AFK: Parking Enforcement

Working as a University of Texas parking enforcement officer since 11 September has allowed me easy access to the libraries that I use most often, even though I have not been able to pry away time to visit more. (I did see the Gutenberg Bible at the Harry Ransom Center.) The morning drive to work takes one hour (40-50 minutes) and the commute home can take two (45 to 90 minutes). I am working tomorrow’s football game against Texas Tech from 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM. (The pay is great: with game day overtime and event bonus, it comes to the same as being a technical writer.) 

Some Saturdays have been devoted to the City of Kyle Public Library Astronomy Club and others to the Austin Astronomical Society and I still edit (and sometimes write) a monthly column for the Historical Astronomy Division of the AAS (here: https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history). Something had to give. 

I try to find whatever personal rewards that I can for self-actualization and transcendence (from Maslow’s Hierarchy). Meanwhile, I now watch the clock and looked forward to Friday. The advantages include semester-long checkouts at the libraries, healthcare insurance, as much walking as I choose to do (and I love walking), along with the light physical challenges of wrestling 22 lbs. of iron around an SUV’s tires to immobilize a scofflaw.  

I also have the opportunity engage in
philosophical discussions about semantics.

 

At the snack bar here,
the food is not labeled correctly
and they do not give out receipts for purchases.

 

This is still my favorite.

 Waiting to be written are these researches.

Like the problem of the tree that falls in a forest when no one is around, the fact is that there is sound in space. Stellar events create shock waves that cause compressions and rarefactions in the particles that comprise what we too easily call empty space.

NGC 6231 is easy to see in the lower body of the Scorpion. It has not been easy for professionals to sort out which stars are bound in the open cluster, which are background and which are foreground. I sketched it several times.

IC 1296 is a barred spiral galaxy that often appears in amateur photographs of the more famous M57 Ring Nebula in Lyra. In fact, I believe that it is an easy claim that amateurs have produced more photographs than professionals. I ran a literature search on the Harvard NASA database of articles and found some references. 

Messier 30 appeared here in October. I would like to recast those as a single magazine article. The cluster is moving opposite to the inertial frame of the Milky Way. So, professional astronomers believe that it was captured in a collision with another galaxy.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

AFK: Away from the Keyboard

AFK: Hurricane Harvey

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

The Bloodless Corpse

I knew that he was dead, tucked into a fetal position, stuffed under the instructor’s station at the front of room LAS 327.  I saw the tiny gray holes.  My spine chilled.  I left the room to call dispatch.  Later, the other patrollers in Safety thought I got out of the room because of the body, but it wasn’t that.  I knew that there was a vampire on campus. 

The medical examiner did not report the wounds – most likely for the same reason I did not mention them in my incident report.  The cause of death remained open. 

The school turned edgy, even in the daytime.  At night, people hurried to their cars in groups.

The sheriff lent us two deputies “to re-establish a sense of safety.”  Each walked halls during the day, and cruised the parking lots from 5:00 PM until 10:30 PM.  Our own patrols changed to a buddy system – at least in theory.  Typically, we hit the doors, split up, made our checklists, and met on the way out.  Some of the patrollers did not like it.  Long used to being on their own, they would take off and meet up a couple of buildings later.  It was all right with me.  I take a lot in stride at my age.  Campus safety patrol was the second job in the fourth career in 35 years.  The student’s death was hard– he looked like a nice kid – but I was not shocked.

What kept me awake was the vampire.  A man who does not believe in God cannot believe in the Devil.  I argued with myself, but no sophistry could contradict the observation.  That immutable empirical fact demanded its own logic.

After two weeks, campus life settled into a surreal imitation of itself.  Until someone was arrested and charged, we all waited for the next one.

When I saw her on the east third floor of the life sciences building, everything about her said “victim” – shoulders slightly dropped and pulled in, head down watching her shoes, backpack too heavy with books.  And she was being followed by Death.  The smell was not the pain of fetal pigs and dissected rats from the biology labs, or even cadavers from the biology core.  But it was.  It was in the air.  “Miss!” I called. “Miss!”  When she turned around, I knew that Death was inside her.  Her reptile stare lacked even the pleasure of a meal.  I wanted to be hers.  She was twenty feet away when I whispered, “Take me.” 

She flew to me in a stride, gripped me to her, her talons in my back, her hand grabbing my hair, pulling my head to bare my neck.  My hand leapt to my shirt pocket, yanked out the pencil and stabbed it into her heart, pressing the shaft home, my hand flat against her cold breast. 

Her eyes lit up with shock, then horror, … disbelief … hatred – and then release.  She died in my arms.  There was no blood.

First posted here October 29, 2012. Written for and rejected by Blood Orange literary magazine, Washtenaw Community College, 2007.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Monsters from the Id
Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction
Atheists in Foxholes
Kicking Nuns for Fun and Profit

The Bloodless Corpse

I knew that he was dead, tucked into a fetal position, stuffed under the instructor’s station at the front of room LAS 327.  I saw the tiny gray holes.  My spine chilled.  I left the room to call dispatch.  Later, the other patrollers in Safety thought I got out of the room because of the body, but it wasn’t that.  I knew that there was a vampire on campus. 

The medical examiner did not report the wounds – most likely for the same reason I did not mention them in my incident report.  The cause of death remained open. 

The school turned edgy, even in the daytime.  At night, people hurried to their cars in groups.

The sheriff lent us two deputies “to re-establish a sense of safety.”  Each walked halls during the day, and cruised the parking lots from 5:00 PM until 10:30 PM.  Our own patrols changed to a buddy system – at least in theory.  Typically, we hit the doors, split up, made our checklists, and met on the way out.  Some of the patrollers did not like it.  Long used to being on their own, they would take off and meet up a couple of buildings later.  It was all right with me.  I take a lot in stride at my age.  Campus safety patrol was the second job in the fourth career in 35 years.  The student’s death was hard– he looked like a nice kid – but I was not shocked.

What kept me awake was the vampire.  A man who does not believe in God cannot believe in the Devil.  I argued with myself, but no sophistry could contradict the observation.  That immutable empirical fact demanded its own logic.

After two weeks, campus life settled into a surreal imitation of itself.  Until someone was arrested and charged, we all waited for the next one.

When I saw her on the east third floor of the life sciences building, everything about her said “victim” – shoulders slightly dropped and pulled in, head down watching her shoes, backpack too heavy with books.  And she was being followed by Death.  The smell was not the pain of fetal pigs and dissected rats from the biology labs, or even cadavers from the biology core.  But it was.  It was in the air.  “Miss!” I called. “Miss!”  When she turned around, I knew that Death was inside her.  Her reptile stare lacked even the pleasure of a meal.  I wanted to be hers.  She was twenty feet away when I whispered, “Take me.” 

She flew to me in a stride, gripped me to her, her talons in my back, her hand grabbing my hair, pulling my head to bare my neck.  My hand leapt to my shirt pocket, yanked out the pencil and stabbed it into her heart, pressing the shaft home, my hand flat against her cold breast. 

Her eyes lit up with shock, then horror, … disbelief … hatred – and then release.  She died in my arms.  There was no blood.