Tin Can
Literary Essay & Science Fiction
After the Jettison: Tales Told From Memory In Zero Gravity
By Gene Dillon
Featured Story
Table of Contents
Copyright & Reprint Information
Pages: 347
Published: Nov 2002 – November-December 2008
*January 2004 (Redacted, Not Found)
*March 2005 – April 2005 (Redacted, Not Found)
*July 2005 – September 2005 (Redacted, Not Found)
*January 2006 – July 2006 (Redacted, Not Found)
Originally published in Mental Contagion
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Featured Story from Tin Can
Selected Emails From the Future #9
September 2003 & 2057 AD
Selected Emails from the Future — #9
Intro and Conclusion by Gene Dillon
Email by Gene Dillon, 2057 AD
I decided to skip ahead to the ninth email, as they make their final approach to Mars. There's so much information here, and obviously it would take about 10 years to present it all, at this pace.
I've been in space for about five months. That brings to mind a couple of things. One - life on Earth must suck pretty hard for them to want to set up a colony on Mars. Two - the people on that shuttle have to be going nuts. I doubt that I'll be helping any, in that regard.
Subject: Number Nine. The Rise and Fall of Lake Michigan.
From: fusp09wUUm@99*7Yyu%4nn_Ppol33.com
Date: 17 Apr 2057 16:52:01 -0600
To: gdillon@explodin.com
G -
I'm tired of announcing these stupid little anecdotes. Why can't you just trust me, for chrissakes? Look, I'll just make sure that my correspondences are dotted with plenty of little thoughts and stories from our past, and you can sort it all out. Okay? Jesus.
OUR past? How can I pluralize myself like that?
Wait a minute. If your life begins to follow a different path in time and space, does that make you a different person now? Or am I drawing and quartering myself? Flaying out my soul to be torn into a million pieces? What if the universe splits in half and I can only take one half of my soul onto each path? I haven't been feeling "whole" lately. What if I'm snuffing myself out, gradually? And you, in your time. What good will you be, if only one half of your self continues down a different path after you read these messages? And that half is cut in half, and so on?
Jesus H! You would think that with the limited space on an important mission to Mars that the passengers would not be allowed to bring along so much horseshit. The human mind is infinitely capable of storing up landfills worth of horseshit. There is really no end to it. Worries, wants, fantasies, bad memories.
At times, I regret being a part of this project. I'm happy to help, of course, if it's at all possible. But from a personal standpoint, here I am, 88 years old, facing the final curtain, and I spend most of my waking hours dredging up the past and writing about it. To be honest, I'd much rather shed all this crap and just exist in the moment. It's all I have.
You left your hometown for good, once. So you sort of know what it's like. But at least you could go back and visit Chicago a couple times a year. I just left my home planet. And I will live the rest of my life under a bubble, 49 million miles from that tiny blue and green jewel.
Mars is dry and dusty and cold. Did you know that Mars was the Roman god of war? Isn't that nice? Mars has 2 moons, which is kind of nice also. Their names are Phobos & Deimos. In English - fear and panic.
We float away from our beautiful, lush home planet, in search of war, fear and panic. It makes me long to stand on the shores of Lake Michigan, and just soak up the radiation until my hair and teeth fall out.
Some fun times on Lake Michigan over the years. You spent time on a couple of islands, at very different times in your life. Washington Island? Off the coast of Northern Wisconsin. What's that - Door County? I can't remember. Fish boils. Green Bay and Sturgeon Bay. And I remember a restaurant that grew grass on its roof, and their were goats up there, just eating it. They had lingonberry sauce for the pancakes, and I swear to God I still don't know what a lingonberry is, but your girlfriend told you that you had to have the pancakes with lingonberries on them or you haven't lived, and they just tasted okay. I wondered if some old lady just grew them in her back yard or something. You were about 19. Laura was about 22, and enjoyed a drink now and then, every single day. You took a ferry to Washington Island, where she had spent summers in high school, and she knew a bunch of people there. People on the island enjoyed a drink now and then, every single day. On this island, people filled up 32-ounce cups with screw drivers at 10 in the morning, and drove around in pickup trucks and Camaros until the drinks were empty, at which point they would return to the bar and get another. They did this until it became dark, at which point they remained at the bar until it closed. Then they all drove to someone's house and had some drinks, and then drove home. You drank and drank and drank for days, and thought it was the greatest thing ever, except for the fact that some of the island's residents were pretty creepy.
