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I want to ride the Hyperloop

You’ve heard about the Hyperloop, right? Right. It’s awesome. It’s going to be awesome. Someday. The Hyperloop is a futuristic means of transportation, a giant global infrastructure project being championed by Elon Musk, the South African technology tycoon who founded Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and PayPal. He’s a modern day George Jetson. Actually, that’s not right, Jetson was a lackey, a corporate drone. Musk is a real life Mr. Spacely, our future overlord boss, just much more benevolent and cool.

The Hyperloop is going to be a series of tubes connecting various locations across the globe. I don’t claim to understand the specifics of the science, but if someone put a gun to my head and demanded that I explain how it works, I’d say that I think it has something to do with the tubes creating some sort of a vacuum. Inside that vacuum, we’d put bullet-shaped cars inside, propelled by magnetic energy.

That’s the best I can do to make sense of what’s going on. But in layman’s terms, what this means is that we’re going to be able to travel from New York to Los Angeles in something like forty-five minutes. It gets better, because the more time a car spends accelerating inside the Hyperloop, the faster it will eventually travel, meaning that a one-way trip from New York to Beijing might be possible in as little as four hours.

Four hours to China! That’s insane to think about. You could plausibly take a long weekend and travel across the globe for a last-minute getaway. Assuming that the prices aren’t prohibitively expensive, and that there are plenty of available seats. I’m guessing that there are going to be a lot of logistical hurdles involved in making this a realistic means of transportation for the average nobody.

It’s inspiring to know that there are actually industry leaders out there making wild proposals that might eventually change the way human beings consider global travel. When I was a little kid, ideas like this were confined solely to the realm of science fiction. Star Trek had the holodeck, even more mundane feats like access to cellphones and Internet were still limited to universities and professionals.

So much has changed in my lifetime alone. In the past century, human beings went from inventing airplanes to developing commercial aviation as an industry to landing spacecraft on various bodies throughout the solar system. I always like to think of the world that my grandparents were born into, how nobody had TVs or telephones. Cut to the present day, my surviving grandparents are in their eighties, my grandmother uses her iPad every day.

What’s that like, witnessing such incredible leaps in global technology? What’s the world going to look like when I’m an old man? Is it really that crazy to imagine an infrastructure of tubes crisscrossing the planet, making travel across the globe as painless as a car ride out of state?

It’s fantastic that we have visionaries like Elon Musk ready, willing and able to invest their personal fortunes into improbable dream projects that might someday benefit all of humanity. It is also a little sad because, up until recent decades, big impossible projects used to be the realm of government agencies. NASA got us to the moon, our elected representatives led us to a bold new era of spaceflight and scientific advancement. The government’s role in innovation today pales in comparison.

I want to see it, I want to take a ride on the Hyperloop so badly. I don’t want to be an old man taking his first cross-planet tube ride at the end of my life, I want to be able to make use of it right now. Let’s get to work, I want this project fast-tracked and operational while I’m still young enough to appreciate how amazing this is going to be. Because future generations, they’re going to grow up with it, they will take it for granted, kind of like how little kids today are being raised on the Internet. But not me, I’ll really, truly, unconditionally love the Hyperloop. I think I already do.

Originally published on HonestBlue.com

I’ve got a hole in my pocket

I’ve got this pair of shorts with a hole in the left pocket. Few problems in life shake me to the core like a small tear on the inside of a pocket. It should be easy, to either stop wearing those shorts, or to fix it so there is no more hole. But I’ve been dealing with this all summer, nothing’s happening in terms of me remedying the situation, and it’s progressively getting worse, that small opening consuming a greater and greater percentage of pocket space every time I put these shorts on.

It must be some sort of a bug in my otherwise relatively normal human programming. For some reason, I just can’t connect the dots, come up with a way to make this problem not be a problem anymore. My inability to find a solution, I think it stems from the fact that there’s not a lot going on in my brain in terms of me thinking about my pockets. They’re something that I take for granted. All of my pants have pockets, all of my shorts, even my pajamas have pockets. Did I make a conscious decision to shop for clothing that comes with pockets? No, it’s automatic, it’s something that I’ve never had to go out of my way to even consider.

