The International Space Station

I am surprised F___loves rockets. He's the last person on earth I would have guessed to unabashedly admire space launches, as he's a fierce critic of the USA and deplores almost every one of its institutions.

I might have hurt his feelings the other night when I said I wasn't a fan, that space exploration always seemed to me a government-sponsored diversionary tactic--first the race to space with the Russians when I was a kid and then the evolution of the NASA program where astronauts became national heroes and returned to earth as right-wing politicos or to head major corporations that manufactued, among other things, munitions and other technological instruments of mass destruction.

Furthermore, I said to F___, the space effort is filled with the same folks who just must climb Everest, and leave behind the foil wrappers of their freeze-dried meal kits--and often a dead Sherpa or two--in trashy piles somewhere in their ascent to the top, which they seldom reach, or their descent back into base camp, having lightened their checkbooks by $200k or so.

F____ and I were talking by phone--he in Santa Monica and I in San Francisco--each of us enjoying a a phonetini made possible by Alexander Graham Bell. 

I kept talking, talking more than F____, and the more I talked the more cliches entered my side of the conversation. I even said something like, 'we can't even take care of the earth.'

F___listened patiently. Then he said he loved to build rockets as a kid, that it was a way to be close to his father.