There’s always a point in the “hero’s journey” when the mentor goes away. That would be Mom. My Jedi Master. My Bene Gesserit mother. I’m on my own now. I still have the mission – save Celestial Mechanics. But how?
All my social support network is “obliterated.” My family. My engineering career. Any hopes of finding professional references to finish my Ph.D. somewhere else, much less get a job in Aerospace Engineering.
It’s the quintessential, “Where’s God when you need Him the most-est?”
As stubborn as the “Luck of the Irish” has been with me so far, it came through one more time. (You gotta love it, don’t you? How this dude keeps pulling a rabbit out of the top hat? I know I shouldn’t laugh, at my own story – but this is starting to be a lot of FUN. . . )
There’s something else that’s been going on here. From Annapolis, thrilling to register for classes on a computer teletype machine (the very first campus to do so). Then loading a stack of punch cards into a mainframe at the computer center at Texas circa 1978. Using the very first FAX machine at Exxon to send data to the office from the field (a tube-shaped gizmo, like the original gramophones).
The remote terminal in my office at Exxon where I could run hydraulic analyses. The Apple IIE PC that got me into so goddamn much trouble at White Sands.
The little structural steel design program on one of Dell Computer’s first terminals when I was at NPS Industries back in Austin town. The FUCKING CAD software that took my job at ORA. (I remember the very first email I sent, to the ASME Committee. “Try it. You’ll love it.”)
The spreadsheet program that helped me recreate the Solar System model for Dr. Z’s class. The FORTRAN compiler that made my Mars Pathfinder work.
There was something brand-new out there, y’all. Something that absolutely INFURIATED the folks at the University of Texas. It was – and remains – an existential threat to the whole damn Deep State military-space-industrial complex. (No, not me stupid. Although it’s on my list.)
Oh. My. God. The God Damn mother-fucking son of a bitch just did an end-run, full-reverse, roll out around the whole faculty, and put all his Mars research on the internet.
I kid you not. They were absolutely NOT prepared for THIS. I was on the internet with my free UT account pretty quickly after I started grad school. As soon as McGraw-Hill published Retrofitting for Energy Conservation, I was working on using the internet to give away my software to help people save energy. I took right to HTML. Everything was hand-coded back then. It was a steep learning curve, but I’m not afraid of steep. Or learning.
My first working website had sections of the Retrofitting book and free download links for my computer programs. This was no small feat. Dial-up was VERY slow. I mean, excruciatingly slow. I had to figure how to create a ZIP file. Set up the installer on PCs, etc.
Yeah. I do like those computers. I know how frustrating they are, especially coding. And especially in the beginning. THE BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. Losing an entire hard drive.
But, you know what (and only young folks will be able to relate to this) – computers are . . . relaxing.
I don’t know if this is relevant, but I met Kim Tabor (the editor who did my two books at McGraw-Hill) up at a Dallas engineering conference one year. Drove up there with my Black DJ friend, Morganna McCann.
The cops stopped us! White man and Black woman on MY Interstate? How DARE you.
I had a very nice talk with Kim at the conference. She was quite surprised. “Your aren’t ANYTHING like all the other ornery, stuck-up, arrogant people who write my other books.” She’s an Orthodox Christian. Lives in the Big Apple. Doesn’t even own a car.
Not ANYTHING like all the other petty, stupid print media people I’ve met.
Back on campus. Everything was going smoothly. I never sold very many copies of the McGraw-Hill book, and I’m not sure if my website ever sold any copies either, but it was fun.
Until I got called in the Student Legal Services office on campus. (Tell me, please – doesn’t that name sound like “Lawyers Who Help Students” with legal problems like with a landlord. Defaulting on a student loan. Divorce.)
Well, at first it seemed like an answer to all my prayers. It was late in the spring 2001 semester. I was having all those intractable problems with the Department over my Mars project (which I had just placed on the web and invited people all the world there to play my Mars game).
Finally, somebody on my side. And an attorney. Excellent.
I was accused of “using university servers for commercial purposes,” i.e. selling my McGraw-Hill textbooks (both were in print now). The attorney handling my case (female, one lazy eye – focuses wide) was peeved. “This is the second time I’ve talked to you about this.” Not true. I’ve never seen you in my life and, believe, me I would remember. I – I, have a bad eye problem too, you see.