So I wake up in the morning, I put on a pair of pants or shorts, I take all of the stuff out of my pockets from yesterday and put them into my new pockets. This process repeats itself until I come across this particular pair of shorts, the one with the tiny hole in the left pocket, the hole that I notice every time I put my hands inside, to look for my wallet, to give my hands a little rest while I’m standing around idly.

And for the majority of the summer anyway, the hole was noticeable, I couldn’t help but play with it, this thing that was in my pocket but wasn’t, it’s a very minor absence of pocket, really. It was directly at the point at which the seams of my pocket came together, imagine an ice cream cone that has the slightest gap at the bottom. But I don’t usually keep ice cream in my pocket, and so there wasn’t anything melting down my leg, no urgent, “this hole is causing a problem” warning blaring in my head.

Aside from those instances in which I was physically touching that hole, I never thought about it, not at all. And so that’s part of the reason why I can’t really figure this thing out. It’s only on my mind when I’m in absolutely no position to do anything about it. As the weeks went on, the hole naturally started to grow, imperceptibly at first, but one afternoon I took a seat and felt one of my keys reach through the hole to jab me in the leg. That was sort of uncomfortable, I thought to myself, maybe I should get this hole fixed up when I get home.

But I’d get home, I’d get ready for bed, I’d throw the shorts in the laundry pile, and the hole wouldn’t register in my thoughts until I’d be wearing them sometime a week later, I’d already be out of the house, and I’d feel it again, maybe I’d feel the key. Shit, I’d remember, the hole would come rushing back to my thoughts as this unresolved dilemma, something that I’d neglected to fix.

Sometime last week I was walking down the street when I heard the sound of a coin fall to the floor. I looked down and there was a dime. Was this mine? Did this fall out of my pocket? I picked it up and put it back in, thinking surely the hole couldn’t be big enough to where actual coins were falling loose. A few blocks later I heard the same sound, but I put up a wall, tried to ignore the experience.

Later in the day I found myself spending a lot more time thinking about the hole in my pocket, time in which I’d usually spend not thinking about my pockets, about holes. I put my hand inside and fished around. Wallet: check. Keys: check. Coins … coins? No coins. In my denial I had convinced myself that while maybe, maybe I had been losing some dimes, they are the smallest after all, there was no way that I’d be dropping nickels, quarters, giant chunks of metal unable to stay in my possession.

This pocket was literally starting to cost me financially. Sure, spare change lost isn’t going to necessarily break my bank, but if I’m passing quarters, was it that out of the question to lose my keys? Could I foresee a future in which I’d be locked out of my house, on the phone contracting the services of an expensive emergency locksmith, wondering how I’d be able to prove my residence so that I’d be able to have him let me back inside?

Now I’m only thinking about my pockets, it’s like a mental tick, I’m reaching inside and moving my hands around to the point where people are starting to give me weird looks. You don’t understand, I want to tell them, I’ve got a problem, I’ve got a hole in my pocket. Only, I’m not wearing those shorts anymore. This pair of pants has no holes at all. But try telling that to my brain, to my wandering hands. I can’t tell the difference between good pockets and bad, my reaction is so involuntary at this point that I can’t even remember which pair of shorts I was talking about in the first place. I open my closet and look at my wardrobe, am I really going to have to throw everything out, to start completely over from scratch?

I came close to making an effort to getting up off of my ass and looking for a sewing kit, but I got distracted by the Internet and then next thing I knew, I was sitting at this desk writing this whole pocket lament. I know exactly what’s going to happen, the weather has been getting a lot cooler lately, I’m already finding myself wearing long pants more and more as the summer gives way to the fall. I’ll eventually put all of my shorts away and I won’t think about any of this until next April, at which point I’ll get up one day and think, wow, what a beautiful spring day! It’s the perfect weather for a short-sleeved shirt and a light pair of shorts. And I know just the pair I’ll pick, with just enough time for me to take a nice first-day-of-spring walk before going to work, arriving back at my house exactly when I need to grab my stuff and head back out the door. But what did I do with my keys? Where did all of the stuff in my pockets go?

