slow, slow summer slump. no enthusiasm, no willpower or i would have written more recently. i write things in my head but they never make it to the screen. this is my half-assed apology. well, formalities aside, im forcing myself to sit here and write tonight for my own mental health's sake. i would be just fine otherwise, rotting or lolling or... i dont know, sleeping. maybe playing guitar... productive? maybe. they say musical people tend to score higher on standardized tests... id believe it. ive played today already enough though. i dont feel like going off on anybody (although i have good reason to) or writing scathing movie reviews (although i have good reason to)... maybe something philosophical.

maybe the stars... they are gorgeous tonight. or the sudden prolific appearance of satellites. they used to mean something to me. maybe not so much anymore. at one point i even considered one a sign from god, a prayer answered. eh, not anymore. looking back it seems like just another happy coincidence that made me happy for a night and ended up causing more pain than it was worth in the end. happens a lot with me. i sat outside on the back deck with my dad independance night and watched the fireworks from the next neighborhood over and the satellites up above. i counted six that night, they were everywhere. just two nights ago i looked up and saw a plane... then a bright satellite traveling the same speed. i thought they might collide but they didnt and i realized then that they really dont mean much anymore. used to be so symbolic... death of an icon i suppose. just a small event in a series of unfortunate tick exterminations that aid in the decline of my psychological dependance on someone. not too important at all...

but stars... i have a feeling they will feel special for a long time. i guess stars have meant one thing or another to just about every civilization in humanity's short history. our levels of understanding have slowly expanded until we have concluded that they are nothing more than fiery gas-balls in space. probably moving rapidly away from wherever that supposed big bang occured. imagine your body moving in a plot of infinite space. moving around normally, rotating around earth daily, simultaneously circumnavigating the sun, going around the galaxy, moving at incomprehensible speeds through the universe. its enough to make you dizzy. im willing to argue that there is no speed in space. speed is, after all, relative to a single location. any single location, as you will now realize, is impossible to maintain given the entire universe's lack of stability. heel, universe, heel. any speed here on earth is no cosmic speed at all because of all the funky movement our world does. if space travel is going to be successful to any extent we are going to have to stop using miniscule miles per hour or tiny machs or whatever else. light years maybe. it is a moot point anyway because i doubt we will find any form of information transmission or sheer power in the near future able to propel humans outside this solar system. the only theory ive heard is hibernation. somehow... isolate the gene that allows bears and other woodland furries to sleep so long and get humans to do it. that or something above light speed. and god only knows what happens then.

cosmic speed only matters (far as i can tell) when you are approaching the speed of light. as far as my thinking has carried me weird things happen around that point in time. here on earth light travels in pretty much real time. when light reaches here from the sun or whatever source, it bounces off you and goes into your eye. lets say you are in your spaceship going a marginal bit below light speed. so maybe light only travels, for the sake of conversation, fifteen miles per hour (i know, cosmic speed... shut up). so looking behind you at say... earth (with a big big telescope); earth activities would appear in slow motion. the light reflected into your eyes is getting there slower because you are traveling away from it. now, the light from the stars you are passing (which i can imagine would appear as lines in the sky...) reflects off your spacesuit and into your eyes. do you appear in real time or do you appear in slow motion as well? and unless your conscious mind slowed down (i dont know why it would but maybe) you would be moving in real time but seeing yourself in slow motion. scratch that... scratch all that. no slow motion. slow motion if you were accelerating away. rather, you see in real time on a delay. light still reaches your eyes at a constant speed, thus, constand vision. it just doesnt reach it in the time it normally would have, thus, delay. but... you reach light speed. this is a tough one. im wondering... since light isnt getting to your eyes anymore, rather frozen at the same speed you are going... would it all appear to freeze-frame from the moment you reached that exact speed? at that exact speed the only light you would have processed is the light that is there when you acheived light-speed. now, you could picture it as a video tape, forward, pause, and rewind but it wouldnt work that way. it is real life motion we are talking. lets say pause would be light-speed. by slowing down you start to see things again... in delay. but what would it look like as you are slowing down from light-speed? consider that no light has reflected off anything in your ship since you reached that speed. you have most certainly moved or done something since then. so when light finally starts reaching you, you would see... all the light that was in between your eyes and whatever else in there going to you and then light that started after whatever movement occured during light-speed time. some odd shift of vision going on. now, going faster than light is something far stranger. you would not see things in reverse looking back but rather forward... seeing all the light from behind you that passed you come back to you again. light from behind you wouldnt reach you so looking backwards would be complete black. looking into oncoming light would be a fast forward. remember... on earth light speed is real time. so that is cosmic speed for you... i think.

time. time is skewed as you can see by how fast you are going. dependent on light... possibly. but is there any such thing as real time? maybe one all consuming time but as for consciousness there isnt one. flies process information much quicker than humans so they basically see us in slow motion... hence their uncanny ability to avoid human swats. to them, time is much different. if you try and compare it, a human second isnt like a fly second. in reality though, it is still the same second for both of them. if the earth froze in space our time measuring systems would be fucked but i suppose digital devices would continue to keep stop-watch type time for us. going light speed maybe you slow down. maybe you stop altogether. maybe time isnt an issue for you anymore. when you see the sky it is a mosaic of time. the stars in any constellation may or may not still exist. they could have burned out millenia ago and we wouldnt know until the light reaches us. picture a constellation and figure the logistics. it is light colliding with earth. ok. so five hundred years ago this star releases light in a direction in space. maybe earth was... over there. well over time earth has moved here (remember all the moving we go) and that light has hit us. the star next to it is closer. its light was released three hundred fifty years ago towards the exact point the earth is now. repeat for other stars. the constellation we see is a picture of individual stars taken at different times at different places edited together to make a pattern. none of the stars are still there. star A is dead, has been for two hundred years. star B is much bigger now. we wont know until all that light reaches us. wherever we are. so time doesnt really mean much after all. it is just a semi-rational creation we use to make things easier to figure. it just confuses things after a while. yeah... i could still outrun light and with a large scope watch myself being born. time is worthless. this doesnt at all explain how i lost the last two years of my life. im still working on that one.

i cant stand thinking any more tonight. take it all with whatever pills you are on. ease the pain. its ok.