Well, this new accusation was serious. Very! I spent several days preparing a formal, legal defense. (Which included an email from Dr. Fowler encouraging me to put all my Mars research on the internet. “It won’t do anything but increase your prestige.”
Excuse me, but what kind of advisor tells his own grad student to give away all his valuable research? It was all copyrighted, ad infinitum – but still.)
This was only a week or two before my written qualifying exams. Which consisted of three three-hour exams on half a dozen graduate courses each; on orbital mechanics, estimation theory, and math. I had spent every spare moment (other than time now and again coding, which was relaxation time for me) for the last sixteen months cramming for those exams.
And. Now I have to spend a whole week defending myself to this lady practicing law under a deceptive title?
Mom came to town with me. Sat in the meeting. I honestly think I would have been expelled right there, if not for Mom as a witness. I don’t recollect how I got off. But I did have everything free on the website. Excerpts. The software.
There was no “BUY THIS BOOK NOW” banner. And, like – what professor doesn’t’ advertise their books on their official university websites? Except. I wasn’t a professor. I was a lowly grad student.
And even my own advisor(s) hated me.
You can see now why I failed the math qualifying exam. I was an absolute nervous WRECK. You’re not supposed to put your name on the exam. I screwed up something badly, ended up writing my name on a page for some reason. Doh! You failed!
(I accused the math teacher, alias Dr. Clint Dawson – of hating me – which he did; he actually failed me in the oral exam even though in three solid hours I didn’t miss a single question.)
So, Mr. Bill learned his lesson. He got a commercial server and moved everything there. My URL was inviticus.com It would later become quite well known in the conspiracy/UFO community. “The Texas X Files” I called it.
Which was actually a wonderful idea, moving off Big Brother’s server. (Thanks, Dr. Fowler for turning me in to Student Legal Services – even if he wasn’t the one, I do know for a fact that the lazy-eyed lawyer called him because Dr. Fowler said in writing that was one reason why he quit as my advisor. . .
Dr. Fowler couldn’t get this bureaucrat to postpone the hearing for two lousy weeks until after my written qualifying exams; the very exams about which he had been telling me for years now, “No Mars feedback until you pass our exams.”)
Why was moving to a commercial server such a great idea? Because now I didn’t have to be careful about what I put on the web.
The Retrofitting section of the site was now expanded to a whole new section on my other textbook. Another section (each section had maybe 15 sub-pagers accessed from a sidebar menu) with all my Bar X Software programs. Then the Mars Pathfinder 2.0 website (illustrations and help files on the sidebar menu) where everybody could download the program and try it.
Wow. This dude has TWO McGraw-Hill textbooks? Shit. His own Bar X Software? Excellent. I don’t have to worry about viruses if I download and try it on my computer.
I sent out THOUSANDS of emails (this was before spam blockers, not that this was spam) to all the Mars groups. The Mars Society chapters. THINK MARS. You name it.
I also posted on the News Groups. Think THOUSANDS of notices. So, yeah. I got the word out and in a very big way.
I was real DEMON on the internet. God’s gift to troublemakers. May it always remain so.
This wasn’t just fun, either. These people to tried my program were my beta testers. I wanted to know if there were any problems. There weren’t.
Everybody in the world visited that Mars website – everybody in space or aerospace or interested in NASA or Mars – everybody but the professors in the orbits group at Texas (you can be sure I emailed them at talked to them after class).
Whenever we had a little extra time at the end of class, I used to talk about the Mars program in the classes I was TA for. One semester I gave everybody in my Statics and Dynamics homework sections extra credit for writing a paragraph on Mars.
That class is required for all engineering majors, so we had all kinds of fun ideas on civil engineering issues. Electrical. Architectural. I put all their essays on my website in their own little section.
Dr. Bedford, the professor for the class, didn’t notice all the REALLY good homework grades everybody had that semester.
After I was officially expelled, waiting on the appeals, I created a new section (by now there were 4 or five sections, all accessible from the top of a sidebar menu) called “The Center for Celestial Mechanics.”
I put the formal papers I had written on the Mars Pathfinder 2.0 there (the ones the AIAA and Mars Society accepted), plus a short paper on my semiconductor model (along with two small books explaining the basics of Solid State Physics used in the model).
The formal Thesis I wrote on my Mars research (the one that the security guard at the Center for Space Research shredded, on instructions from Dr. Fowler) was there.
A whole book I wrote on all the orbital mechanics equations involved in the Mars Pathfinder – essentially an introductory text on interplanetary trajectories.