Player two, start

When I was a little kid I always wanted to play Super Mario Bros. as Luigi, but unless you’re playing two-player, that’s never an option, and two-player regular Mario is terrible, each person taking a turn on the same level. It was impossible, trying to sit still, having to wait around for my brother, everything taking forever, just jumping over that hole in the ground such a challenge.

But as the oldest brother, I couldn’t let anybody else be player one. And so we’d start the game up, I’d be Mario in his classic red and brown and I’d have to watch my little brother get to start up as Luigi, classic Luigi, white overalls on top of a green shirt. Was there any difference? Aside from the colors, could Luigi do anything different than Mario?

I guess because they were identical, I always assumed they were twins, the Super Mario twin brothers. But then in subsequent games, Luigi developed his own distinct personality, character traits that set him apart from Mario. He was taller, I could definitely identify with that, because I was always the tall one in my family. He could jump really high, I guess to go along with the whole tall thing. He seemed like a natural older brother, and thanks to Super Mario World 2, I was given the option to start as Luigi.

Unfortunately he’s way too slow, and that high jump, it takes forever to land back on the ground. Not that Mario’s any better. He’s just regular, as regular as he was in regular Mario One. But I hesitate to draw any significant conclusions based on that sequel, because it was a really terrible game, and everyone always wound up opting to play as Princess Peach, whatever, not for any stylistic reason, none that I’m aware of anyway. No, the Princess could fly, or float, it was a huge in-game advantage.

Mario 3, Mario 4, it’s back to basics, the focus squarely on Mario, Luigi never mentioned, not featured on the box artwork at all. He’s merely a placeholder, “Player two, start!” I’d go through the whole Super Mario Land alternating between player-one and player-two just so I could have a chance to beat King Koopa as Luigi. When I finally did it, I was disappointed to see the game scroll through the victory credits as if Luigi didn’t even exist.

“Thanks Mario! You’ve saved the Princess!” even though Luigi would be standing right there, holding the Princess. I think it was Luigi anyway. But it was probably just Mario, no height difference at all, just a Mario twin, a clone, I don’t know, maybe they were short on cash for those third and forth games and they were like, all right Mario, you’ve got to play Mario and Luigi’s parts for this one. Here, put on this green cap and overalls, it’s almost player-two’s turn.

Mario 64, Luigi doesn’t exist. Jesus, even Yoshi gets a cameo at the very end. Spare no expense for Mario’s trusty dinosaur sidekick, but what about his brother? His own sometimes-identical-twin brother, absolutely no respect. And then they’d release Mario Kart or Mario Tennis and fine, Luigi would be there, but strictly as a filler character. They don’t even give Luigi a proper villain. Where Mario has Wario, which is cool, they play on the whole upside-down M for Wario, when it came time to give Luigi his own doppelganger, they created Waluigi, like it was just, whatever, through Wa in front of Luigi and turn the L upside-down on his hat, nobody cares, nobody’s going to pick him, make him really slow and useless so that nobody wants anything to do with him.

He just gets a bad rap, Luigi, I always feel bad for him, like he’s the more relatable of the Mario Brothers. They give him his own game, finally, for the Game Cube, and it’s like purposely unplayable. He can’t jump, he can’t do anything, he’s stuck in a haunted mansion and his avatar is onscreen trembling every time he has to do anything.

I remember when I was a little kid we’d go to the skating rink or bowling alley and there’d always be a small arcade section set up somewhere by the lockers. A few places had this Superman arcade game, a pretty standard side-scrolling beat-‘em-up single player. But this being a big arcade machine, there was a second joystick, and if you somehow successfully begged your mom for a quarter, and someone else also happened to procure twenty-five cents at the same time, you’d both deposit your money and Superman would be joined by a second player.

Who was it, Batman? Green Lantern? No, it was another Superman, the exact same graphic as player-one, but they just filled in the entire costume red so as to differentiate from the original. It’s a pretty basic arcade game, you’d fly to the right and zap a bad guy, eventually the computer would be too much to outsmart, and your mom refused to give you another coin for an extra life or two.

