THE OXFORD (FUCKING OHIO) DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS: Of Voter Choice, Crab Fries, Murder Rap, and Staring at a Woman's Nests in Private

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SHORT TAKES AND SUCH: Life From the Other Side of Rock Bottom, Of Strange Crises of Identity, & How Fate Sometimes Invites Drama Queens to Lunch

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Miss Poison stirs her drink, laughs loud and defiant, as her boyfriend - a boisterous wild man named after an Outlaw Country singer with a similar reputation - bounces around on his bar stool, singing along to a 1980s heavy metal song on the jukebox.

Everyone at the table has a drink, in fact. One woman's drinking a cocktail, I have a plastic cup of Bud Light, the boyfriend has his beer bottles lined up like steadfast, perspiring tin soldiers from some Hans Christian Anderson story. Another woman nurses her British import, not quite sober but not drunk, and makes a comment about how she just can't stomach domestics anymore.

But one drink is different, however, a ballerina of a booze-free cocktail amongst the trollish Jack-in-the-Box of libations. Miss Poison proudly displays her new tattoo, recently acquired to celebrate a milestone. It's been almost two years since she chose to rebuild her life as a clean and sober woman.

Having been free of cocaine and PCP for more than a decade now myself, well, I can still remember how each day those first few years felt first like the reconquest of a stretch of battlefield long held by an entrenched enemy, how around every corner I'd find booby traps and snares lying in wait.

Some friends were supportive; some took it personally or just couldn't understand it. I walked my path back to being drug-free alone and, had I not been so stubborn, well, it might have been a bit easier to simply go to swallow my pride and go to a few more meetings than I did. I would've learned about things like root causes, triggers, and acceptance in less, shall we say, awkward ways.

We each walk our paths and choose our footing each step, whether we accept it or not. Back in my hardest days, on one of my many soul-searching trips up and down California's Central Coast in the late 1990s, I met a former Buddhist nun who said those words to me.

Still true, after all these years.

Holy shit. I could've been dead by now, a corpse in some Colorado cemetery. Instead, I've traveled the country, watched sunsets over the Pacific and danced in New Orleans streets during Carnival, dined with pro ballplayers and even held the hands of an award-winning actress as she confessed, in tears, how much she hated Hollywood.

Life's too damned fun to be a goddamn addict, man. You're even a respected member of --

Suddenly, to my left, a camera's flash breaks the darkness. I'm out of my introspective moment, just in time, to turn and wink as the photographer shoots another digital image. Miss Poison's boyfriend is fetching himself another beer, another cocktail for her friend. The other woman at our table is sipping her drink and staring into her PDA, texting away the night.

The juke's even playing one of my songs - the dark rumble of Howlin' Wolf explodes through the speakers, "Evil" seeping into the ear canals of unsuspecting college kids and locals. I look around the now packed bar and see the look of shock on the middle-aged patrons, who suddenly smile as they realize someone young played something so classic and old.

And there sits a happy Miss Poison, begging the photographer to snap pictures of her in her glam rock outfit, new pics for her MySpace page. She's smiling and striking poses and laughing, grabbing her tits and tilting her head this way and that as the flash goes off again and again and again.

Yeah, life really is fucking good when you've got something -anything - to live for, especially when you're one of those people blessed enough to get a second chance.

* * * *

LOS ANGELES (ZP, via World Wide Web) -- She confirms what it seems like everyone here in Oxford Fucking Ohio has been telling me lately.

Something disturbing. About my appearance. My mannerisms. How I carry myself.

She's an expert, after all, in appraising these sorts of unfortunate things. In fact, she frequently spends her days hunting down people afflicted with similar issues - and offers them jobs because of it.

"Jason, it is with deep regret that I must inform you that, yes, you do indeed look like, at least in these shots, a cop."

She's laughing. It's a painful diagnosis. I am not amused.

"You're fucking shitting me."

"Nope. Actually... I think I could even get you some background action work, maybe even a few limited core gigs or a few lines. Would you be interested?"

"You're fucking shitting me."

She's no longer laughing.

"Hey, casting for things like police dramas, you look for a lot of the qualities you have. Jawline, eyes, demeanor, and build. And you, my friend, look like a bonafide police officer. At least a TV cop."

I guess I should provide a bit of embarrassing background here. Last weekend, an undergrad walked up to while I was contently sitting on a bar stool, sipping a beer. The chick called me "Officer," apologized for bothering me while I was "off-duty or whatever," asked if I'd talk to pair of her guy friends at another bar, who were about to get into a fight. Even after explaining that I'm not 5-0, she still insisted that I walk next door to calm down her friends.

