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Visions of Mars and the phlegmy Jew
Sep. 23rd, 2003 12:36 pmWe had to get out of the house Friday night.
The sadness was stultifying and neither of us felt like we could fill our lungs up entirely without it breathing it in and having it stick to our insides.
I decided arbitrarily on the planetarium.
I love the planetarium with an awe and reverence that I generally reserve for good sex, excellent wine and bittersweet chocolate. Feel free to mix and match adjectives with the former sentence if you like.
We skipped dinner and arrived too early to even purchase tickets. That was okay with me, that meant we had time to walk around and stare at the displays of carefully taxidermied wildlife and play with the tornado machine.
The industrial tile in that place gives off such a crisp echoing noise when you walk. It feels like a scene in a spy film when you only see the bad guys feet. When you pause the silence seems heavy and pandemic, like the whole world spun to a vicious halt the moment you stopped walking.
A gaggle of girl scouts broke the quiet while I stared at perfectly preserved fish suspended mid-swim for all eternity in a pond of plastic urethane. After we bought our tickets we parked by the velvet ropes near the giant fiberglass representation of earth's only natural satellite.
A table was being set up by an employee and a obvious teen volunteer intern-type guy was there assisting her. He looked like your standard science teen doofus. Awkward with ill-fitting clothes and a yarmulke pinned lopsidedly on the back of his head. I felt a minor pull to go talk to him as I would have in high school. I loved boys like that, weird bug-eyed guys who couldn't look you in the face while they spoke, but could rattle off seventeen digits of pi if you asked them to.
That feeling soon passed.
He made a noise.
I am not certain I could do it justice with the written word, but I will make the effort. It was a back of the throat snort that sounded like he had a wet dry vac in his sinuses and felt it was time to clear the decks as it were. The decibel level of this was astounding, it reverberated through the quiet halls of the museum and made the glass cases quiver. Afterwards he swallowed whatever the results were with a noisy wet gulp. Then he did it again.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
I felt a little sick.
At the point that I determined I could not take it one second longer, the double doors opened wide and I practically ran in to settle myself into the best eastern facing seats.
The program was "Visions of Mars."
It was shoddily assembled and at one point the letters "turn off DVD" shone brightly by mistake in the faux night sky, but I didn't care. It is worth four bucks to me just to have them fill up the dome with all constellations visible to the naked eye without the interference of light pollution. The universe shone brightly on me for once this terrible year, instead of me having to blindly fumble through the dark fog for it.
After the show we hurriedly walked around the building to the observatory so I could look at Mars quavering through the atmosphere with the big telescope. We apparently did not walk fast enough, there was a sprawling ugly line. Standing patiently, the line surged and waned like tides and eventually we were packed into the small round room with the telescope, waiting our turn to peek through the eyepiece.
Paul and I were talking and didn't see him enter through the other doorway, but his presence was made clear upon the first esophageal wrenching snort. It bounced back and forth along the walls rendering all conversation meaningless in the wake of this most turbulent of sinus infarctions.
Paul pointed out that he only seemed to do it in prime numbers, two, three, five, etc.
I was trying to be amused, but I was getting desperate, the noise was excruciating to me. Every time the kid let one of those fly I exchanged painful looks with others in line, I begged for the merciful hand of Flonase to rescue us from this bizarre level of congestive hell.
The telescope was so very close now, I knew I could make it.
Finally right before I stepped onto the metal ladder, the sentinel nasal demon let one more go as if for punctuation and to test my resolve. I stepped up boldly and peered at the pale pink ball of dust wiggling through a murky haze of ozone.
I saw it and more importantly it saw me.
I held Paul's hand tightly as we went down the outside stone steps one by one.
Fall was coming, I could smell it and finally felt like I could breathe again.
The sadness was stultifying and neither of us felt like we could fill our lungs up entirely without it breathing it in and having it stick to our insides.
I decided arbitrarily on the planetarium.
I love the planetarium with an awe and reverence that I generally reserve for good sex, excellent wine and bittersweet chocolate. Feel free to mix and match adjectives with the former sentence if you like.
We skipped dinner and arrived too early to even purchase tickets. That was okay with me, that meant we had time to walk around and stare at the displays of carefully taxidermied wildlife and play with the tornado machine.
The industrial tile in that place gives off such a crisp echoing noise when you walk. It feels like a scene in a spy film when you only see the bad guys feet. When you pause the silence seems heavy and pandemic, like the whole world spun to a vicious halt the moment you stopped walking.
A gaggle of girl scouts broke the quiet while I stared at perfectly preserved fish suspended mid-swim for all eternity in a pond of plastic urethane. After we bought our tickets we parked by the velvet ropes near the giant fiberglass representation of earth's only natural satellite.
A table was being set up by an employee and a obvious teen volunteer intern-type guy was there assisting her. He looked like your standard science teen doofus. Awkward with ill-fitting clothes and a yarmulke pinned lopsidedly on the back of his head. I felt a minor pull to go talk to him as I would have in high school. I loved boys like that, weird bug-eyed guys who couldn't look you in the face while they spoke, but could rattle off seventeen digits of pi if you asked them to.
That feeling soon passed.
He made a noise.
I am not certain I could do it justice with the written word, but I will make the effort. It was a back of the throat snort that sounded like he had a wet dry vac in his sinuses and felt it was time to clear the decks as it were. The decibel level of this was astounding, it reverberated through the quiet halls of the museum and made the glass cases quiver. Afterwards he swallowed whatever the results were with a noisy wet gulp. Then he did it again.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
I felt a little sick.
At the point that I determined I could not take it one second longer, the double doors opened wide and I practically ran in to settle myself into the best eastern facing seats.
The program was "Visions of Mars."
It was shoddily assembled and at one point the letters "turn off DVD" shone brightly by mistake in the faux night sky, but I didn't care. It is worth four bucks to me just to have them fill up the dome with all constellations visible to the naked eye without the interference of light pollution. The universe shone brightly on me for once this terrible year, instead of me having to blindly fumble through the dark fog for it.
After the show we hurriedly walked around the building to the observatory so I could look at Mars quavering through the atmosphere with the big telescope. We apparently did not walk fast enough, there was a sprawling ugly line. Standing patiently, the line surged and waned like tides and eventually we were packed into the small round room with the telescope, waiting our turn to peek through the eyepiece.
Paul and I were talking and didn't see him enter through the other doorway, but his presence was made clear upon the first esophageal wrenching snort. It bounced back and forth along the walls rendering all conversation meaningless in the wake of this most turbulent of sinus infarctions.
Paul pointed out that he only seemed to do it in prime numbers, two, three, five, etc.
I was trying to be amused, but I was getting desperate, the noise was excruciating to me. Every time the kid let one of those fly I exchanged painful looks with others in line, I begged for the merciful hand of Flonase to rescue us from this bizarre level of congestive hell.
The telescope was so very close now, I knew I could make it.
Finally right before I stepped onto the metal ladder, the sentinel nasal demon let one more go as if for punctuation and to test my resolve. I stepped up boldly and peered at the pale pink ball of dust wiggling through a murky haze of ozone.
I saw it and more importantly it saw me.
I held Paul's hand tightly as we went down the outside stone steps one by one.
Fall was coming, I could smell it and finally felt like I could breathe again.
