Dad

My dad was a straight-laced bureaucrat [oh wait, spoiler alert to Aunt Edith’s secretary: this article not to be read to Aunt Edith as it makes occult (hidden) revelations]…so yeah Dad was a bureaucrat who ran a military organization whose mandate included putting laser objects on the moon.

Whatever the “moon” is.

He was a geophysicist (back in the days when the system needed him is what I’m talking about) and so inside the system that I remember him flying down from Boston to the Smithsonian all the time. In airplanes, but still. Not the moon, but still. He was flying to the Smithsonian. Arguably weirder than the moon.

The Smithsonian!

He was six-foot-seven before that was popular and he made weekly trips to the Smithsonian, that hider of giants.

He wore a tie that pointed at his uncut penis. The one I swam out of. Not like my own cut piece so unworthy of tie pointage. Straight, and laced, that guy. But as for swimming, he could power through heavy snow-cold surf Australian-crawling and not even look up as the waves would smash over him. A man when men were men.

Straight. And yet…and yet. He had a quiet side-gig as what I now call a feral geologist. His handlers must have known but he was still necessary. Did he ever find out about my time in the CIA in 1980 [Indonesia]? Dunno. On our hikes he would point out sedimentary rocks, igneous rocks, all that. Little David learned how to pronounce “gneiss” from him. All the university stuff. The oil-prospector stuff. And yet, and yet…he told me that the rocks were actually wild and recent. Rocks didn’t come from the long dull billion-year march to the sea of the uniformitarians. And yes, I knew the phrase “uniformitarian hypothesis” as a child. Rocks weren’t a sign of an imaginary boringness reckoned in billions. Instead, they were recent. Therefore tumultuous. Wild rocks on a restless planet. Wild! They were, he was.

Dad! Rocks!

Too rambunctious to fit into the long dull safe tale of the university-military geologists.

—David

up near Alaska, ten April year twenty-six

Picture is from yesterday and we were up closer to Alaska in stunning scenery and I’m peeing and I look over and see this hilariously cockamamie electrical thingie and I’m like yup, that’s what our modern humans can figure out. This is while Artemis 2 is “up” around the “moon” and supposedly modern humans are smart enough to figure out the electricity for such a venture. Dad and I would eat sardines on tops of mountains and he would intone: “where every prospect [view] pleases, and only man is vile.”