Funny, yes, but, well, as I relayed the rather amusing story to several friends, I discovered that a lot of people in this town think I look more like a cop than a librarian. Kinda freaked me out a bit, to say the least.

"So, hon, what about as a librarian? Or as a blogger? Would you -- "

"Jason, seriously. Do you really think anybody is going to mistake you for a librarian?"

"You're fucking shitting me."

"Hey, I call it as I see it. You do know chicks do tend to find that extremely sexy, right? Quit bitching about it."

Okay, so maybe looking like a cop's not a necessarily a bad thing.

* * * *

RICHMOND, Ind. (ZP) -- She did, at one time, think I was "The One." Women know what I'm talking about here. The One.

And then I threw her out of my apartment after I made it clear that things weren't going anywhere. Sure, she'd compared me to Jack Nicholson in terms of sexual liberation and freedoms, and sure, she'd basically tried to force herself on me after I'd made it perfectly clear that I wasn't really in the mood for her.

It was more than that. She broke my Golden Rule for friends, even lovers, within my own home. If I catch you, say, cutting up some white powder in the bathroom, and you lie to me about what it is, well, you're gone.

No hard feelings. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

But now she knows better. She called me, in fact, under the pretense of a friendly lunch in her former hometown. Just as friends, to see how I'm doing, to catch up, to even apologize in person for how she'd behaved back then.

I'm old enough, experienced enough, to the point where I should know better. Against my better judgment, I agreed to meet her. I walked into that Hoosier Country cafe and knew, as I saw her fumbling with what looked like a color printout of a web page, that I'd probably be walking out before I even had a chance to order.

"Yeah, so my sister told me everything. Actually, she let me read it."

"Chica, look, I'm sorry if you're upset. And I haven't seen you or ____ since. It's just a stupid blog..."

She always had a flare for the dramatic. She waited, in fact, until those elderly folks were seated at the booth behind us, in their Sunday School finest, to throw the printout - all five pages and the folder - into my face.

"So were you fucking her when we were together, or just playing both of us? She thinks this is fucking funny... Do you think I fucking think this shit is funny?"

"Well, one, I don't care what you find funny. And two, no, ___ and I never hooked up. Three, it's none of your fucking business."

And then come the real fireworks, the angry verbal A-Bombs over all time's personal Hiroshimas. I let her lay it into me, just sat there listening, like a rational adult.

She didn't believe me about the whole I didn't fuck your sister thing, didn't like the fact that I hadn't been completely honest about my reasoning for kicking her ass out of my life back in 2006, didn't like reading about it years later.

Hell, I don't like reading about it. I didn't like living it. And, well, we're talking two years ago here.

And if she hadn't called, I probably wouldn't have wasted the gas driving to Indiana on an amazing Sunday morning for a brunch that never came.

As I drove back, I stopped at a gas station a few miles from the Ohio border, grabbed a granola bar and a cup of rather shitty coffee, sat in the truck and ate a simple, quiet lunch all by my lonesome.

Ya know, I could've faked it if she hadn't been a fucking cokehead. Still using. Fuck, she was high in that fucking diner. And, hell, her sister was the cooler one, hot and down-to-earth, too.

Man, life's too fucking short for that shit. Drama. Too much fucking drama.

- # # # -

HOODLUM EMERITUS LECTURES AT THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS: Hustlers, Youth, Politically Incorrect Humor, and other Vulgar Desplays of Wisdom

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- Brother Lexus pushes up from his lounge chair, two sable-colored, tattooed arms raising him from the most comfortable seating in his tiny two-room apartment.

I've been talking shit for a good five minutes straight at this point, trying to get a rise out of the supposed born-again pacifist and sometime adherent to the Five Percent Doctrine.

"Man, how your Old Negro ass pray to Mecca when you can't even get out a motherfucking chair? What you gonna do? Throw a TV Guide at me, Uncle Remus?"

It's been ten years since I last had a chance to jive on the great Brother, once one of my home state's hustler of hustlers, grand teacher to many young juvenile delinquents of all things good, hard, and motherfucking hood - including certain former punkass white kids from rural Southside.

I've heard stories - still have a few nightmares, in fact - about what can happen when some college - educated, cracker-ass jester makes the mistake of calling him a racial epithet outside of the proper circumstance. It's not pretty and, well, it's true what they say about hydrogen peroxide being the cure-all for bloodstains.

