Take Off, Lift Off, Get Off...

      There's still something magical about being at a window seat and watching your plane take off.  That rounding of the corner after a slow taxi out, the feel of the plane straightening itself along the runway, and then that sudden surge of power.  And no matter the size of the plane, I still have to wonder how such a massive chunk of metal and fuel, much less its heavy loads of passengers and their ever-larger pieces of checked luggage, gets off the ground with such ease.  Even when driving in my car, I am baffled that a simple push of my foot somehow causes a mist of gasoline to enter a chamber and ignite flames thst wll then power pistons and valves not much different from the stream trains of old.  How is that it is all so controlled, and controlled in such a manner that most of us can just take all of it for granted, never even considering a simple crack in the line may cause the entire thing to burst into flames as easily as when our Cub scout manhood brains shot lighter fluid into a charcoal barbecue?  And yet, I did just that, not the lighter fluid explosion but me drifting off with a lack of concern as my plane took off for yet another half-day trip across the Atlantic.  No big deal, since thousands of other such flights were in the air as well, as they are each and every day, each going somewhere and each flying as uneventfully and as unconcerned as the next. 

     Of course, these wandering thoughts of mine were once again all old school, likely little different from the memories that arrives to a child riding a carousel or some other fond memory waiting to be imprinted from days long past.  And for me, these reflections could have originated because of all those dang books and such which I found myself reading, many of them about changing with the times (or not) and of one's age now being ever closer to hearing the grandfather clock's bong ever louder about the approach of high noon, or midnight, whichever analogy you may choose.  It all seemed to bring me back to the days of having a manual shift in your car (what??).

     Take this quote from Bloomberg Businessweek: Today, only 2% of new vehicles sold in the US have manual transmissions, per data from CarMax. Most manufacturers, even famous sports car brands such as Ferrari and Lamborghini, don't make them at all anymore. Sigh.   I can remember that classic scene from Bullitt with Steve McQueen, the original street smart Bond, who could not only ride a motorcycle to escape the Germans in The Great Escape, but could shift his souped-up Mustang far better than any Jason Stratham and his special-effects laden Fast & Horrendous flicks.  Those were the days when most everyone actually drove a "stick," a car you could "jump" to life if your battery was dead; a few buddies pushing your Chevy Nomad or whatever, a quick pop of the clutch, and you were good as gold.   Watching McQueen's pulsating race through San Francisco only fueled our adolescent imaginations.  But slowly, the auto makers convinced our addled minds that it was time to put away those fantasies and to think about the future, and the safety features which would soon be so necessary for our upcoming settled-down life with kids in the back.  Forget that gearshift knob, they told us, you were now going to need all of your hands and senses on full alert if you were going to drive with a family in these modern and dangerous times.  Little did they know that texting would arrive in just a few decades...

   

     I think some of these geezered thoughts also came from another statistic in the same magazine that showed that those films and memories of "mine," were in sharp decline, at least at the box office.  Forget  Bullitt.  Thriller and suspense movies were down 59%; comedy movies down by 31%; drama movies down 25%; adventure movies down 18%. In truth, the only genre now killing it on the big screen, not only for the audiences but for the studios as well (as in cheap to make and with a high profit return) was horror.  Wait, horror?   It was up 70%.  And the return to the studio, as in what it cost to make vs. its profit return?  780%.  Yes, that was seven hundred eighty percent.  But horror?  Really?  I lamented this fact because I couldn't remember the last time I saw a horror film.  Sigh...

    Then there was this (and yes, all of this appeared in this same issue): dead actors narrating movies and books via the voice cloning startup, ElevenLabs. Wrote the piece: Among current clients including Rosa Parks and Malcom X, he's [intellectual property lawyer, Mark Roesler] negotiated Jerry Garcia into his own ElevenLabs deal; Albert Einstein, Alan Turing and Maya Angelou are set to deliver MasterClasses next year...[Judy] Garland can now read you The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or your tax return -- the choice is yours.  Sound a bit creepy?  The recreated ABBA avatars show is making a cool $2 million per week!  Imagine going to an "original" Beatles or Rolling Stones concert, that is one in which THEY were young.  If all of this sounds a like a bit of science fiction, picture that for the first time in 45 years,  Elvis will be making a comeback.  Well, an AI version of Elvis anyway, as Elvis Evolution premiers in London.  

  

     Okay, okay, so they're all dead or nearly so (with apologies to those few still hanging in there...right on).  But another article asked about the coming time when you are also gone, kaput, outta here.  Dead.  It asked, what happens to your "stuff," as in your digital stuff.  Forget those old material trinkets and photos and collectibles that are now worth zip in whatever dimension  you are; we're talking about all your emails and data, your digital records and bits and bytes, the stuff that locked up way past that delete button.  What happens to your financial data and your "secret" dark data, that stuff only you could find (or hide), your "other" life, be you boring Billy or psycho Sally.  Now imagine if you really were the Einstein of today: trade and military secrets, formulas and biological bugs, all protected and cyrpto-locked for the sake of humanity except...now you're gone.  That stuff remains somewhere, waiting, and it ain't in a box in the attic.  Wrote YourStory: The handling of deceased users' data raises ethical questions about privacy and ownership.  Some argue that tech companies should not have the ultimate authority over what happens to our digital selves after death.  As noted by Carl Öhman in his book The Afterlife of Data, our online presence can be seen as an "informational corpse" that deserves respectful handling rather than mere deletion or monetisation by corporations.  As the publisher's blurb noted about Carl Öhman's book: Sooner than we think, the dead will outnumber the living on Facebook.  In this thought-provoking book, Carl Öhman explores the increasingly urgent question of what we should do with all this data and whether our digital afterlives are really our own—and if not, who should have the right to decide what happens to our data.  The stakes could hardly be higher.  In the next thirty years alone, about two billion people will die.  Those of us who remain will inherit the digital remains of an entire generation of humanity—the first digital citizens.  Whoever ends up controlling these archives will also effectively control future access to our collective digital past, and this power will have vast political consequences.  Elon Musk already owns all the data from #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and of course, X...

