Dispatches from the Underground: Mark Zuckerberg Made Me Go To The Planetarium
And other wild tales from the last seven days
It’s Mark’s fault we went to the Boston Museum of Science last Saturday. I’m talking about Mark Zuckerberg, of course, but it’s 2019 and I feel like I should be able to say just “Mark” and you should know what I mean.
Anyway, a few weeks ago — for one of any number of reasons — Mark got this idea that I might be interested in both the Museum of Science as well as Wild Kratts, an educational children’s program. Consequently, I was subjected to an absolutely relentless barrage of ads for a Wild Kratts exhibit running at the MoS through the beginning of May. Absolutely relentless.
Turns out, though, he was quite right. I am pretty much always interested in that wonderful place and all three of my sons are avid fans of the Wild Kratts. “Honey,” I said to Kellie, “let’s take the kids to the museum and see this exhibit, maybe catch a planetarium show.” It had, after all, been four or five years since the last time. Why not? I went over to the Peterborough Library and scored some discount passes and the path was set.
This is what’s called good ad placement, folks.
The funny thing is, it turns out the Wild Kratts exhibit was absolutely the least memorable part of the trip. The thing was tucked away in a tiny room in a back corner and utterly half-assed. When I saw it I honestly couldn’t believe they would even advertise something like this. We spent about ten minutes there.
Were the kids (or adults) disappointed by this? Hell no! Not in the slightest — especially because we had to walk through half the museum just to find this cheap trick and they’d already been enthralled by dinosaur skeletons and exhibits showcasing rare animals (at least half of which all three boys already knew about, thanks in no small part to…Wild Kratts).
We got to sit together in a model of the Lunar Module. We ate lunch overlooking the sunny Charles (my old stomping grounds) and watch a real indoor lightning show. I was fascinated by a model of a 5,000-year-old Phoenician ship (how the hell did they make something like that back then?) and tickled to learn that a dinosaur that once roamed these parts seems to bear my family name.
We finished with the Planetarium show. It was called “Exploring the Universe” or something like that, and it was exactly what it sounds like. We started on Earth, zoomed out to see the moon and various planets (including some of the more interesting planetary moons), worked out our collective feelings about poor Pluto, and continued on outward, to other stars and finally outside of the galaxy, and on and on until we saw that view of all the galaxies in the “visible universe.”
I wasn’t much of a kid even when I was one, but just then, sitting in that reclining chair staring up at that dome that’s exactly what I was — every bit a kid as my sons sitting around me. I am just as floored by this universe (and amazing visual representations of it) as I was when I was six. That was a really good feeling. I do really like this universe, even on a bad day. And let me tell you, it was a real treat to see the whole family right there with me, just as into it as I was. (Not to mention feeling impressed and proud when the older boys were shouting out correct answers to all of our host’s questions about the cosmos.)
Yeah. So let’s raise a glass to Mark and to that shitty, harassing, misleading ad that got us to go down there and have a day we’ll all remember forever. I mean it. That was a gift.
Last Thursday, the day last week’s Dispatches ran — you know, the piece where I reflected on how my irritation was subsiding and things were looking up — I had another terrible day. Just as before, nothing unmanageable, nothing catastrophic or even particularly serious. Just a frustrating, aggravating bummer of a work day.
I left and drove straight from Manchester to Gardner, to a magical store where everyone — customers and employees — are equally jovial and pleasant and just overall happy to be there. This was a really big boost for me. I drove home after that, probably around 8 o’clock and put on the Sox opening day game just in time to see how badly they were getting crushed.
I had a lot of writing work to do that night, but it soon became clear that the correct thing to do was to blow it all off, relax, and watch 10 Things I Hate About You, which had been released exactly twenty years prior, to the day. (There’s a lot more I could say about that movie — so much more that I’m saving it for its own piece.) So that’s what I did.
Then I got up Friday morning and decided that I was going to be in a good mood and that I was going to listen to the Beatles. So I did. I listened to Sgt. Pepper’s on the way in — man, that really is an awesome album. It’s kinda “cool” in certain circles to be like above or beyond the Beatles, or even to say that “they suck”, but fuck those people. I don’t worship that band, I don’t make more of them than what they were, but every time I put them on I realize that what they were was pretty goddamn good. Then I moved on to Let it Be…Naked, which is a somewhat controversial reworking of the original Let it Be album, stripped by Sir Paul of all of weirdo murderer Phil Spector’s overproduction. Some people don’t like it, but I think it’s a drastic improvement.
Anyway, on that album, “Let it Be” is the last song. And man, there it was, at my desk it work, it GOT me. It just got me. I felt it, especially in the context of all the recent aggravation and even in the context of some of the broader conflicts that are more longstanding and likely to continue throughout the year and beyond. Let it be…yes, in some cases and at some times, that is not only an option, but the smart move.