And now he's pushing 40, an old man too young, living in one of Cincinnati's worst neighborhoods, working shitty day jobs and waiting for the day when his healthcare professional girlfriend finally says I Do! and they head off into the West as man and wife.

Okay. So I was just hoping I hadn't read the man's face wrong and wasn't about to end up a missing person. Not gonna lie.

We're a long way from Virginia these days, in more ways than either of us would care to remember.

* * * *

He's not smiling as his tree-sized legs straighten. I hear the leather of his Timberland boots squeal as he makes it to his feet. His bootblack Under Armour tee strains in agony as his ebony chest and shoulders expand to almost twice the width of mine.

He's almost a foot taller than my five-nine ass. In fact, he's always been taller, bigger, stronger, older, and, well, much more of an O.G. than I could ever be, thanks in part to a series of state-sponsored vacations. For a brief moment, I feel like a child about to have his ass handed to him by the neighborhood bully.

After all, Brother Lexus was the man who taught me which end of a crub (slang - a modified short crowbar, easily concealed, painted black and covered with grip tape) brings the pain all up on a motherfucker and which end is best used to bodyshop up on a ride, taught me how to fight dirty, hard, and quick, yet also encouraged me save that money, not to flash or flap gums, to go to college and to not sully my adult record.

We're both men of peace these days, well-read, and long past of fighting primes. But, well, we both still know how to take a pound of flesh off a cat if push comes to shove. I may still respect the man, even more so for changing, I tell myself, but I will step to his ass and represent Southside.

Three giant's steps and there's a large fist pushed into my chest, a meaty black digit driven into my sternum like a railroad spike. His biceps, honed by thousands of hours logged benchpressing away years of confinement, each are roughly as big around as my neck.

Oh well, so maybe representing Southside won't last long.

* * * *

Without smiling, he explains that, well, before I come all up into his castle and disrespect, I'd better be grateful that he journeys now, mostly (he does still drink beer, after all, but doth not dine on the swine), along the path of a peaceful and learned disciple of the principles of put forth by the teacher Allah the Father, Clarence 13X. And 13X, you see, was a man born and raised upon the same Virginia red clay that had once fed and nurtured in the pair of us the idea that all men were equals and brothers.

Yes, he says, he can overlook the fact that last century's prophets of Gods and Earths were mostly wrong about the nature of white folk and their supposed devilishness. In the 21st century, it has become imperative that we move past race and embrace Africa as the Original Home of all men. But in HIS house, he says, no one of the Caucasian Persuasion is allowed to forget that it was Europeans and their pale North American and Oceanic descendants who brought the world two hot wars and one cold war, exploited the Motherland and South America and Asia almost to the point of complete destruction...

"Well, amen Reverend. Now you gonna preach it or bring it?"

He stopped and looked suddenly lost in his own mental notes, like a physics professor at a dinner party who suddenly remembers that he's lecturing over the wine and cheese. I wasn't sure where he'd picked up his Poor Righteous Teacher act, but, well, personally, I appreciated it more than what I'd expected to be a much more painful hook to the jaw.

"Sheeeeeeit,* we been through too much for me to hate up on you. And I know that deep in that big white head of yours, mos def, you meant no disrespect."

"Dude, I am so sorry. I just, you know, like just we were kids, man, No offe-"

He pushed that finger harder into my chest. I suddenly felt ashamed, self-conscious of my ethnicity and familial history, embarrassed over the fact that I've spent much of the last decade living as a free, middle-class white man.

"Hold on now. I know you think your academic shit don't stink, but you better listen when I'm schooling your peckerwood librarian ass..."

* * * *

I stared up at him with the same wonder and humility I'd felt when I first met him, back in the day, back when this monster of a man interrupted a rather boring night at a fast-food joint in my hometown.

I'd been studying an opponentless chess board - my regular partner was tied up with woman problems. I was hung over, melancholy but appreciative of the time alone, on a Friday night. Five minutes prior, everybody in the joint had run out to the parking lot. A fight, I'd heard, and some cat had put a piece to some other cat's head.

Hey, none of my fucking business. I had my Mc-Fucking-Nuggets, a shake, and no chess partner. I only hoped they finished their beef elsewhere. I was, however, quite annoyed at the fact that somebody couldn't get that screaming sow of a woman outside to shut the fuck up before the Po-Po rolled by...

He was a suave motherfucker back then, in his Karl Khani jeans and silk shirt and black leather duster, with his gold chain and matching tie clip. He sat down and calmly asked if I was looking for a game - he'd learned to play in a housing project in Jackson Ward, never imagined that us country folk knew how to play.