Half a dozen other draft papers I had written, as I explored new dissertation ideas (realizing early on that Mars might not pan out).
Again, nobody in the Department was aware of ANY of that material. At one point my graduate advisor Dr. David Hull told me, “I don’t care what you write or how you present it, I will never read anything you write.” Those are his EXACT words.
And, again, this is the Department’s expert on optimization, especially TRAJECTORY optimization. Aerospace engineering? Spacecraft? Like, maybe – when a spacecraft takes off it’s on a TRAJECTORY. And stays on one forever thereafter?
It’s kind of funny, in a morbid sort of way. I mean, I was literally running circles around these people. I’d been doing Ph.D. level research since that NASA letter, and especially since the semester before I started grad school and I presented that paper in Dr. Z’s class on Regularization.
Virtually every class I took after that was to advance that research. Why? Because it was evident that nobody believed my Mars solution was possible because there was no THEORY to support it.
There actually WAS a theory. Part of the Three Body Problem called the free-return trajectory. But since nobody was conversant on the 3BP and because Celestial Mechanics was banned – I had to find a new THEORY.
That’s where the new semiconductor model came from. Transistors work because a special application of voltage across unique materials causes a SUPER FLUID flow of current. Fast. Unexpectedly fast. Exactly the result of Mars Pathfinder.
New transistor model? No way! You’re in ORBITAL MECHANICS.
(Imagine the optics for a second: Austin, Texas was the epicenter of the semiconductor business. The modern Taiwan and San Jose California rolled into one. And those guys weren’t interested in a whole FUNDAMENTAL model of the transistor?)
They couldn’t even listen to themselves. The New York Times bestseller, The End of Science had just been published. It was a smashing hit, hailed as a hallmark creation from sea to shining sea.
The basic gist – it was a compilation of dozens of interviews of all the top experts in every field (including several at UT Austin) – was that all modern sciences were based on STATISTICS and because probabilities are inherently accurate, science can progress no further.
“Brilliant. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary.” Solid State physics is 100% statics, too.
Excuse me, sir? May I please ask a stupid question? My new model is MATHEMATICAL. Not statistics. Not probabilities.
- A. T. H. How is that not interesting?
But, no. They were too busy patting themselves on the back. All these fat heads had spent their whole careers publishing EASY papers on SIMPLISTIC computer applications (hundreds of tech papers, dozens of tenures – by astronomers who “discovered new planets” – by programming a computer to find them! NO WORK WHATSOEVER. Tenure.)
And here we are – this wonderful book says we don’t have to work anymore; as if they ever worked in the first place.
Can you even IMAGINE what AI will do?
Anyway, back to reality. I’m expelled for good. I keep fighting with my website for a while longer. While I try to get help from the Ombudsman on campus. “Go away.”
The U.S. Department of Education. (Sorry we can’t help you because you cannot provide the original letter that started our problems with the Office of Students with Disabilities. Which I DID have. Which I DID send to them.)
Mom’s attorney laughed when I talked to him. “File a suit against the University of Texas?! LOL.”
The ACLU. “Sorry. Not unless you’re gay or a minority.”
The Texas P.E. Licensing Board. “Out of our jurisdiction.”
Back to ABET with ALL the formal documents DETAILING on UNIVERSITY LETTERHEAD everything I’ve been talking about and all the retaliations after I had contacted them a year before. “They didn’t do anything wrong.”
That’s all she wrote. Ain’t nothing more I can do.
One last stab and I dumped every last shred of research I had done in the last four years on a whole, new giant section of my website. FIFTY little papers.
All manner of wild and crazy ideas from Celestial Mechanics. There was all the old science: My Mars Pathfinder research. The transistor model. The model of the atom. Plus ENGINEERED ideas. APPLICATIONS for celestial mechanics, which I would later call “Temporal Mechanics.”
10,000 notices in all the space-related NewsGroups (literally, I did a Google search and Dr. Google counted the notices I posted).
My final act was to take a bound, nicely formatted copy of the above ideas, in a new dissertation called “The General Solution to the Unrestricted Three Body Problem,” and drop it off a Dr. Lee Smith, J.D.’s office.
After which time he forbade me from contacting anybody on campus involved in any way with your research.
I emailed somebody after that, somebody on the Student Council I think – one of my former students was a higher up – the email bounced. I tried somebody else, just to be sure – my email was blocked. That ban remained in effect until Dr. Smith retired, some 15 years later.