On the other side of the lake, later in life, you discovered the best camping of your life, backpacking on North Manitou. Or South Manitou. Can't remember. I think it was the bigger of the two islands. Or the smaller one. No cars. A ferry took you and Michelle out there, and then you hiked for five miles and found a perfect spot overlooking a beach on the West side of the island. Several days went by before you saw any people at all. Ideal weather. Dazzling sunsets. Paradise.
That was the one.
One day, you will look back on the moments of your life that were strung together to wind around the world ten thousand times, and you will remember the most peaceful and wonderful times, and that was one of them. Watching the sun setting on Lake Michigan from that campsite. When feel you have lost everything, you'll always be able to close your eyes and get there. I still go there all the time.
When I open my eyes right now, I open them to war, fear and panic, growing ever larger in my little porthole. I thought we had left them behind for good. No. In this life, they never leave us. In six hours, we will orbit the god of war, a cycle that has trapped the human race since they crawled out of the oceans and jumped down from the trees.
Heading off to this bubble, the seed of human civilization, I bring with me all of my fear and panic, and a planet's worth of horseshit. With great pain and effort, I could attempt to wipe clean the slate of my own heart, mind and soul, but what is the potential of the rest of this new civilization? We've seen what seemingly intelligent human beings are capable of, and it has become a teensy, bluish dot in our rearview mirror. Did they slap up a nice Utopia for us in this bubble? Is the bubble teeming with enlightened beings? Or is the human animal destined to live in conflict and suffering as long as babies are born, as long as people continue to spend their lives struggling to survive?
What's the point?
What's your plan, Gene?
What are you going to do? What's your "battleground"? I've been puzzling all these months over how the fuck you can possibly make a difference in THIS life.
I guess you can always start with yourself. You're a sick bastard. I'm a sick bastard. It's damn near impossible to change the way anybody else thinks out there. Plenty of men and women have tried. Ideas get snuffed out, or fade away with time. As the population grew to well over 6 billion, the insignificance of the power of the individual mind was pretty damn close to insurmountable. The power of the group mind in the structures of power, and even in the circles of idealistic thought, would always become susceptible to corruption.
Oh, well. If you can manage to fix your own self, then at least that's one less sick bastard left. That's where it starts. Individuals can change. Individuals can influence others, and bring about change. Be contagious. I think that's the best advice I can think of.
Just know that a majority of human beings alive in your time are wishing, just BEGGING, for some kind of guidance.
But, LORD, we've been in this stinking can a long time. I'm gonna kill somebody, if I can find something blunt and heavy. No... zero gravity. It won't work. I'll need something sharp.
But I joke with you! Ha ha! Nobody understands the dark humor any more. In my time, death and murder carry absolutely no humor value. When the loss of one life can change the total size of the human race by .00008%, you tend to get a little bit annoyed by morbid humor. Gallows humor is okay though. Resignation is rather popular in our culture.
So, I told you about the radiation back there, didn't I?
Yep.
I doubt if you're at all surprised.
If you put a hundred alpha male apes from different tribes into a room filled with sticks and stones, what do you think will happen, sooner or later? And then, what if you turn up the heat in that room? Or take away most of the food? What if some apes had the ability to constantly pit other apes against each other? What if one ape becomes dominant, gathers up all the sticks and stones, and maintains order for decades, but then becomes old and weak?
Apes.
Animals animals animals.
We are animals.
I think all the humans will eventually leave Earth. It's just a sick place. Evil storms and pervasive radiation. It will be ten thousand years or more before it's even remotely safe to live above ground again for any length of time. If everything goes as planned, the atmosphere and surface of Mars may be adapted for human life within 6 or 7 generations. Until then, life may very well suck for us Martians. Hard, hard work for a couple of hundred years.
