A cardiovascular procedure?
Wasn’t his whole life, from July 16th 1969 on, a cardiovascular procedure? I keep thinking about the scream of a roller coaster ride, how exciting the journey. The ups and downs the twists.
The screaming fun.
Sadly it all ends when the cars come to a halt and bars pop up and everyone is asked to get off, a heart will still race for a short while anyway.
I am always disappointed in that, when it happens and I am asked to leave the ride, knowing the excitement will soon fade.
I tried when I was kid to just sit there and hope I wasn’t noticed and maybe be able to go around one more time, but I would be discovered and I would be removed, well asked to anyway, I still had an amusement park to explore and more lines to stand in.
Maybe it shouldn’t be such a letdown, after standing in line for what would feel like an eternity. Waiting behind bored people who smell like mildew from the log flume ride, or stink from being deodorantless, or stink because they are shitty people, rounding what feels like endless number of times around bars set into a serpentine.
All to sit in a very worn seat and sent on a short spin through a fraction of what it must have felt to sit aboard Apollo 11.
It took that old bucket of bolts 7 seconds to go a mile when leaving the atmosphere. It takes me longer to put one of my shoes on, or use to before I discovered All Stars now come prefabbed for slip on.
The rocket weighed 500,000 pounds empty and 6.1 million when fully load with fuel. Once in the Army, I transported a bunch of old C4 to a dump site crapping my pants the whole time thinking about an imminent explosion, which wasn’t made any better by the guy sitting next to me, some older then dirt E5, missing fingers and all telling me “careful, private,” anytime my truck hit a bump.
We survived, and Neil survived. Though I think Neil survived the most dangerous thing a human being has ever done and I just survived a routine task made nerve-wracking by a onetime careless soldier sitting next to me freaking out at every pebble in the road.
Maybe I wasn’t told everything I should have been told on that drive, but Mr. Armstrong knew what he was getting himself in for.
It just feels wrong to have his life end with such a whisper. He created such a bang with his efforts, or his volunteering to sit in the capsule of a machine designed by thousands and allowed to be sent to a foreign body that for millions of years has circled our planet unmolested by the feet of man or animal.
I told my wife maybe it would have been better to have the man die in the arms of a prostitute named bubbles, living a life no normal 82 year old man could ever hope to have lived.
Complication of a cardiovascular procedure?
It just doesn’t seem right.
Maybe it was the moon after all that killed him. How hard must his heart have had to be going on the 16th of July 1969? 7 second miles to start a 300,000 mile journey.
Once the descent was survived , unknown, unproven theories were his only hope, a huge grey boulder potentially to be his home, forever , a president with two speeches prepared, one for a win and one for a loss and it truly was a tossup as to which it would be.
A nation watching, no, a world watching, in history it is an American flag that was placed on the surface, but it is a human flag made with human fingers, placed by human hands, and all due to a purely human effort.
Man invaded the moon and thousands and thousands and thousands of things had to go right with this journey, every second was a victory that had to lead to yet another victory a second later.
In the middle of it all, after a lunar modular touched down on the surface of the vacant wasteland of its destination, a man stepped out and said, “That’s one small step for man, and one giant leap for mankind.”
Oh jeez.
After a near perfect situation, a perfect journey, a perfect everything, the only flub came from the vocal cords of the man to first touch a foot on the Moon. A man named Neil, a simple machine called man.
Having been on stage in front of hundreds I can understand his error, he flubbed his line in front of billions.
I can see him practicing it every day of his journey, looking into a little space mirror, saying, “a man, a man, a man,” and then he forgets one simple extremely important word and his sentence has a completely new meaning.
But it worked. That flub, the launch, the reconnection and the return, it all worked so perfectly.
Years went into starting and finishing that roller coaster ride.
I wonder if the thrill ever went away, I wonder if his heart ever did stop beating a thousand times a second. I wonder if the adrenaline of that journey ever left his body.
I like to think he did not die a normal man and that at the hands of a doctor, who tried to fix his racing heart, Neil was finally able to relax from his journey. He was finally able to rest.
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