The Curious Tale

HOUSTON, USA — Dogs, merry-go-rounds, Loop 373. Nature is full of things that go in circles. Now we can add one more item to that list: a giant, flaming bucket filled with computers that talk to other computers, shooting over our heads 16 times a day as it makes a giant, repeating circle around the Earth.

The mood was one of intense elation in the NASA control room at Houston this morning, where nearly three dozen highly-paid PhDs, most of whom got here by studying humanity's most arcane mathematical and scientific principles for at least 15 years a head, gathered to watch something of their own making go in a circle.

At a salary rate of roughly $1 to $2 dollars per minute per person, the several hundred dollar outburst of enthusiasm was a veritable steal compared to the $380 million dollars that it had taken these same individuals 18 months to get to this point with the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite, NASA's premier Earth-circling device and the latest human triumph in circulogical engineering after Mrs. Beasley's Lazy Susan kitchen aid was installed last week in Michigan.

"This will certainly make the Chinese think twice about challenging us in the mastery of circles," speculated Chief NASA Scientist Dr. Jorge Galilei. He added, "Apart from the roughly 62,000 Earth circlers that have previously been put into circles around the Earth, no one has ever done anything like this before."

Minutes after the initial jubilation, the mood at NASA was dampened somewhat when a circulator engineer reported that the GOFAST Earth Circler Satellite was actually making a slightly imperfect circle, a geometric abomination known as an "ellipse," where one side of the circle is longer than the other side. But Chief Scientist Galilei took it in stride:

"The pattern is so close to a perfect circle that it's practically a rounding error," he said. "The difference we're talking about is narrower than a basketball in Miami hitting a split end on a human hair in Los Angeles." When asked what that meant, Galilei replied, "We struggle to put these sophisticated concepts into lay terms sometimes. But we're talking about a circle that is, for all intents and purposes, perfectly circular."

In Washington, D.C., the news was less warmly received. "I hear it's costing a lot of money," said President Scroob, who has frequently been dismissive of his own, recently-renamed Department of Platonic Geometry, formerly the Department of Circles. "I think triangles are a lot more efficient," he said. "I make really good triangles, and it's just...really the best...some people even call me 'The Triangulator.' They say, 'Sir, make me a triangle,' and I'll do it for them. It's amazing. And they say, 'Nobody makes better triangles.' Which, to be fair, is something I've heard all my life, so maybe it's true; I don't know. But all you crooked media people want to report on is circles, but behind closed doors you're always telling me, 'Sir, you make such good triangles.' It's unbelievable."

Back at the NASA control room in Houston, the scale of the day's accomplishment was best captured by a relatively new hire: a Junior Radius Technician named Millie Chester.

"I know a lot of people don't think it's all that impressive anymore that we can make circles," she said. "They look on TV and they see AI-generated circles that are mathematically perfect. But the difference is that our circles are really there. It's not easy to put a circulator in the sky. It took this entire room of highly-paid circle experts, and hundreds more at our other laboratories and factories around the nation, to get to this point. Nature makes circles so easily, but humanity really has to work for it."

And work for it they shall: Despite presidential misgivings, the next NASA Earth Circler is scheduled to launch in 2027, with the ambitious goal of making circles around the Moon—itself a noted maker of circles around our planet.

19:13'07": Damage Control reports Holes in the main balloon from attacking enemy guns.

19:13'20": Mathematicians deployed to investigate the claim.

19:14'53": Chief Topologist thrown overboard by mutineers.

The older I get the more alienated I become by the fact that in Star Trek: The Next Generation—in all the TV Treks, really, but I love TNG so it stands out the most—the bridge has way too few stations, and the bridge crew doesn't behave like a bridge crew because none of the extras speak or do anything active so that the action can stay on the hero main cast.

Like, who the fuck do you think you're fooling by furiously manning Science Station II while the bridge is under attack by interdimensional terrorists and your captain is being forcibly abducted? That's all the extras ever do: They furiously man their stations. Enterprise under attack by the Romulans? Hold on for dear life while the ship shakes as you randomly press buttons at the Environmental Control station. What do those buttons even do? Are they call buttons for response teams? Are you regulating all the oxygen tubes on the ship in real-time? GTFO of here.

And there aren't enough damn stations! You can't have one "operations officer" who is responsible for all "operations" aboard a Galaxy Class starship. I don't care how fast his little android fingers are. It's bullshit. The show makes it seem like he is directly controlling the functions of the ship, and not like, say, writing work orders to various operations crew teams.

I know that Roddenberry's conceit for TNG was that it was the future's future, so the mechanical and functional aspects of the ship would be farther-removed than ever before from the daily rhythms of shipboard life. But that's a radical premise that takes radical commitment. You can't just have the ship for all intents and purporses run itself, and, like, four dude on the bridge occasionally doing everything that matters.

As a kid, these conceits never bothered me at all. But it was already troubling me in my late teens and twenties, since the movies do it so much better, especially Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And by my thirties I was actively rebelling against it.

A real crew, with rapport and camaraderie, will always be interacting together. Talking, chatting, joking, collaborating. Bridges should tend toward the noisy and chaotic both in times of crisis and times of ease. The most we ever see of this among the extras in TNG is the mimicry of quiet consultations occurring in the backgrounds of scenes between two or more extras. But even this pale echo of insufficiency is very uncommon. Mostly they're just window-dressing.

😰😱😭

I started taking anti-anxiety medicine in March of last year, and ever since then I have not been able to work on my novels at all to any level of satisfaction. I have tried many times, mainly last year, only to struggle and be completely dissatisfied with what I wrote. The problem seems to be at the level of synthesizing sentences both as aesthetic features in themselves and as increments of larger ideas. I'm not happy with the work at the sentence level.

This is by far the longest and most thoroughly I have ever gone, in my entire adult life (and, really, ever, since my relationship with writing was different as a kid), without making substantive process on my most important stories. In the past I could always at least report progress, no matter how distant the actual finish lines may have seemed. Now, for nearly fourteen months, I can't even report that. This is a new, disorienting, bewildering, and unhappy circumstance I find myself in, to put it mildly.

I have been under crippling, steadily increasing financial stress since late 2024, and because of this I have not dared to discontinue the anxiety medication. I am not sure that there is a way forward for me without doing so. I haven't categorically exhausted the possibility yet; maybe if I were to throw myself into the brick wall in just the right way, I would find a new normal and a way to move forward. But in any case, with the financial stress debilitating me almost completely, all I can really do is try not to drown.

This has not been a happy time, suffice it to say.

The only future-looking thing I can say is that, if I live long enough, I have to imagine the financial angle will get better. That may even be sooner rather than later. If it does, perhaps all of this can change.