I've been imagining life on Earth in ten thousand years, devoid of human life, populated by the animals that survived the radiation and mutated somewhat. No beast will remain that is capable of mass destruction. Unless a raccoon manages to locate a certain button or a test tube some place. A pure textbook of Darwinism, sped up by the effects of radiation. What will survive? What will be lost forever? Before the Big One, some scientists with foresight actually did manage to cryogenically freeze a large number of embryos of a wide variety of species, but all were lost. Extinction through power outage. How incredibly sad. But Ted Williams can rest in peace.
I predict that omnivorous beasts in mountain regions and near the poles will have the best chance of survival. There should be a number of cracks, crevasses, valleys and caves that may be safe harbors from the worst effects of radiation and harsh weather, and some quantity of untainted water should be available up there. Bugs will be okay. They can live through anything. Imagine how the 17-year cicadas will do, having missed the torrents of flame. They might just decide to come up every year. Some of them are bound to mutate. I bet we'll have huge swarms of gigantic bugs, spiders and bats. And at least one Mothra.
"We'll" have?
Well, I'm still a native Earthling.
I hear tell that the welcoming committee on Mars likes to fuck with people when they get off the shuttle. They put on this elaborate performance, with everybody dressing up like the Roswell aliens, poking and prodding you, and speaking in tongues. Sounds like a fun bunch of people. As long as there's no probing.
Approaching orbit. Freakboy waking up. I hope I never see him again.
This flight has been a lot like prison. Except for the floating. Really boring and claustrophobic. At least in prison you could eat nutmeg and smoke banana peels and take showers. I'm going to recommend it to the Board.
I guess you'll be hearing from a Martian next time.
Later.
G
The rest of the messages were typed out on the surface of Mars, where I will be living out the rest of my days, after which I will be composted.
I'm amazed that I was only able to knock out nine messages in five months, but I assume that the presence of Smith and the mental effects of the lack of gravity had a lot to do with it. From here on out, I'll be typing pretty furiously, just about every day.
It's going to be difficult, choosing the most important and interesting entries, but I'll do my best. Number 10 is a doozy.
Table of Contents
Redacted, Not Found
May 2003
October 2003 – February 2004
April 2004 – January 2005
March 2005 – April 2005
June 2005 – October 2005
January 2006 – July 2006
November 2002 Tenderfoot
Part 1: A Couple Mistakes
December 2002 Tenderfoot
Part 2: Never Get Out of the Boat
January 2003 Tenderfoot
Part 3: Meat, Blood and Crucifixion
February 2003 Vegans In Furs
Part 1: Out of the Frying Pan
March 2003
The Jets
April 2003
Vegans In Furs — Part 2: Tofu or Not Tofu?
June 2003
Selected Emails from the Future #2
Intro and Conclusion by Gene Dillon
Email by Gene Dillon, 2057 AD
July 2003
Selected Emails from the Future #3
Intro and Conclusion by Gene Dillon
Email by Gene Dillon, 2057 AD
August 2003
Selected Emails from the Future #4
Intro and Conclusion by Gene Dillon
Email by Gene Dillon, 2057 AD
September 2003
Selected Emails from the Future #9
Intro and Conclusion by Gene Dillon
Email by Gene Dillon, 2057 AD
March 2004
Selected Emails From the Future #111: Part 2
By Gene Dillon
2067, presumably
February 2005 ?
By the Train
May 2005 ?
Apparently Not Finished
November 2005
Tag
December 2005
Poor Me
August 2006
Cry Fowl — Part 1
September 2006
Cry Fowl? Are You Kidding Me?
October 2006
Haikus of Panic and Realization
November 2006
Chapter 1: Difficult
December 2006
Chapter 2: Spare a Moment?
January 2007
Chapter 3: Shift
February 2007
Three Things at Once
March 2007
Facing East
May 2007
Doula
June 2007
The Baptist
July 2007
Doing the Darks
August 2007
Mountain
September 2007
How About This Line?
October 2007
Move Over, I’m Driving
December 2007
Cruise Control
January-February 2008
Sabbatical
March-April 2008
Freelancing for Sasquatch
May-June 2008
End Transmission
July-August 2008
Supper on the Road
November-December 2008
Field of Beast
All content ©2020 Gene Dillon via Mental Contagion. Content may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, or transferred in any form or by any means without prior written consent from the author and with express attribution to Mental Contagion. For reprint information contact Karen Kopacz, former director of Mental Contagion.