One of the things I’ve been doing for my Lent practice that I keep teasing is going through this audiobook I have called Original Prayer by a man named Neil Douglas-Klotz. Raised a Christian in the US, Douglas-Klotz grew up to become both a Sufi mystic and a scholar of the Aramaic language. Not only is his unique mysticism some of the deepest, most beautiful, and best I have ever encountered, but his linguistic scholarship is mind-blowing. Many of his books are devoted to the words of Jesus, but viewed through Jesus’ native tongue.
Aramaic, he explains, like Hebrew and many other languages, is the sort of deal in which pretty much every word means several different things at once. This is pretty important when dealing with sacred words, because a simple translation is going to choose a single meaning for each word, to the exclusion of all others. His explorations, shining light on the broader, fuller, multiple meanings of key New Testament passages drastically expands their meaning in profound and powerful ways. Ways that make a lot of sense to me, not just as a fellow mystic but as someone pretty familiar with Jesus.
Original Prayer is not so much an audiobook but a kind of basic course in which he goes through each line of the Lord’s Prayer, first exploring the expanded meaning provided by an understanding of the actual language, and then by singing and chanting the line as a meditative exercise.
I’ve just finished it in the last couple of days and part of me regrets actually writing this as a dispatch because I don’t actually have the words to describe any of this. But it may not be an exaggeration to say that this exercise has been so powerful that it may well change my life in ways I don’t realize yet. Feeling these sounds, from heart to head and throughout the body, singing and chanting and embodying these words that I don’t even understand even though he just explained them has been some of the most moving, touching, deep, profound, powerful, cosmic meditative work I have ever even seen, much less experienced.
Come to think of it, in the last year or so, I have really come to learn the deep power of the chant. Perhaps we might be at the point where I can say that while I know silent meditation is the thing for many, that I can’t “get there” that way in the same way I can through chanting.
This is true when I’m in the car listening to this wonderful man strum a guitar and sing in a dead language, but it’s even more true when I’m doing it with other people.
Starting in January, on the first Wednesday of each month, my church — the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church — has been hosting 30-minute Vespers services. The structure is simple. Enter silently and light a candle. We begin with a gong bath and then progress to a chant chosen for the evening. There is a very brief reading of a poem or a blessing, followed by several more minutes of chanting, a second reading, more chanting, a third reading, more chanting, and then a second gong bath to wrap it up, after which participants are invited to sit in silence for as long as they are inclined, before blowing out the candle and leaving silently.
They are amazing. If you are in the area, you must come. In the summer, when Sunday services are not held, we intend to offer them twice per month.
I helped push to make this into a thing and I help facilitate the services (often I say the readings) but 100% of the credit for how amazing these are belongs to our supernaturally talented and deeply masterful music director, Marybeth Hallinan. I’ve given her props before and will do so again, and cannot possibly do so enough.
If I sound especially effusive, that’s because I’m writing this late at night on the first Wednesday of the month, after having been blessed by such a service. Trust me when I say we all need more of this.
In closing, since we all know how well I do with change, I want to say a few words of gratitude and farewell to my dark blue 2007 Toyota Corolla. Tomorrow, likely right around the time this goes to “press”, it will be taken away for good, after three years of extremely loyal and faithful service.
She did not die naturally but was instead scheduled for unplanned euthanasia. Three months ago, I was rear-ended coming home from work — not a big deal, I was not hurt and it could have happened to anybody, no shade to the guy who hit me — but anyway, it took all this time to go through insurance and the other guy’s insurance has decided the car is a total. So it goes, as Vonnegut might say (though probably about something objectively more weighty than an old car). We’ve worked it all out, they’re paying off the loan and giving me a couple hundred bucks and a rental car until I can buy a new one.
I really liked this car and we had a very good professional relationship, but I can’t say that there was a super deep bond. I don’t mean that as any slight on the car herself. She never had any major problems, despite pushing 150,000 miles and was more forgiving in annual inspections than any car I’ve ever had since coming to this racketeering state. In fact, I intend to get another car almost exactly like this one, if I can. Maybe our time together was just too short — it was just about the three-year mark when I was struck.
Despite all that, I’ve been talking to the car for the last few days, expressing my sincere thanks and appreciation and acknowledgment for the relationship we did have. She never failed me and I’ll always remember that. And there’s no denying that I’m gonna feel a little hole inside when they take her away. I’m just like that, I guess.
Funny side note, though — I had to clean the car out in a hurry this afternoon in order to both be on time for the Vespers service and to have it all ready for tomorrow morning and I can’t even begin to tell you the years’ worth of artifacts and debris that was in there. One thing I had been driving around with is a giant stump I took from my parents’ yard a few months ago — a stump from my favorite tree, the one that’s been so cruelly taken from me. Well, now it’s out of my car and safely down in my lair, where it will make a phenomenal stool. It makes me happy knowing it’s here — knowing it’s home.
We go on and move on and things change and disappear…but nothing “behind” us ever goes anywhere.
Be well.