My wife’s brain has not had any activity in about five years. Which is awesome.

My wife’s brain has not had any activity in about five years. Which is awesome.

I’ll admit that, when we started dating, I didn’t really know what Multiple Sclerosis meant. I barely knew what it was, but had no clue why it was “Multiple Sclerosis.” For those like me, “sclerosis” is an abnormal hardening of tissue, basically scar tissue. Multiple, obviously, just means more than one. Traditionally, if you have one bit of abnormally hard tissue in your nervous system, that’s bad, but that’s all it is. You get a second one – boom, that’s MS. (Today, they’re quicker to consider the possibility of MS even at the first sighting.)

The sclerosis are referred to as lesions, and the formation of new lesions is referred to as activity. So MS is about the only situation where it’s good to say there’s no activity in someone’s brain.

Rebecca had an MRI Monday, and the results came back – no new activity since the last MRI, and none for almost five years.

I share this because a friend contacted me earlier today to ask about her experience; his doctor suspects he may have MS. I share this to say there is hope. I share this because not that many years ago, five years without activity would have been a miracle. I share this to say that the war against MS is being fought, and it is being won. I share to say, keep fighting.

Ode to Opportunity

A poem for the Mars rover Opportunity, still silent in the midst of a planet-wide dust storm on the Red Planet.

One of My Favorite Quotes From This Whole Space Business Thing

A couple of days ago I came across one of my favorite quotes from this whole space business thing. In my head, someday I’m going to write a self-help book based about applying spaceflight principles to personal life, and if that ever happens (spoiler alert: it’s not) this quote will be in there.

Seven years ago yesterday I was in Titusville, Florida, for the last launch of the space shuttle. There was, obviously, a lot of anticipation for the launch, and a lot of attention being paid to the fact that the weather was not looking like it was going to comply.

During a press briefing a couple of days out, Mike Moses, chair of the Mission Management Team, was asked if NASA would still proceed with preparations for the scheduled launch, given that, at the time of the briefing, there was only a 30 percent chance of acceptable weather. (And double that two days later.)

Moses responded, and I love this: “I know of only one way to make it a 100% no-go forecast, and that is not to put propellant into the tank.”

They did, in fact, put propellant in the tank. The weather, did, in fact, cooperate.

And Atlantis did, in fact, launch.

You can never guarantee success. But you can always guarantee failure.

Review: “Hope of Nations” by John Dickerson

If there’s one thing many modern Christians do well, it’s despair for the state of the world. Either the modern age is the end times, or it certainly should be. 

John Dickerson’s “Hope of Nations: Standing Strong in a Post-Truth, Post-Christian World” is a handy guide for that mentality, which is both everything that’s right and everything that’s wrong with the book.

The premise of the book is this: Modern society is abandoning capital-T Truth, which seems to pendulum between being the belief that there are some things that are more than just opinions no more valid than other opinions, and being God. This new “anything goes, everything’s equal” mentality is leading to a worldwide cultural decline and societal collapse.

At its best, the book has practical advice for living as a Christian in that world, both in terms of how to recognize “Post-Truth” fallacies, and in terms of how to live in such a way as to make the world a better place. How does Christianity prove its relevance and merit in a world decreasingly likely to accept “because it’s true” as a compelling argument? “We should not be outloved,” Dickerson challenges in an example of the strongest parts of this book. 

Unfortunately, such points are scattered sparsely throughout the book, and, most often, buried toward the end. How this is received will depend on the reader. At one end of the spectrum, the book seems unlikely to make much impact on a non-Christian; it’s “preach to the choir” approach seems more likely to alienate than convince a reader not already in Dickerson’s doctrinal camp. To the reader of a similar mindset, however, that choir-preaching could be a welcome pep-rally, a reinforcement that things really are as bad as they thought, and that those they were inclined to blame really are at fault. 

For myself, I would have preferred more meat and less pep rally. I found myself wanting to give up on the book after multiple recountings of the same anecdote about just how depraved those folks in San Francisco are, and disappointed when I finally reached a chapter challenging Christians wanted to make a difference to be “Known for Doing Good in a Post-Church Era” that the pages it spent exhorting the reader to “do good” never got around to positing what might be recognized as “good” things for a Christian to do in today’s society.

The meat of the book is good, but your enjoyment of the book as a whole will entirely depend on whether you find getting there a slog or a celebration.

“I’m Going to Paint the Moon for You” Godspeed, Alan Bean

“And what you didn’t see

I’ll let you see through me

I’m going to paint the moon for you”

Captain Alan Bean passed away today. He was a Navy test pilot, an astronaut who served as lunar module pilot of Apollo 12 and as commander of Skylab II, and a painter unlike any other.

He was a great man, and a man who was greater for not appreciating how great he was. I don’t know that I’ve met any who have accomplished more, nor any more driven to better themselves.

History will remember him as the fourth man on the moon, or, more commonly, will remember forgetting him as the fourth man on the moon. The band Hefner many years ago released a song title “Alan Bean,” which while generally a beautiful tribute, contains the line “Everyone will forget soon/ the fourth man on the moon.” In a Twitter war between Wendy’s and Hardee’s a couple of years ago, Wendy’s claimed nobody cared if you were first to do something – “Tell us the fourth person to walk on the moon without googling it.”