I later added a couple of sci-fi chapters and self-published it, Lulu.com, as The Conceptual Design of a Constellation Class Starship. (Remember my old manuscript about al the Star Wars tech?)
Not even the Star Trek crowd were interested. Are you serious? Science fiction is about pushing the homosexual agenda on society at large. We aren’t about space exploration at all. Go away!
Okay. I can take a hint. No offense meant. Good luck with all that.
I put my little green house on the market. I found a seller even before it was listed, the property manager at the campgrounds right down the hill. He and his Mrs. had been living in a GIANT recreational vehicle.
My house wasn’t much bigger, but they closed in the carport later on. It was a good house for me. Great location, right there by the lake. I hope the oaks in the backyard are doing okay. The pyracanthas in the front. Yeah, its hard to grow grass in that soil, as little rain as the area gets.
I’ve followed the Lake Travis water level online ever since. It’s sixty feet low again this fall. I really do wish I could have done more to help folks save energy. I’ll keep trying. Enjoy the house, buddy.
Hook ‘em Horns.
Then the voice came from out of the wilderness, “Why don’t you make a movie about what happened at Texas?”
No, it wasn’t an audio hallucination – which I now had frequently – but my neighbor Rita (her exact words, by the way: you really do have to watch what you say to me because, like Hammerlun and those old meetings at SECO, I remember everything), asking after all my appeals and other efforts were exhausted.
Screenplay? Hmmm…. My novella Behold Leviathan had some catchy dialog. It was all centered around a courtroom drama, too.
Huh. I’ll give it a try.
I studied a few books on screenwriting. It’s quite a challenge, cramming all that into 20,000 words. Character development. Dialog. Conflict. Action. Description.
Kind of like a building where you cram all that information from the different disciplines into many overlapping layers, onto the blueprints.
Sure I’ll try that.
So, I learned all the margins and formatting. Typed it all up on my computer. Sent out query letters. There was a little interest. I sent out a few hard copies.
“Sorry, A Beautiful Mind just came out.” And.,“We only do movies on schizophrenics that win a Nobel Prize.” And, finally, “If even a fraction of what you say is true, nobody will touch it. Too much liability.”
Damn lawyers, anyway.
You can see now why Texas was fearless in putting everything down on paper. So bold with their discrimination. Ruthless. Malicious. Doh! They had absolute confidence the word would never get out.
No book publisher will dare touch this material you are reading, either. The only way out is to self-publish it.
Hell, I got so damn many debts that I got nothing Texas could even take from me if they won a civil suit. You want my mortgage? You can have it. Mountain of credit card debts? The house full of books I can’t even read anymore? Anchor’s aweigh!
Now look who’s the fearless one!
Got myself a few more words to spit out before I hit the 80,000 recommended maximum. You up for a few more tall tales, friend?
So, here I am, packing everything up to move to a new house in Port Gibson, Mississippi, just south of Vicksburg. Our camp wasn’t too far south from there. I‘m, a-going back home.
Ain’t no place in Texas for no schizophrenics.
Sad day, leaving that little green house. Clothes line under the oak trees in the back. I love clothes dried like that. Saves energy, too. Long walks along the lake around the park and the camping grounds.
Going for a swim when the lake was up in the inlet just down the road. (Nerve spasms that last semester at UT, from the EXTREME stress, when I was swimming.)
Forgetting to put the parking brake on in the green Isuzu Brat, parked on the street. Zoom! It rolls down Paseo de Vaca and SLAMS into the stone wall around the camping grounds. (I was oblivious.) Cops found me in the house.
“Do you own a Bratt?” Ummm…. Who’s asking?
All the letters-to-the editor the local newspaper published for me, angry words against Texas. (Folks came up to me at Mom’s funeral. “You’re the guy writes all those letters!” Umm – who’s asking?!)
The day Mom came over and BANGED on the front door, and she sat me down to watch the news about 9/11 coming down.
Four years after living there, my nephew Luke comes over one time – says, “That blue on the top of your washer and dryer comes right off.” The stickie wrap for shipping. “Doh! I knew that.” Heating water on the stove after the water heater went out and I couldn’t afford to fix it. That last summer when the AC went out and I couldn’t fix it neither. (The new owner replaced both.)
