The Loneliest Surface to Air Missile in the World

Let me tell you about Sam. Sam was a missile, the loneliest surface to air missile in all the world. Sam sat forever at the bottom of the silo. He waited day in and day out for his turn to launch. Tears ran down his fins from his nose casing as he watching buddy after buddy zip out from the earth on a bed of flames to a firy destruction in the skies above.

So glorious, Sam thought, to launch from the earth on a bed of fire and collide with another object to detonate in the sky in an even bigger and more destructive fireball than the one that launched me.

Sam thinks about launching every day, about the blue sky, about the trees growing smaller before he blew up. Sam cries everynight as one by one his friends fly away to their beautiful, firey deaths.

"What's the point of being a missile if not to be launched? Can there be a God if there is nothing for me to blow up?"

These are the questions Sam asks day in day out. The other missiles that hadn't been launched long grew tired of hearing Sam's whining and made themselves go dud. As night set on the silo shortly before the end of the summer and the last rays from the sun backed out of the hole like a dying flame, Sam wondered if he could just launch himself.

Could he fire without purpose to detonate in the sky? Would his explosion be just as glorious?

Sam didn't have the answer. He just waited and waited until one day one of his red guiding fins fell away from the side of his propulsion housing. One of his internal sensors shut down and another indicated that his fuel had been contaminated. The months past, and then the years, and so did war after war, and Sam's housing began to corrode and his nose lost its shine.

One day, some technicians opened a door at the base of Sam's silo dressed in white coats smudged with grease and carrying clipboards.

"Looks like this one's got to be junked too," the first technician said.

"Yeah, too bad they didn't launch this one when the war was still hot," the second technician said. "I bet this was one damn fine missile.

"You got that right," the first technician said. "He would have blow'd up good. They don't make them like this no more."

"They don't fight wars like this anymore," the second technician said, shaking his head.

Neither technician knew it, but tears rolling down Sam's side through the rust and the corrosion. Neither of them knew it, but they'd broken Sam's internal guidance chip with grief, and he had become a dud despite his determination to stay volatile. When Sam was disassembled and deposited in a weapons disposal facility, he was too sad to notice. He just didn't know which was more meaningless, to be laid to waste or to detonate in the sky atop a pillar of smoke and flame without a target.

The End

I care about octopus care.

Like most Americans, I get really worried when my pet octopus is sick, and I find the inavailability of health care for octopi to be one of the more troubling facets of our society. What are we supposed to do if we wake up drenched in our beloved pet's ink to the sound of it's beak champing in fear? What do we do when the nearest veterinarian certified in octopi care AND who runs a 24 hour emergency clinic is more than three hours away by car? They have helicopters for people, so they need helicopters for octopi damnit. I remember the days when any Nurse or EMT could start an octopoidal IV, but now they need to bring in a specialist. Those precious lost hours could mean the difference between the need to amputate a tentacle. Biology journals may claim that we've made great strides in marine medicine, but I'm still waiting for the day when every household in this country has an octopi medicine kit safely tucked away under their sinks. Maybe then we could sleep easy at night.

Felt too specific for Totally Vague Reviews

I know I'm behind the times with this, but I resisted reality TV as long as I could. Now, I've been watching a lot of reality TV for the last few months out of some strange masochistic/ experimental impulse, anything from reality games shows like Fear Factor, the Real Gilligan's Island, American Idle, and the Bachelor to those shows where they redesign people homes, plan their weddings, fix up their cars, make them compete for jobs, and who really knows what else. Although I must concede that I often am mildly entertained by the shows and spend the rest of my time watching them in a sort of vacuous stupor that passes time without really noticing it (except when Fear Factor makes me want to laugh and vomit and vomit laughter at the same time), I must insist that I think reality TV sucks away my will to be creative. It reminds me that real life just isn't as interesting as I sometimes let myself think it is and certainly not as interesting as it is when I write about it. If writing and movies etc. is reality with all the boring stuff cut out, than reality TV is movies and books with all the good stuff cut out. Just once I'd like to see the judges from American Idle stand up, pull out shotguns and just start removing all the candidates from the gene pool instead of simply kicking them off the stage. I think waiting for this is what ultimately keeps me watching.

Chihuahuas the size of Buicks

So it would seem I've spent most of today alternating between putting batches of chocolate chip cookies in the oven and shooting terrorists. All these years I thought I was American, it turns out that I was mistaken until now. Now that I have enjoyed tasty, oven-fresh toll-house cookies while shooting terrorists; now I am an American, full-blooded. I even bought beer today. I'm kind of proud of myself. I've come so far since I was a little pup. Now I'm a big dog eating raw meat from a little bowl by the water dish. No wait. That's my dog, except my dog isn't big. Really it's pretty damn small. Smaller than a cat. Bigger than a rat, but we're trying to get it fat its just that it isn't all that easy to make a little dog big. That's what today's science needs to explore; how to make little dogs into big dogs. Chihuahuas the size of Buicks. That's the future. We'll ride them to work and throw them the bones from the table. Hell yeah.