Blast-Off Minus 21 Days

I, Byron Barnett, being of sound mind and body, do hereby begin this chronicle of my last three weeks in Arizona before I move to the Moon.

And please call me “Boon.”

Also I solemnly swear that I’m fine with my personal papers such as this chronicle being published upon my demise, due to how much people will probably want to know about my life and times by then.

In today’s news: I just wrote a letter to Galactic Snacking Solutions Incorporated. I offered to be their first Off-Earth Snacks Ambassador.

Think about it: twenty-one days from now I’ll be living on the Moon, in the lunar colony of Cosmopolis, needing nibbles and such on a regular basis. And I’m already a loyal GaSnakSo customer. (That’s the abbreviation for Galactic Snacking Solutions that I came up with. Efficient, no?)

Where are my stamps by the way?

I could wear the GaSnakSo logo on my jacket or my socks or where-be-it. Also I could do interviews and whatnot from up in Cosmopolis about how GaSnakSo products retain their flavor even outside Earth’s atmosphere.

They don’t have to pay me. All I’m asking is for them to send up a container of snacks for my exclusive on-Moon consumption. Mainly their Space Gazelle Brand of Space Cakes.

A year’s worth should do. Since I’ll be turning ten next month, my body needs the vitamins and minerals in a Space Cake at least twice a day, for sustenance between meals. So that’s two Cakes times 365 days equals 730 Cakes divided by 12 Cakes per pack equals 60.833333 packs. Or we could round it up to an even 75.

Aha! My stamps were in the wrong drawer again.

I only get to bring up three suitcases on The Biarritz as my individual baggage allowance, and I have to cram in all my clothes and comics and toiletries and what have you. (The Biarritz is the rocket-ship we’re taking to the Moon.)

That means there’s no extra room for snacks. Or maybe just enough for a pack of Space Cakes and a couple of boxes of Cheezy Tidbits. Which’ll last a week if I’m lucky. Therefore a snacks ambassadorship would be a convenient source of supplies. Because who knows what Cosmopolis Food Services offers in the way of light refreshment?

I included my home phone number in the letter to GaSnakSo, so they shouldn’t have any trouble getting in touch.

I’m going to the mailbox now.

More soon,

Boon

P.S. Here’s a snapshot I took of part of the Moon poster on my wall. It’s called a “false-color” photo. It’s the real Moon, only with hues and such added in.

Stimulating, no?

Blast-Off Minus 20 Days

I, Byron Barnett, need to see a space-allergist.

I just found out that the nasal spray I use here in Arizona (Nose-Floze) won’t work on the Moon.

The good news is, there’s no pollen in space, which is the stuff in flowers that makes you sneeze and whatnot.

The bad news is, there’s cosmic dust flying around Cosmopolis, even though the whole place is quite climate-controlled.

Mom says they have an excellent space-allergist up there and she already made me an appointment for the day after we land. As long as I don’t have to get shots, I’m sure the treatment will be tolerable.

Also I can live with some cosmic dust up my nostrils and even a small amount stuck in my nasal cavity if that’s the price an allergic individual such as myself has to pay for living off-Earth.

Who cares about sneezing if where you’re expelling your mucus is on the Moon?

What’s an itchy eye if while your eye’s itching it’s looking out your bedroom window at the Earth rising off the lunar horizon?

Like so:

I got this picture from the Lunar League Relocation Office. They sent me a packet with a bunch of brochures and so forth about what to expect once I’m Moon-based.

I fiddled with the colors and stuff. To make it more artistically fascinating. (My brother helped.)

But back to allergies: mine are mostly nose-related. And throat-ish.

I get a stuffed-up nose and scratchy throat from all the regular irritants. Your pollens. Your molds. Your pet danders, especially any cat I come in contact with.

If it’s a cat, I also start to wheeze. And my eyes water and my lips start to hurt. I can even get a rash on one or more body parts. It’s highly unpleasant.

The stuff that makes your allergies start up are called “allergens.” Pet danders are full of them. Dander is another word for flakes of skin off an animal that gets caught in their fur. It’s quite microscopic. It’s related to “dandruff” in people.

When it falls off the fur it gets on your clothes and stuff. Also a cat’s saliva is loaded with allergens.

Revolting, no?

I do have one food allergy. I’m allergic to cantaloupe.

People tend to put cantaloupe in melon salads, along with honeydews and watermelons. Cantaloupe’s the orange one and honeydew’s the green one. I used to get them mixed up, but my allergy helps me remember which is which.

I won’t drop dead if I eat a bite of cantaloupe, but the top of my mouth starts itching (and your tongue is not a good scratcher). Once I even got hives on my chest.

Luckily I don’t care for melons. I prefer the berry family. Blue, straw, rasp, boysen.

Out in space the whole allergy situation is completely different. First of all: no cats. Second of all: very few cantaloupes.

But there’s other things up there that you can be allergic to. I already mentioned cosmic dust.

Space seems pretty clean to me, so I doubt I’ll run into any molds and such. I did hear that you can be allergic to very strong starlight out in space. Though that might be a rumor.

