tales from an ordinary world

1999-07-28

There's a lunar eclipse happening. It's kind of cool, but space no longer interests me in the same way it did when I was Much Younger. Why is that ? I happily sucked in all the sci-fi/fantasy books I could get my hands on, and firmly believed, like most others, that by the time 2001 came up we'd be up on that space station like Arthur C. Clarke said. But instead, I'm sitting here earthbound, looking up at the moon partly covered by the earth's shadow, with a glass of wine and the Underground Lovers playing on our office speaker system. And somehow, I'm not particularly bothered by this. Hell, I'm feeling relaxed. Perhaps I just let the mundanity of normal life cloud the inspiration that would have driven me into space ? Like Burroughs said (quoting Gysin), "what are we here for ? We're here to go !". Mankind, he says, was born to move into space, and it's only the shits holding us back...