personal

I don’t quite know what happened to today. I woke up pretty early, did the Sunday crossword (on my iPad, which is nice if not quite the same as on paper), and the rest of the day is kind of a blur. Oh, I bought a couple of small oscillating fans, having thoroughly failed to get the air conditioner working again. I found an owner’s manual, which might even be the owner’s manual, but it didn’t suggest anything I could easily check that I haven’t already. (The filter is clean.)

This afternoon, with my semi-regular writing group, I penned this (also on the iPad):

High in orbit, out of range of most of the ground crew’s instrumentation, but near enough to keep the top floors of Central’s main offices in a perpetual semi-shade, the Candle sat tethered in dry-dock. If you wanted to, you could call it a ship, although there was nothing nautical about its design or function, and it held no crew beyond its on-board computer, and it ferried no passengers save one. This passenger you could have called anything you wanted, and no doubt the records of Central were full of its many official designations, but the one thing you would not have been tempted to call it, despite a passing (and unsettling) resemblance, was a man.

Lopez had been a man once. Buried beneath pages of schematics, Army blueprints bequeathed to Central in that moment when the project first seemed to turn sour, you would have discovered not only his name and vital statistics — age, height and weight, hair and eye color — but also the rank and serial number he had held before being volunteered for the project, and long before the Candle had ever taken flight.

Now he was no one. He was half-jokingly called Mean Mr. Mustard among the ground crew, although they rarely saw him nowadays, and they were almost never called to service the computer that sustained him, the computer that, in years past, would have connected him to what some of the higher-ups still hazily remembered as the Net. Both he and it were now seldom glimpsed relics. It was true, his skin was jaundiced and sickly — a side-effect as much of the project’s early pharmacological stages as the now half-decade he had been integrated into the decaying (and itself yellowing) hull of the Candle — but it was surprising how quickly the nickname had stuck and how long it had lasted.

But there was no great fondness in it, and everyone knew Lopez had outlived his usefulness — if the abandoned Army project could ever have been called useful. So it was with only a little shock, and almost no rush to act, that the ground crew noted the sight of the Candle, sinking from its geostationary orbit and drawing closer, burning at both ends.

We decided to give Green Lantern a miss.