The Criminal Astronomical Theorist

What would the experience be like? Traveling to another country, making contact with members of fierce criminal gangs, and launching a new career as a brutal and dangerously violent money-hungry beast? I suspect it might be quite different for me now, as I approach the age of 72, compared to the experience as it might have been 30 years ago. The problem, of course, is that I cannot compare it to that 30-year-old experience because I did not have it. My only option is to imagine what it would have been like all those years ago, and then to compare it to the reality of today.

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I left my two grandchildren in a bus station in Nacogdoches in east Texas. From there, I drove to San Antonio for the night. and then to Shafter, a ghost town about two hours northwest of Big Bend National Park. I stayed in an abandoned building in Shafter for a couple of nights. Just as I was about to pack up and head north to Lloydminster, Alberta/Saskatchewan, I was approached by a highway patrolman who already knew my name and my history. He asked me why I had left my grandchildren in Nacogdoches. I told him they had been after me to cut them loose ever since we left Refugio and I’d finally had it up to my neck with their whining. Besides, I told him, I left each of them a crisp $100 bill and a cheap cell phone with my number in it; if they’d needed me, they could have called. But they never did. Apparently, though, they called the Nacogdoches police and told them I would probably go to Big Bend (because that’s what I told them). They had not said a word about Lloydminster because I hadn’t said a thing to them about going up there. I figured they would have told the police about my plans, if I shared my plans with them, so I just kept my mouth shut. Somehow, though, somebody had told the police I was going to head up to Lloydminster to recover some money I lost late last year in the casino. If the snitch told the police that I also planned to make the town a safer place by ridding it of  a miserable cheat, I never got wind of it. But somehow the RCMP, which contracted with the town for police services, knew what I intended to do. Fortunately for me, the RCMP was delighted to know someone else was going after the same guy they had planned to permanently remove from their list of criminals they would encourage to leave town and never return.

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Black holes sometimes are described as locations in space where stars, as they collapse near the ends of their lives, generate enormously powerful gravity. Nothing, not even light, can escape from the black hole’s event horizon (essentially, the surface of the black hole). Limiting one’s understanding of black holes to individual stars…or even groups of stars…fails to recognize the immensity of their gravitational pull. I am confident that black holes are not created by the collapse of individual stars. They represent the collapse of entire galaxies;  even giant segments of of the universe, each comprising hundreds or even thousands of galaxies. Black holes are the places where time and space shred into miniscule particles, each one no larger than one billionth the size of an atom. In other words, black holes are the places where the embers of existence are extinguished. They are the places where beginnings and endings and everything in between are erased, confirming that the time between them cannot be measured by a traditional clock, nor even an advanced calendar. Black holes are dangerous; they are the final resting places for every creature, living or not. Before those creatures die, though, they prepare their own obituaries and they write their own identical autobiographies, each one entitled The Autobiography of Time.