That second Superman wasn’t meant to be anything, it was just a way to accommodate two quarters in the machine at the same time. But I always thought, man, who is this guy? Does he ever get pissed that red-and-blue Superman gets all the fame, the publicity, comic books, movies, everything, and here he is, this guy decked out in solid red spandex, he’s apparently got all the same powers and abilities as regular Superman, but that’s it. That’s all he gets, this maybe cameo on some shitty arcade stand. Is he from Krypton? Does he have his own secret identity? Doesn’t matter. He gets nothing. Not even a name. He just nominally exists. Wouldn’t that drive you crazy? Doesn’t he deserve at least a little backstory?

The revolution is absolutely going to be televised

The revolution is most definitely going to be televised. There’s going to be wave after wave of TV cameras, all jockeying for a good angle, a decent vantage point, and the anchors are going to be sitting at their news desks, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we’re bringing you live to frontlines of the revolution,” and all of the hippies are going to be sitting there in their plush leather recliners watching MSNBC on their sixty-seven inch plasmas, holding their worn paperbacks in their hands, “But … but … but I thought that the revolution wasn’t going to be televised.”

And he’ll look up at his bookshelf, at the rest of his “library,” his “collection,” Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair, nobody knows how to operate a motorcycle, Steal This Book, purchased for $6.99 from the sixty-five percent off clearance rack at Barnes & Noble, “I’m sorry, can you actually give me a different Barnes & Noble tote bag?” the memory flashes through of that particular transaction at the store, “Do you have any with Angela Lansbury’s face on it?” but they didn’t, he had to settle for an Alex Trebek.

It was probably still there somewhere, buried under all of those receipts being saved, the ones from Petland Discount, “Try shopping at Petland Discount!” the circular read, “If you buy twelve jumbo bags of cat food, the thirteeth’ll be on us!” which, if you think about it, that’s actually a pretty significant savings, what, $37.99 a bag? Sure, Purina is somewhat of a premium item, but just think about all of they money you spend on your food, on your dietary well-being, those are the thoughts running through the heads of everybody picking out cat food and dog food.

But try it, try to save those receipts for a full twelve months, because that’s what it amounts to, twelve bags, twelve months, roughly. And it’s not just the receipts, it’s the proof of purchase, it’s taking that giant empty cat-food bag out of the giant plastic cat-food bag dispenser that you bought to keep that dry cat-food smell somewhat localized to one area of the kitchen. “Have you seen the scissors?” questioned, lobbed out to no one in particular.

“Just don’t use the kitchen scissors!” the answer pointed straight back, but where else, upstairs? In the study? More clutter, more receipts. And if you forget a month, whatever, that’s just one month, you’ll get to twelve months eventually, you’ll get to twelve receipts, twelve proofs of purchase, you keep reassuring yourself, I’ll save that $37.99 eventually.

But the neighbors mentioned something about Petco, how they used to have a similar deal, a similar means of maintaining its customer base, free cat-food, keep coming back, until they stopped. One day it’s twelve receipts, twelve barcodes, one free bag. Today, not so much. How much longer until Petland Discount follows suit?

So it’s upstairs to the study, the home-office, whatever you want to call that side room where the desktop computer sits forever turned on, on top of that old desk, warped in the middle from the weight of its now antique boxy monitor. It’s always a challenge, looking for the scissors, for anything, moving aside stacks of coupons for Gillette Fusion razors or free archery lessons, coupons that surely must have expired by now, try not to make too much more of a mess, kicking up layer upon layer of old dust.

Accidentally nudging that old mouse and the computer jolts awake, how long was it asleep anyway? Ever since the wife bought that laptop, which you were initially against, and why? Why put up a fight over something that wound up making life a whole lot more convenient? You need to look something up on the computer? There it is, no need to go upstairs. But why not get rid of this old machine? Sitting here, eating up electricity, bandwidth, radiating heat, sucking up time and energy.

KaZaa still loaded on the screen, although it’s unlikely that any data is being transferred to or fro. And look, Steal This Album must have finished downloading sometime over the course of the past six years or so, technically that’s a success, no money wasted on this … this music cd? It’s not some sort of a revolutionary audiobook, no, it’s a heavy metal record, System of a Down, that’s probably a little disappointing.

