Re-affirming my faith
by Matt Worley

It all began mere hours after writing last week's column. I was driving home from a Coke and gas run in preparation for the work week ahead. Less than eight blocks from my house, I was pulled over by a bored cop. As usual, I wasn't wearing my seat belt--this was the reason I was pulled over. No weaving in the lanes, no running stop lights, signs or anything else having anything to do with safely operating a moving vehicle.

I'm not going to go into the ethical questions this traffic stop brings to mind (Harassment? Insurance influence? Some strange right-to-life amendment?). The end result was two days of hassle. I had to get a new license because the address on my old one was wrong (and I got a ticket for that, too), and I had to stand in the long lines at the court building to pay off my seat belt ticket. All told it was $70 from my meager checking account into the massive coffers of the court. The only change this will bring to my life (other than trying to figure out where I'm going to find $70) is that I won't get double takes from bar bouncers because of my new haircut, which is radically different from the one on my old license.

Laws of probability being what they are, I'll most likely never get stopped for such a stupid offense again. So much for teaching me a lesson. But the experience and ensuing week of hell (described briefly to a co-worker as 'like swimming in a sewage tank the size of the Pacific ocean') caused a bit of questioning on my part. Most specifically, what the hell am I doing here?

I've tackled this question many times and usually the answer was quite easy. But somehow I couldn't figure out a good reason for my existence this week, so I went searching. The question was compounded by the fact that I've been slowly re-reading Catcher In The Rye-a novel I pronounced a "total piece of shit" when I was in high school. I hated symbolism or anything that wasn't literally stated back then.

After two days when nothing was accomplished except cleaning our laundry room and hacking down a bunch of weeds in the backyard (this act caused me to actually contemplate death, since my allergies were none to happy about the activity), my younger brother suggested we visit the VLA near Soccoro. VLA stands for Very Large Array, a large installation of satellite dishes aimed at the sky in the middle of the high desert in mid-southwest New Mexico. If you saw Contact this summer, those big dishes behind Jodie Foster was the VLA.

It was an overcast and occasionally thunderstormy day on Thursday in our part of New Mexico, which was somehow comforting. As if the Earth was doing a little housecleaning as we trekked to where scientists contemplate the existence of life elsewhere, and the origins of life here on Earth. Like many tourist attractions (It wasn't built for that purpose, but obviously something of this enormity is just waiting to be visited by big RVs and mini-vans.), the trip was almost as interesting as the main event.

As we drove to and from the VLA, we watched as storms rolled across the sky, lightening ripped into mountains and valleys, and rain bled across the land. At the VLA, a few of the dishes moved, trucks of scientists checked out various positions and mechanical maneuvers, and we could only contemplate what secret information the huge computers were thinking about. Unfortunately, the computations are only meant to be viewed by scientists. Alas, there was no answer at the VLA.

On Friday, the Rodey Theatre season at UNM opened with a two week run of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Rodey is not the largest theatre at UNM, but it has all the really cool (non-musical) plays. For those not familiar with R & G R Dead, I'll sum up. R & G are two plot devises masquerading as characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. In their own play, the two characters try to understand the futility of life while the world of Hamlet occasionally runs past their musings.

Hamlet contemplates his own existence with long soliloquies, deception and the art of acting, but R & G throw continuous questions at each other. When they realize at the end they are fated to die at the hand of the King of England, the two decide that at least it's an ending. Through the entire play they're trying to figure out why they are doing what they're doing and where their lives are going to go, and the answer, of course, is death.

I thought, "This must be telling me something," but I couldn't quite figure out what. It wasn't until I was home and watching the last fifteen minutes of Blazing Saddles on Comedy Central that I realized what I was supposed to figure out.

If one is continually trying to comprehend and contemplate endings and resolutions, one tends to ignore all the cool stuff that happens in between.

So while thousands of people were watching big balloons fill up with hot air and float away in northern Albuquerque Saturday morning, I didn't mind that I was working at a computer, laying out pages for the mid-morning Weekend edition. Besides, I could finally catch up on all the sleep I lost from over-thinking after I got off work.

Matt Worley almost wrote about how Star Wars' C3PO and R2-D2 were modeled after Hamlet's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Aren't you glad?

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