I’ll ask the space-allergist at my appointment. If it’s true, let’s hope the treatment involves chocolate.

More soon,

Boon

Blast-Off Minus 19 Days

I, Byron Barnett, just got back from my patrol of The Eleven Deadly Realms.

Not sure if/how my forthcoming relocation to the Moon in 19 days will affect my interdimensional travel schedule.

The Eleven Deadly Realms—I call them “The Deadlies” for short—really do depend on my regular check-ins. I have to make sure no space-vermin have invaded and gobbled up all the comestibles. (That means food.)

Space-vermin have huge appetites. Their appetites are what you’d call “voracious.”

Furthermore I have to get over to The Deadlies on a regular basis so I can reverse the effects of any cosmic whammies that might’ve occurred in my absence.

Yes, living on the Moon will be highly satisfactory. But what if it stops me from making my rounds?

Just to be clear, the Eleven Deadly Realms are all other dimensions, but you get to them by going through the Seventh Dimension. It’s like going somewhere on a plane but with a connection where you have to land in another city first then change planes and take off again for your final destination.

Last week, on patrol in the Fourth Deadly Realm (not nearly the worst of The Deadlies) I discovered six rings missing around Purple Saturn.

S-T-O-L-E-N.

Do you realize how many words there are for “steal”? A lot.

Purloin. Thieve. Pilfer. Rob. Loot. Swipe. Nab. Nick. Snaffle. Peculate. And so forth.

It took me all afternoon to find the responsible party, secure the rings, and get them back where they belong.

I scraped both knees and got a hangnail in the process. And if you know me, you know I abominate hangnails.

Also my tongue tasted like burnt frog for two days afterwards.

Not that I’m complaining as such. Cosmic robbery is nothing new in The Deadlies. But what if I hadn’t been able to get over there to set things straight?

True, Purple Saturn is in another dimension, but if everybody only worried about their own dimension’s law and order, where would we be as a society?

You see my point.

More soon,

Boon.

P.S. On my way out I took this snapshot of Purple Saturn with all its rings back in place.

Blast-Off Minus 18 Days

I, Byron Barnett, am ready to talk about Moon-ghosts. 

Are there any?

If yes, did they used to be people who died an untimely and/or agonizing death while already living on the Moon?

Or could an Earth-ghost slip into a rocket-ship before blast-off as a stowaway, and relocate for a lunar-based haunting situation?

Why has no one studied this? 

Meanwhile, in today’s news, I’m forced to report that there’s been no reply so far on my offer to Galactic Snacking Solutions for me to be their first Off-Earth Snacks Ambassador. 

How odd.

Maybe they’re figuring out how many boxes of Space Cakes they can send up for me to have on hand before they get back to me, but you’d think they could send me a note asking politely for my patience in the meantime. 

And speaking of ghosts, where are the ghost-animals? And in particular the ghost-dinosaurs? 

The giant asteroid that whizzed down from space sixty-six million years ago and slammed into Mexico and wiped out all the dinosaurs should’ve left behind quite a number of dino-ghosts. 

Where are they?

Maybe their ectoplasmic load was too dense, since dinosaurs were so heavy, and they could only last a few seconds in the spectral plane before collapsing under their own weight and disintegrating.

Which brings me to a thought-experiment: if a dino-ghost weighed too much on Earth to last long, would it have lasted longer on the Moon, in one sixth Earth’s gravity?

But getting back to my main subject: people who died a grisly death on the Moon. I think I should look into it. Someone needs to get to the bottom of things up there, haunting-wise.

I’m putting it on my Action List. 

More soon,
Boon

P.S. Here’s my artist’s conception of a ghost orbiting the Moon for all eternity. (My brother helped.)

Blast-Off Minus 17 Days

I, Byron Barnett, am at odds with a certain robot.

His name is José Ignacio. He gets my goat.

He’s my roommate. It’s quite the tale to tell how we ended up together, just not now. 

Incidentally he’s very tall, over seven feet. When I have time to explain how irritating he is, I’ll write an appendix about it. 

(Yes, an appendix is the part of your digestive system that’s connected to your large intestine, but it’s also the word for a section of extra information that you put at the end of an important document. I’d need a whole appendix to list about eighty or ninety examples of how José Ignacio ruffles me the wrong way during the course of the week.) 

But I still have to bring him to the Moon. I can’t do my research without him. Or my field work. I certainly don’t want to be hauling moon-rocks around by myself.

To be extremely candid, José Ignacio is more annoying than a bag of mosquitos with a hole in it, but he’s also pretty useful. It’s a tradeoff.

After I got my school picture taken on School Picture Day, José Ignacio said he wanted one too. But I wasn’t gonna ask the principal if my robot could come in to avail himself of school services. That makes no sense. 

Even if the principal said yes, they probably would’ve had to charge me for it, since José Ignacio isn’t a member of the student body. That could’ve really eaten into my allowance.

So I asked my brother to help. Taji works Wednesdays after school and Saturday mornings at a photography studio downtown. Convenient, no?

He did some portraiture of José Ignacio at different angles and such. 

José Ignacio was happy with the result, except he wanted his color changed from his normal white to black. I guess for a robot that’s like putting on a sportcoat and tie for your school picture. 