We talked for a bit, about all sorts of things but mainly about why I hadn't moved from that booth, how I was able to focus surrounded by shoutin' niggas and fools. He liked my answer, appreciated my strategic non-involvement, ability to observe my surroundings, how I could give him the names, describe the faces of every last single person in the dining room without looking up...

After he'd wiped the board with me, was up a good few games, he made me an offer - to play a different sort of game of skill. He said he sometimes had cash-money work for smart white boys who understood things like chess, the strategy of sacrifice of pawns to gain rooks and Bishops, the need for discretion and stealth.

A lot of people, where I grew up, heard the stories. About that midnight - colored sedan with the tinted windows, cruising the countryside between Richmond and Southside. There were sightings everywhere, rumors about all sorts of things, inner-city occupants, hustlers, yes, ballers even. Maybe some of those stories were true.

Maybe the one-time owner of that sedan was always more of a Scientist, a Teacher, than a simple hustler. He taught many young bucks, of all colors, how to defend what was theirs, how to put up the appropriate fronts while not losing one's soul. And he was one fucking hell of a ghetto-trained chess master.

And maybe, yes, that same Teacher was about to renounce his peaceful ways and lay me out like a cheap suit. I knew that if he did, well, there'd be a lesson involved, somewhere.

* * * *

He suddenly smiles wide, ivory white teeth contrasting perfect and bright against his black chin.

"The Negro Community fuckin' frowns upon your shenanigans, son. Now quit acting a fool an' trying to get a rise outta me."

He shakes a smoldering Newport and two fingers disapprovingly, forces his face into a frown, just like the central figure in that highly controversial Internet image.

The lesson, this time, was that wise men, regardless of ethnicity, knows when to behave as serious, educated adults and when to take rather childish, patently offensive race jokes in stride.

Why be angry? Life's too short.

I'd pushed it. And now the war was on.

* * * *

He was down to his last resort - the short white dude jokes. A whole plethora of material, everything from When you stand up like a man... Oh shit! You are standing! one-liners to Man, look at you... I didn't know they made an Albino Smurf jabs.

"Sheeeeeeit, big man." I continue to shit talk, still prodding like a cattleman. "Motherfucker, you saying I didn't get you all worked up? Lookin' like Uncle Ben jumpin' off the rice box, shufflin' up at me like a zombie."

"Sheeeeeeit."

"C'mon... that all you can say? Disgracing the Race, homes. I may have to have a talk with your mama once she's off my dick."

"Maaaan, your dick so small..."

Believe it or not, but this is just how most Southerners handle race relations amongst themselves, as friends, behind closed doors. Snapping on a friend, playing the dozens, even jokes about how your dick is so small, you could fuck a Cheerio and not feel it, tends to be a lot more enjoyable than a goddamn sensitivity-training workshop.

Great desensitization exercise, playing the dozens. Helps people down on their luck, broke, or, just, well, tired of dwelling on all the shitty things they've experienced, times when nobody else gives a shit where they've been, what they've done.

* * * *

"Wigger, I let you stay breathin', and you still can't shut that monkey-looking mouth. And listen to you! A master's degree, a motherfucking scholar, and you talking like you got game? Sheeeeeeeeit!"

And then, time catches up and there's a momentary burst of intellectual, adult conversation. We talk about what Over-The-Rhine's black residents really think of Oxford Fucking Ohio, along with the Local U. - i.e., the state's largest "Color-Free Zone." He fills me in on the recent "urban renewal projects" in OTR, which many working-class residents - including Brother Lexus - see as nothing more than white liberals taking advantage of cheap real estate, pushing out everybody too broke to fight gentrification.

"Fuck it, man. Let's go grab another sixer an' finish this."

He points to the chess board set up on his coffee table. Our first chess game in more than a decade. This was why I was here - he remembered that last game, when he was at his most-dirt covered, sitting in a Section 8 lot and lording over his kingdom, getting his ass handed to him by one of his Boys from down U.S. 360/460, getting beat by that country-fried Fa'mville Cracker.

I have just enough beer in me to suggest that, well, he's just getting old and that we should, possibly, hit a bar and introduce my single ass to some of OTR's legendary Around The Way Girls...

"Man, you ain't changed at all, has you? STILL looking at my people's women like you stand a chance. Please."

In all honesty, I've always looked at all people's women. I mean, who really wants to drink white milk, when one could just add some chocolate or a little caramel syrup, maybe some plum flavoring from Beijing or honey from Cairo?