Remember Alan Bean.

Twelve human beings have walked on the moon. Someday there will be more; a someday that is both soon and not soon enough. I am proud to be part of a team working to put them there. 

Alan Bean is the embodiment of why I believe that is important.

Right now there are two rovers driving on Mars, among other robots surveilling the planet. They are our vanguard on the Red Planet; they are our proxy scientists, our proxy explorers. They do the things we need to be doing on Mars, and they do it well.

Soon, much sooner than there are humans, there will be new robots on the surface of the moon. They, too, will conduct science and exploration on our behalf on the rocky regolith of our nearest celestial neighbor.

Some believe they should suffice. Some believe that we should spare the cost and risk of sending humans to other worlds in light of the able accomplishments of our mechanical surrogates.

They are, with all respect, wrong. Part of the reason is that as capable as these robots are, a human being is more capable still, and, more importantly, better able to improvise, to respond in real-time to his or her surroundings.

For me, however, that argument is wrong because of Alan Bean.

I had the opportunity to meet Alan Bean. I saw him in person multiple times, but the moments that will stay with me always are the ones I spent with Alan and my Homesteading Space co-author Owen Garriott at Bean’s Houston home.

Alan Bean was an amazing man, and it was incredible to sit with him and hear him tell stories. We were there to talk Skylab, and his Skylab stories were captivating. And even though it’s not what we were there to discuss, the moon was mentioned more than once. 

It was an unforgettable experience to be there with him and Owen, two men who had shared decades before an experience unlike any other, to see them not as heroes in the spotlight, but as two friends who had known each other far longer than I’d been alive. I hope to have friends like that when I’m that age.

We sat in his kitchen, adjoining his studio, surrounded by in-progress paintings. His skill with a paintbrush was impressive in its own merit, but almost shocking in the context of who it was painting – it seemed somehow unlikely – and certainly unfair –  for a man of unparalleled left-brain accomplishment to  be a right-brain virtuoso as well.

Owen asked when he was finally going to paint Skylab. We tried to get him to time a Skylab painting for the release of the book. Every time we asked, it was always just over the horizon. It’s a painting I would have loved to have seen, and one we now never will.

Being a fan of history, his studio area for one reason made me debate whether I was annoyed. There, hanging from his walls, were presentations of patches he had flown to and worn on the moon. Or, more accurately, of portions of patches, gradually stripped apart thread by thread til only half-artifacts remained.

Bean went out of his way to help us. He shared his stories, he reviewed what we’d written to make sure it was accurate. In one of the conversations, he mentioned that he’d kept a diary while on Skylab, something not even Owen had known before. “Would you like to use it in your book?” … Yes. Yes, we would. As if any other answer to that were possible.

It was a fun challenge transcribing the diary; when I first saw it, I didn’t immediately recognize it was English writing. Bean seems to have a very distinctive autograph, but, the reality is, he doesn’t sign his name, he just writes it normally. It’s his normal writing that’s distinctive, to the point of appearing almost heiroglyphic to the untrained observer.

I’m proud we were able to do that; to share such an important historic document, to make it available to the public, to preserve it for future generations.

To make sure no one will forget soon the fourth man on the moon.

One of my most prized possessions is an early draft of Homesteading Space with Bean’s handwritten edits in it. A man who walked on the moon took the time to read something I’d helped write, and in his own hand marked it up to make it better. My answer to the icebreaker “if you’re house were on fire, what item would you save” is easy.

I’ll never meet the Curiosity rover. I’ll never eat cookies in Opportunity’s kitchen. I’ll never hear InSight’s stories of being on another world.

But, even if I could, they couldn’t tell me what it was like. They provide us with endless valuable data, but they can’t shared what it is to experience it, what it means to be the only ones on a distant orb.

Alan Bean did.

I was blessed to have that that personal experience, to have met the man, talked with him, spent time with him, eaten spaghetti with him, to get some slightest vicarious sense of what it was like, how it felt.

Twelve men walked on the moon. Eight have already left this Earth again. Four – Buzz Aldrin, Dave Scott, Charlie Duke and Jack Schmitt – remain. The dark day will come when none are left. The youngest of them were born in 1935. If it takes another decade to return to the moon, they would be 92. It’s possible this planet will never again be without moonwalkers. It’s possible it will. If so, when there is no one left who can tell what it was like to be there, the best we will have are those who heard and carry their stories; a somber burden.

Not everyone will get to meet a moonwalker. Not everyone will have that experience. Alan Bean knew that, and that knowledge drove so much of his life after his return to Earth.

He realized that he had in combination two things no other human being combined – the experience of what it was to walk on the moon, and the ability to capture it visually. And so he did.

For the rest of his life, he painted. He painted the moon, but in a way that was less driven by photographic truth than by emotional truth; he wanted to paint not what the moon looked like, but what the moon felt like.