“Breaking News” you can still hear from downstairs, it’s MSNBC, it’s Chris Matthews and he’s tossing to a correspondent, live from Egypt, live from Tahrir Square, “Chris, look at it, this is the revolution! It’s happing right now!” right on TV, right in front of the cameras, pass the popcorn, kick back and enjoy the show, because the revolution is absolutely going to televised, it’s going to be saved on our DVRs, you can watch as much footage as you want on Youtube. The hippies had it all wrong. They had everything wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Don’t hit the wall

Whenever I hear someone use the phrase “hit the wall,” I get immediately pissed off. Who’s hitting what wall? Nobody. There is no wall. And I know, I get it, it’s a figure of speech right? Yeah, well it’s a stupid figure of speech. If I’m running, and I see a wall coming up in the distance, I’m either going to go around it, or I’m going to start running backwards. That’s it. I’m not going to hit it.

Or, and I’m just thinking about this now, I could go left or right of the wall, find a way to run around it, except, I guess maybe if I’m in an alleyway, I don’t know if I’ll necessarily be able to go anywhere, really. Nowhere but backwards. Yes, I think the important thing to remember, if you get to that wall, in an alleyway, just run backwards without stopping to think about where you’re at. You’ve obviously made a wrong turn, and you’re not going to make any progress standing there pensively rubbing your chin.

No, the more time you spend looking at the wall, the greater the chance that you’re eventually going to hit it. Do not hit that wall. See if you can climb it. That’s not a solution you hear often when people talk about hitting walls. “Man, everything was going so great, but then I just hit the wall.” I want to be like, well, did you try climbing it? Did you?

Did you try burrowing a tunnel underneath the wall? Stop talking to me about figures of speech. I’m talking about you either burrowing or not burrowing underneath that wall. It’s been done. Sure, you might lose a lot of time, like if you’re actually racing somebody, assuming they also haven’t confronted this wall. In this case, I might suggest a team-up, because that tunnel’s not going to burrow itself, and there’s no sense in you each burrowing two separate tunnels.

Maybe a tunnel isn’t the answer. In fact, it probably isn’t. I just didn’t want the possibility of a tunnel to be totally discounted, especially not if your only other viable option is to hit the wall. Nobody wants to see anybody hitting any walls. When the Berlin Wall came crashing down in 1989, everybody was so happy. Not me. Even though I was only like four at the time, I didn’t get it. Why hit the wall? Why can’t they just move it somewhere else? Like there aren’t any other spots without walls that could’ve used that wall?

Question: What if you’re running a race and you take a wrong turn and it turns out that you’re in China and all of the sudden you come face to face with the Great Wall? And you think, OK, I’ll just backpedal a little here, but the organizers of the race are right on your heels, and seeing as how it’s China and everything, there are all sorts of Labor Ministers and Party Officials and they’ve got their guns trained right at your head and they’re like, “No backwards. Only forward. Hit that wall.”

Answer: I’ll answer with another question. What if you’re taking part in a different race, this one’s on the Great Wall of China, and it’s the entire length of the wall? It’s like a hundred miles long, at least, I’m totally making it up, but it’s big enough, obviously everybody knows this already, but you can see it from space. I remember reading an interview with some astronaut and he was like, “Actually, that’s not entirely true,” and all I kept thinking was, shut up you stupid astronaut, trying to hog all of the space glory for yourself, staring down at the earth, right at the great wall, you’re thinking, “This is great! I’m going to make up some lie about not actually being able to see it from space so that way I can keep this experience all to myself!”

That made less and less sense as I wrote it out. I think the astronaut was actually talking about other manmade stuff that you can see from space, or common space misconceptions, I don’t know, my mind must have taken a little detour. I got off topic, but back to that race on top of the Great Wall. How can you hit the wall if you’re already on the wall? That’s what I meant to say. That’s what this whole thing has been leading up to, that sentence: how can you hit the wall if you’re already on the wall?

So for all of you endurance athletes out there, if you’re worried about hitting the wall, just remember: only race on top of other walls. Problem solved. And yeah, I get it, it’s a figure of speech, I’m listening, OK? I’m not stupid. I know it’s just a saying. But what I’m saying is, come up with a new saying, on top of other walls, because you can’t hit a wall on top of a wall. There’s got to be something else, a little clearer, something a little less confusing.