Preponderant Dismissal

Something important had inexplicably vanished. He stared at the walls of his former office, absolutely puzzled and confoundedly bemused. Few things in Alastair's life had leveled such a shock. In fact, as he continued staring off absently into the space before him, Alastair could only count one other such instance -- the unexpected death of his father. The shock of that though was not nearly as immediate. Alastair was young and unfamiliar with him in many respects. The effects of that death were felt over a period of time which could be represented as an oddly continuous distribution of hurt and missed time and lost experience. The whole lot of it was strange, but Alastair was able to hold his own.

Alastair walked down the hall. He was a bit confused, a bit concerned, and a bit over the edge. For the moment, the frigthening, harrowing aspects which Alastair feared most over the past several weeks had irremediably gripped his entire sense of being. Alastair saw time move past him in slow-motion. The slower it moved, the heavier he felt -- until Alastair had expanded into a super-massive, aging gas ball, ready to implode.

Alastair felt betrayed, and his reaction to the betrayal was anything but healthy. As most betrayals begin, Alastair's began with the gift of himself to another and ended with the irresponsible and irrevocable misappropriation of blood and body, years of toil and selfless understanding.

This was all known. This was all common. People lose their jobs all the time. Unfortunately, not many seem to steep themselves in horribly inexplicable messes in the process.

"Pressure," Alastair remembered saying, "can be a good thing. It can spur on the imagination and inimitably disrupt the status quo at its cowardly foundations." Alastair felt profoundly naive and ashamed for having been so drunk with youth and inexperience. "Turns out," Alastair would now tell himself, "that a man's self worth ought to remain a constant in this universe. Evidently, I was once a young dirigible."

And with all this, Alastair's eyes finally opened to the hurt around him, and he grew from that in ways which would be shown to astound even the least of his friends and lovers -- this horribly embarassing scandal would only open the door to greater opportunity. He had no way of knowing at the time that judgment really is a two-way street, in that the hurt perpetrated by ill-will, ingraciousness, and misunderstanding can often become a distinctly reversible process.

And thus began Alastair's big day.

...Some More

• Alastair Templeton


• Alastair


• Lost in the Penumbra


• Bicycles and Such


• Amelia Buendia


• Regional Transit Authority


• Solitude

Hooray!

I seem to have fallen off the face of the earth as of late. Oh well. My powerbook is currently very sad and sick right now. If you could please say a prayer for its timely recovery, I'd very much appreciate it.

In other news, I just started my second semester as a physics graduate student at Texas A&M.

Beth literally bought me a real koala for christmas. His name is Harry, and he lives at a koala refuge in Brisbane, Australia.

I saw two Beluga whales at the Georgia Aquarium.

And I played lots of video games while at home in Cleveland.

All in all, I must say that I had a most productive winter break.

For my T.A. sections this semester, I think I'm going to allow my students to earn extra credit by writing letters about what they are learning in physics to Harry the koala.

I also resolve to turn purple and sit in the stink-o corner for fifteen consecutive days.

And I would like to try writing longer, better pieces of short fiction. Perhaps I'll study some classical electrodynamics and statistical mechanics along the way.