To make that connection more visceral, he put something of the moon in his paintings. He took his moon boots and pressed them into the fresh paint, giving it texture. Those half-stripped-apart patches I mentioned? Taken apart thread by thread so that he could place those strands, with whatever slight particles of moon dust they contained, in his original paintings, embedding the actual moon in his paintings of it.

““And what you didn’t see

I’ll let you see through me”

He brought the moon home, and he spent his life sharing it.

Someday men and women will walk on the moon again. It’s not impossible it will be people I know before they leave, and it’s a goal to talk to them when they get back. But when they do, they’ll tour the world, and they’ll tell their stories. They’ll share their experiences.

And Alan Bean is why I believe that’s vital.

Godspeed, Commander.

Thoughts about Time Travel

Without spoiling anything, the most recent episode of my friend Jason Sims’ podcast has a moment that relates to a subject I’ve given a lot of thought, involving time travel:

If I had the ability to travel through time, I would do some amount of the stereotypical time-tourism stuff, like watching the Apollo 11 launch or being at the Sermon on the Mount.

(But not the one with the loaves and fishes, because I am allergic to seafood.)

But that would only be like 5 percent of my time-traveling.

The huge majority of my time traveling would be going back to places that I miss, like eating at favorite restaurants that have closed or walking through places I worked that have been torn down or playing classic video games at the arcade.

In particular, there is a Mexican restaurant in Indianola, Miss., in the mid/late ’90s that would have gotten a lot of my future business.

Because these were favorite places of mine, though, it raises the possibility of past-me encountering future-me, which I feel it would be important to avoid. There are two reasons for this:

One reason is the cliché concern that it would create some sort of temporal paradox/anomaly thing that would destroy the space-time continuum. This is the lesser of the two concerns.

The bigger reason is this: If I assume that I’m going to actively avoid past-me being aware of the presence of future-me, then the fact that I’ve never seen myself do this is entirely consistent with the possibility that I will, in fact, do it.

I’ve been thinking about this for about 20 years now.

And even back then, I wondered how careful that would really require me to be. For example, if 22-year-old me were at a restaurant, and 52-year-old me walked in, would younger me even recognize me as the same person?

Factor in the facts that a) I’m not really going to be expecting time-traveling future older me to come in, so that’s probably not going to be my first thought*, and b) I’m honestly probably not paying a lot of attention to the other patrons anyway.

For example, the guys on the right in these two pictures from 22 years apart certainly favor each other, but if they were in the room together, do they really look “the most logical explanation is that one of them has traveled from the future” alike?

Supporting my theory is this: Several years ago, my friends Caleb and Lauren told me about the time they were at their favorite restaurant, and an older couple came in as they were leaving. (Or vice versa, I forget.)

And this older couple looked JUST LIKE OLDER VERSIONS OF THEM!!

And they now say that this restaurant has since made some changes so they don’t think it’s now as good as it used to be.

There are only two possible explanations: 1) The couple they saw was future-them, who had traveled back to the past to revisit their favorite restaurant when it was in its prime, or 2) It was an older couple that favored them quite a bit.

I, obviously, subscribe to option 1.

Which means that there is a good chance that I may already will have eaten again at Los Arcos in Indianola again in the future before it closed.

*Though I’ve already acknowledged that I’ve been thinking about this for 20 years, so if it happened since then, I actually probably am maybe more likely than average to think it’s time-traveling future me.

MS Awareness Month 2018: Blessings and Monsters

March is Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Month.

 

Last year, Rebecca and I really couldn’t help but promote MS awareness when we spent the better part of a week in Cullman so she could receive what may be her final MS treatment. You take off that long, and folks are inevitably going to be aware.

 

MS Awareness has become a different sort of thing for us over the past year since that treatment. Our awareness of Rebecca’s relationship with MS has evolved in that time. Free of some of the worst of it, and gradually and tentatively letting go of some of the fear of what tomorrow could be like, I think we’re both a little more of the realities of day-to-day post-Lemtrada life with MS. There have been days where it’s so obvious that the progress since last March is incredible. There have been days where it’s obvious that an indefinite treatment is not the same thing as a cure. Rebecca has always amazed me at how she perseveres; it’s easy for someone to not know what she deals with. I admire her so much, and have such a deep respect for her strength.

 

Without question, though, MS Awareness for us over the past year has included a deep-seated awareness of how incredibly blessed we are – to live in the time we do, to have the resources we do, to have the doctor we do, to have the community we do. Take any of those things away, and life could be very different.

 

One member of that community is Amy Kibbey, who has shared with Rebecca experiences from her own battle. I’m grateful to her (and so many others) for that, but I also really respect her efforts to share the blessings we experience with others.

 

Rebecca has been a beneficiary of the National MS Society, an organization that Amy supports each year through Walk MS. Here is a link to how you can support her Walk. The fight against MS is a fight which can be won and is being won. The Walk, and the Society, really do make a difference.

 

I’m not asking people to give. I really believe these battles are fought best by passionate people. Everybody has a battle. MS may not have touched your life. For you, the monster facing you or your family may be diabetes or cancer or any number of others. It so, I’m not asking you to fight MS, and don’t judge you for not. Fight your monster. Fight hard.

 

But I did want you to have Awareness.