     If we're lucky in a sense, our "deaths" will happen in the right order of sorts: first your grandparents, then your parents, maybe a sibling or two, and all of your beloved cats and dogs.  And then like some end of life celestial TSA person waving you forward, you'll hear that "come through" and realize that you are indeed next, even if you can't quite remember booking this bizarre flight (at least not this seemingly early departure) or what you're even doing here.  But here's the blunt and morbid fact, as so eloquently put in the book, We All Know How This Ends: One day you'll eat your very last meal.  You'll speak your final words.  You'll take your last breath.  Your heart will stop beating.  Your blood will no longer flow.  You will die.  You will be dead...Worldwide, 151,600 people die each and every day.  That's one hundred fifty-one thousand and six hundred people.  In the time it takes to watch an episode of This Is Us on Amazon Prime, 6316 people have died...Some 105 people have died in the minute it's taken to read these statistics.  That's almost two people every second...But how can we truly live a good life if we never properly acknowledge that one day it's going to end and the people we know and love will die?  Avoiding it won't prevent it from happening.  It's going to happen to all of us.  How many of us would jump headfirst into marriage without truly thinking about the implications and consequences?  Do we give birth with no thought as to how and where?  Have you ever bought a house without stepping inside it first?  Yet we tend to hurtle towards the end of our lives mostly without thinking about it, discussing it or really believing it's going to happen. 

  

     So jump to my finishing the skimmable best seller, Here One Moment.  In the book, a quirky woman stands up in the middle of a flight and begins to tell each passenger the age that they will die and the way it will happen, from cardiac arrest to a domestic beating by a newlywedded husband.  At first people are aghast at this odd and slightly rude display, but most are happily told that they will pass away at a ripe old age.  A few discover that they will live only slightly longer than a year or so, or will encounter a totally unexpected death, but most still chalk it off as the ramblings of a deranged woman needing to be escorted off by security when the plane lands.  Then a few of her predictions begin to occur.  The premise of the quick read was an interesting one because it brought up the subject of psychics in general, and whether you would want to know the date and cause of your own death.  Would you live your life even fuller if you knew it was going to end soon?  Or the opposite, would you let life happen as if it were no concern because you had so many years left?  Or would you pass on the psychic altogether and just take your chances, as most of us seem to do? Whatever your views on fortune tellers, one of our friends did indeed meet such a psychic, one whom he felt was quite accurate in knowing detail after detail about his past, and one who also told him when he would die.  But they're not supposed to do that, my wife and I told him, but then quickly followed with, so when?  He wouldn't tell us, but asked us the same questions.  Would we want to know, and why?  Would it change the way we would choose to live?  

      Hmm, such morbid thoughts all, but authors Lyons and Winter added this: Embrace yourself and all your flaws.  If you can't embrace your flaws, change them.  Or at least change the way you look at them.  Our biology may give us a template, our childhood may give us insecurities, our experiences may form us, but we are responsible for our futures.  We have the opportunity to create a good life, despite our difficulties, to design a beautiful, brilliant life -- for ourselves and the people we love.  Do this.  Take control.  Because believe me -- you don't know when it'll all be taken away.  And with that, poof!  Ernesto the Magnificent had waved his wand and ordered me to snap out of it.  Wake up!  You're not dead, or in a trance, or even sleepy.  This is now and you're more than alive so get out there and enjoy the rest of the show.  There was some sound in front of me, growing steadily louder before I heard Ernesto's voice: Let's have a big round of applause for our guest tonight and for his volunteering to enter the wondrous world of Ernesto the Magnificent!   And then, with a grand bow and the flare of his velveteen cape, he motioned for me to quickly leave the stage.  Go live your life, his eyes told me.  Don't believe everything you hear in this show.  Open you mind, and your eyes!  It's still bright outside and the day is young.  Go, young man.  Go!  And that, my friends, is all I remember of the Azores and the Canary Islands...and life, in a sense.  It all passed by so quickly.

Young ladies resting by the newly adopted logo for the city of Madeira, Portugal

Addendum: So I'll throw this grammatical tidbit in at the end so that those of you tired or bored of such musings can simply click out of here and, as with Ernesto's wand, make all of this nonsense vanish.  So the title: if you think of it, the words all seem to imply a hint of travel.  Picture that airplane or rocket: 3-2-1, we have "lift off."  Or your quick call to a friend: gotta go, we're about to "take off."  In Canada, take off is a colloquial phrase that becomes a friendly way of saying "get outta here" as in you don't believe it.  An example: "...then he ate the snail," to which you'd reply, "take off."  Of course in an active sense, both phrases can become more meaningful as in to "lift off" a fingerprint (if you're into forensics) or to "take off" a pair of jeans.  Which differs from the emotional attachment often associated with "get off," and often one associated in a sexual or psycho way, to "get off" on something, so said because whatever it was that brought that level of excitement (as in, "he really got off on that") is generally on the darker side and not a phrase you'd use to describe the fun you had at a party or restaurant.  One only has to picture that bug (or whoever is bugging you) hearing you yell, "get off me!"  Which brings us to the world of "away."  We can lift away a stain, or take away a treat.  Or simply just get away from it all...and thus the link to travel (huh??).