There are a lot of things that are said about the nature of interstellar travel. But there’s one thing that hardly anyone talks about. And that’s the sheer tedium of the whole thing. I mean, sure, being in outer space is pretty incredible. At first. You can just sit there for days and stare out the window. You are blown away by all the trippy shit you see and you are just overwhelmed with the sense of awe. But eventually that starts to fade away.
So maybe you have a quick lick of the lucytoad you got from that belter a few months back. And it’s back on again. All that trippy shit is now trippy for real and you are back to staring out the window for days, melting your mind. And things are good again. For a while. But eventually even that starts to lose its appeal. Not to mention the build up of tolerance to that shit. Or the fact that the lucytoad dies in a totally accidental garbage disposal incident (fuck you, Randy). The days start to blend together. The walls begin to close in. You feel trapped. You don’t know where is up or down or how long you’ve been out here or who you really are.
And then it happens. It might be a sound. Or a smell. But something triggers it and you completely lose your shit. You start bouncing off those walls that were closing in on you. One moment you are angry. Then you are manic next. Everything is fucking absurd. You start to suspect that you might be a clown. This insanity continues for months. And right when you reach that point where you might just off yourself, you realize you just reached your destination. The instincts suddenly kick in, all that training that has been drilled into you takes over, and you go off and colonize the fuck out of some poor 3rd world exoplanet.
Triumphantly.
Then you go right back to the tedium of it all on your return journey.
And that’s something they don’t tell you about the nature of interstellar travel.
Someone re-posted the deadline as “the 17th” so I figured I had until tonight.