* * * *

We played two more games before I hit the road. He had me in checkmate within twelve moves each game. And, at thirty bucks a game, well, I left with an empty wallet. It's hard for me to overlook the irony, given the fact that years ago, back in that McDonald's, he actually paid me - a nice, crisp Ben Franklin - just to talk, to hear out his indecent proposal, and to (ha!) let him win a few games.

Brother was once one of Virginia's hustlers of hustlers. Even pushing 40, legit, and out of the game, well, he's still able to make paper off a sucker.

Glad we didn't go for dominoes. He'd have taken me for rent.

Sheeeeeeeeeit! One more lesson, I guess.

- # # #-

* NOTE - The obscenity "SHIT" is pronounced "SHEEIT," "SHEEEEEIT," or "SHEEEEEEEIIIIT!," depending on use, throughout the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, from Philadelphia to Charlotte, North Carolina, but most predominately in Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Maryland.

THESE ARE THE VOYAGES...(WE'LL NEVER MAKE): Feverish Dreams of Space Cowboys, Ray Guns, & This World's Last Great Adventurers

The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart, the original good heart with which every man is born.

- Mencius (372 – 289 BCE),
Chinese Philosopher

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It's amazing what one thinks about whilst staring at a moon-whitened ceiling, alone with only the sounds of crickets outside a bedroom window and menthol-scented vaporizing rub drifting up from one's chest.

Jesus Christ! When was the last time I built a fort on Mars? THAT one...? Oh FUCK... how long ago was that?

Yes, it may have been the fever I had at the time, the body's own disinfecting oven, that marvelously complex biological reaction to things like sinus infections and influenza. It may have been the over-the-counter fever-reducers, or the sugar imbalance caused by the ingestion of about a quart of orange juice before bed.

Friggin' amazing what one thinks about, really, when one is ill and alone and trying to find something to think about at well past three-thirty in the morning, something besides the fact that that person is feeling pretty damned miserable.

And sometimes I just think about fighting off a thousand and one alien invaders in the dark with my cousins, sometime back in the long-lost 1980s, a battle complete with ray guns and photon cannons that looked and behaved, strangely enough, like ordinary old hickory ax handles.

We fought many a glorious battle as children. Glorious. Fought off entire battalions of invisible mutant warriors and transparent planetary raiders.

For some reason, despite a snot-filled head and an aching throat, I started to laugh up at that moonglow ceiling. Laughed so hard that the bed shook, that the crickets outside stopped chirping.

... What'd we make that damned thing out of, anyway? An old wood shipping crate, a few tobacco rods lashed together with bailing twine...

Oh hell! J.C. and I bolted down that old lawn mower engine, used an old steel coffee can for a steering wheel...

Dammit, I forgot that damned fort used to be our space cruiser, too! We were destructive kids, but, dammit, we were creative...

I reached out from beneath my sheets, pointed a finger towards the ceiling, and fired my imaginary ray gun, for old time's sake. My lips even provided pew-pew-pew sound effects.

Once again, laughter filled the room, rudely interrupted the crickets, shook the bed.

Maybe it was just the fever. Or the over-the-counter drugs. Or the orange juice.

Couldn't figure out for the life of me, in my feverish state, why that shit literally popped into my mind.

* * * *

When I was a child, I never imagined 2008 would look so damned much like the 1980s. My dad recently said a similar thing - he, too, never dreamed that, for the most part, the 21st century still looks a whole hell of a lot like the 1960s. Sure, we've got some nifty toys these days, but...

Hell, when I was a toddler, I remember watching that first shuttle mission live with my grandfather. He promised me that one day that could be me riding into the stars, that I really could grow up to be a space cavalier, an astronaut, an explorer of the Cosmos.

Three decades later, we're still flying the same ol' space shuttles here in the U.S., and I'm obviously no closer to the stars than I was as a kid.

The Chinese government, and the European Space Agency, too, seems to be more dedicated to space exploration than the one-time space powerhouse I call home. Even the Russians, with their virtually indestructible workhorse Soyuz capsules, seem to put more into making space exploration viable than we do.

Actually, at this rate, well, I'll probably end up promising the same hollow Buck Rogers/Captain Kirk dreams to my grandchildren one day.

Like my father's generation, I assumed that by now we'd have flying cars, regular flights to lunar colonies, and maybe, just maybe, real live heroes conquering the Martian mountain ranges for the sake of humanity. We were supposed to have viable, personable robots in every home, even a supercomputer in every garage. Cancer and other diseases were supposed to be cured, humanity united, that which lies in wait for us in the skies our only potential menace.