Mom calling when I was living in town with Chana. “Your house is leaking!” A water pipe had frozen. Then BURST. (The house was lonely, all that long cold winter. It worked! I was back home in no time.)
A possum having babies in the garage closet. Little baby mouse-sized possums hanging by their tails off my bicycle spokes. (I left kitchen scraps outside for the critters all the time.)
The same possum using her last ounce of energy to crawl back home and die in my front yard. She got a proper burial, for sure.
Clark Lilly, our resident gardening expert in the office at ORA, telling me, “Sure, you can pump the raw sewage out of the sump into the yard.” (I had a grinder pump that tied into the city sewer system. Costs a FORTUNE to buy a new one.)
Thanks, Clark – you just killed the nice cedar out by the street I watered like that.
Changing the oil for my little blue Geo Metro in the grass. Dumping the oil illegally in the lot next door.
Washing down the vinyl siding every few years for a shiny new house. The pyracanthas in the front of the house Mom gave me as a welcome gift when I moved in. Love those orange berries!
Feeding the deers with deer corn. Hungry deer standing RIGHT THERE, staring into the window when I forgot to feed them.
The landscape timbers I used to frame in around the pyracanthas I stole (along with the rocks) from the elementary school landscaping one dark and stormy night. (Mom was on the School Board at that time. Oops.)
Jaxx the cat drinking water out of the fish tank. (Not sure if that’s healthy but she didn’t mind.) Running outside when HAIL STORMS came – to tuck the little car under trees for protection. Or cover it with a thick blanket. Both!
Trying a hundred different tricks to keep the damn squirrels out of the bird feeder. (How come all those smart scientists on campus can’ figure THAT one out?)
Jaxx climbing up on the refrigerator then HOWLING because she can’t get back down. BITING ME at the vet when I brung her in – then the vet rushing ME into her office for bandages and a cleaning. (Cat saliva is some kind of bad.)
The day when Mom and Regan brought Jaxx over from the pound. A tiny little ball of fur. Love at first BITE. Fencing in the carport (which was a terrible eyesore, made me look like a real redneck hillbilly) so Jaxx could be outside for some sun. My exercise equipment out there.
The tiny little bedroom when I threw away the bed and made it into my work office (then study space when I was in grad school). Slept on a floor mat that I rolled up every AM.
Bed? What’s that? When the ladies stayed over for the night. Hmmm… Gonna have to plan for the next time, tired of all these rejections.
Morgan McCann the DJ coming over to “whiteyville” to visit. Only person from town who ever did that. Thanks, girl. (The apartment I leased for a season after she agreed to room together. Wrong! Somehow I never got billed for electricity . . . ) I didn’t never stay there, not once. Home is home, and that wasn’t it.
It’s good, to have roots. A place of your own. A retreat. Mom really hit a home run when she built that little green house for me. It was a real lifesaver.
Makes me want to support the crazy idea of the government giving first-time home buyers a guaranteed low mortgage rate. (Like, they bailed out all those Too Big Too Fail banks with, what $10 TRILLION in ultra-low interest loans? Say – what?)
I did so like helping Mom out now and then. I did her gardening. Trimmed the tops off the damn cedar trees in her front yard so she had her blessed lake view.
I could hear her playing the piano way down there in my yard too. Nice toons. Comforting tunes.
Well, it’s time for me to beat feet. Too much hate in Austin. Too many wounds. Deep wounds. Painful wounds.
The landscape my eyes see is a major battlefield. I lost every last battle. Badly!
It was an effing Slaughterhouse Five.
But the war ain’t over yet. I’ll be gathering my strength. When the storm hits, you won’t know what hit you. Texas. It will be total, absolute annihilation.
Scorched earth. . .
A body can dream. At this point, well. . .
Maybe yonder in my new home I’ll catch the “Deep South” head fever and get a hankering to spin some yarns. Tell my tale instead of SHOUTING it out from the highest building. Or the editorial page. Nobody ever listened anyways.
Hey, it’s worth a try. Ain’t got nothing to lose. I’m on the VA payroll now. And you know what they say to P.O.W.s, how you’re supposed to do everything possible to escape. And you know me by now.
I don’t much like being in confined spaces.
SUBMARINES!
Closed spaces drive me – CRAZY!! Time to assert some authority here. Pick up the intercom on the bridge.
“Now here this. All hands. Blow the ballast! Fins vertical. Engines off.
“Surface.
Surface!”