Instead, well, man has yet to return to the moon in my lifetime, we barely have enough gasoline to keep our terrestrial cars running, and the only Martian conquests have been virtual, with video-game Space Marines retaking imaginary, demon-infested space stations through first-person shooter games.

Hell, the only viable semi-autonomous 'Bots are the ones powered by remote servers, the computerized aggregators that are currently indexing this site for keywords to store for some search engine. And most people on this planet, too, can't afford even the most basic desktop computer.

That imaginary ray gun I had as a kid, the fondness for building space cruisers and Martian outposts in backyards that I inherited from my father? Hell, the only thing a kid has to do now is add a laser pointer to the end of that hickory stick.

... Of course, with the addiction to online gaming, the increasing rates of morbid obesity in today's lazy indoor-bound children, I seriously doubt those fat-ass children of the Industrialized World still have the imagination for such follies...

* * * *

It's been more than half a century since man first reached into space, with the Soviet Union's successful Sputnik satellite launch. Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the first moon walk, four decades since a man from Wapakoneta, Ohio, hollered across the solar system One small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind.

Now, the sky is littered with satellites, wondrous things that guide our aircraft and ocean liners, allow us god's eye views of every canyon and mountain, even allow us to watch things like the Olympics and rock concerts live from the other side of the globe.

But, with the exception of the International Space Station, there are very few human eyes out there, staring down at us, watching over our world.

And those eyes don't include mine, or your's, and they probably never will in our lifetimes.

Given the fact that both of our mainstream candidates for the U.S. presidency this go-round place as much emphasis on space exploration and science education as your average golden retriever, well, our grandchildren will be lucky if there's ever anything more than a few grainy pictures from Mars and a tiny outpost in the orbit.

Or maybe they'll look up in awe at all of those other nationalities up there, in space, and wonder how the United States went from walking the moon to obsolescence in only a few short generations.

* * * *

I fell ill on a Sunday afternoon - a sunny, warm weekend day with nary a cloud in the sky. And as much as I hated to even make the attempt, while still feverish and strangely nauseous with vertigo, I did make into work for a few hours Monday morning.

And the only thing I did productive was to puke into a urinal, clean up after myself, check out some DVDs from the My Library's media collection, and to head right back home.

I spent the next 48 hours huddled in my grandfather's old flannel blanket, watching the entire fourth season of probably one of the greatest series ever, The Wire, and various zombie flicks - for some reason, films about the living dead just, well, make me feel better.

By Wednesday, the fever was gone and the head congestion was just starting to break up, so I decided to chance a half-day. At noon, I left the office to once again lay in bed and watch yet more DVDs on the ol' laptop.

On the way home, again, I suddenly remembered that old fort, those childhood dreams of being a space conquistador within the span of this third-gone lifetime. I don't know why that feverish memory stuck with me, why my subconscious mind had pulled forth and made connections to real space exploration, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong and...

"CHINA!"

As I opened my apartment door at just past two in the afternoon, I suddenly remembered why I'd been having visions of forts and space cruisers, of an imaginary childhood in the stars, what I'd been reading about online right before bed Sunday, out of simple curiosity...

The Chinese space program. Project 921, in particular, and the anticipated launch of Shenzhou 7, and the PRC's third manned space flight in the last five years.

I till don't know why I'd been reading about space programs, really, how I ended up surfing Wikipedia onto vague pages filled with advances in Chinese rocketry...

"Well, fuck me," I exclaimed as I flipped on the laptop to find a Firefox window still containing the entry. "So... somehow, reading about the Chinese space agency's history triggered all of that subconscious shit!"

"Fucking A, dude. No more wiki-surfing while ill."

* * * *

On the following day, Thursday, September 25, 2008, at 9:10 a.m. Eastern, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched Shenzhou 7 from deep within the Gobi desert.

Two days later, Zhai Zhigang and Lui Boming became the first Chinese citizens to participate in a spacewalk.

Zhai and Lui's feat marks only the 298th spacewalk since the Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik 1 more than 51 years ago.

And, as of this post, less than 500 people - less than 50 women - have ever reached Earth's orbit, a number small enough to comfortably fit every one of them on a single Boeing 747 aircraft.

Odds that anyone reading this will get into space in their lifetime?

I'm no statistician, but I'm going to guess those odds are a lot greater than the chances of getting a sinus infection in September.

- # # # -