Taji made the change at his workstation.  Here it is:

José Ignacio is fairly photogenic.

But he’s the bane of my existence.

More soon,
Boon

Blast-Off Minus 16 Days

I, Byron Barnett, am something of a poet. 

So said my Mom after she read the limerick I wrote for her.

It was inspired by a talk me and Mom had on the subject of us moving to the Moon.

I included it in a letter that I mailed to her, even though we live at the same address. She got it the next day.

Dear My Mother,

I’m happy to put down in writing
And per your request here highlighting
That I’ll do you the favor
Of lunar behavior
That no one will not find delighting

Thank you for your time.

Best regards,
Byron

You can interpret the limerick a couple of different ways, depending on what you think delighting behavior is.

I can be quite tricky and stuff with words.

Also I have a large number of dinosaur-themed poems that I’ve been writing, possibly to put in a book of my dino-related research et cetera.

Here’s Dino-Rhyme #19 …

Dinosaur, oh dinosaur
You weighed more than a grocery store
So how were you an herbivore?
And other questions furthermore

Dinosaur, oh dinosaur
Mighty reptile heretofore
Your bones I keep on looking for
And I’d love to find an egg

See how that last line about the egg isn’t rhymey? That’s a thing poets do every now and then to surprise the reader. It’s very sophisticated.

The word “dinosaur” comes from Latin via Greek according to my dictionary. In Greek it means “terrible lizard.” Feel free to use that information at your next Thanksgiving dinner.

I have many other rhymes about dinosaurs.

D.R. #20 through D.R. #24 are about the spookier side of what happened when that asteroid killed off all the terrible lizards on Earth. 

Yes, I’m talking about dinosaurs that then turned into ghosts. I’m now convinced there were some.

And think about it: at least some dinosaurs could’ve been knocked right off the planet and out into space at the exact instant they died from the asteroid impact. Therefore, I ask, where did they end up haunting?

The Moon, of course.

I’m betting there’s frozen reptile ectoplasm somewhere in the lunar landscape that’ll prove my theory.

If it’s up there, I’ll find it.

More soon,
Boon

P.S. Here’s a dinosaur picture I have in my bathroom. I asked mom if I could get dinosaur wallpaper for my whole room, but this is what she got me instead.

Blast-Off Minus 15 Days

I, Byron Barnett, needed my brother to draw me a picture of myself on the Moon.

It all started last Saturday at the comic book store …

I had a brainwave: I should be a character in a comic book!

In 15 days I’ll be living on the Moon where I’ll be having multitudinous space-adventures—perfect to put into comics.

(Or some people spell that “comix.” It’s a big debate.)

So I went straight home and started writing up my idea. I worked on it till dinner. It was spinach lasagna with a side of garlic bread and you couldn’t even taste the spinach.

Then I went back upstairs to finish my outline instead of watching Saturday Evening Cinema in the den. I kept working all the way to bedtime, even with José Ignacio being highly annoying by asking why anybody would want to read a comic book about me. 

He’s not what you’d call an optimist. I pretty much ignore his so-called “opinions.”

Anyhow, I wanted to send the outline to Mr. Berkenbosch for his expert advice. Mr. Berkenbosch owns the comic book store. But I thought I’d better include a picture. People tend to need visual aids to wrap their heads around a fresh idea.

So when I woke up Sunday morning I asked Taji for help.

He was pretty busy that day. There was a car show downtown he was going to. He’s quite obsessed with cars and hovercrafts. He actually subscrives to “Car & Hovercraft.” The magazine.

He thinks he could be a car and hovercraft designer for his job after high school and college, since he’s good at drawing and he loves all things vehicular. Personally I think his future is more artistic than automotive, but to each his own.

In the afternoon, between the car show and a date he was going on, he squoze in enough drawing time to finish a picture for me to send to Mr. Berkenbosch. It’s called “Boon On The Moon.” Which’d be the title of the comic book too. 

It’s a little dark for my taste. And it doesn’t look exactly like me. But’s it’s not too bad.

Here it is:

More soon,
Boon

Blast-Off Minus 14 Days

I, Byron Barnett, am often available for conversations about rocket-ships.

But my brother is an automobile nut. I believe I mentioned this previously.

I went with him to the car show downtown on its final day. He’d already been twice, first for opening day then again after school on Tuesday.

But he wanted to go one more time to see the new Plymouth XNR, which they were about to unveil for the show’s big finish.

When they pulled down the curtain, people gasped and so forth. 

It looked like a one-man rocket on wheels.

They gave us free postcards of it to take home with illustrations of the XNR from different angles and such. Here some are:

Guess how much it costs?

200,000 credits. That’s more than some people’s house.

My allowance is 5 credits a week. So if I wanted to buy an XNR for Taji as a high school graduation present in 2 years, I’d have to save up for 40,000 weeks.

The math on that doesn’t really work.

If I’m President and CEO of Galactic Snacking Solutions Incorporated someday, I’ll probably get a salary of 50,000 credits per year at least. I could buy it for him then.

I’m glad I brought up GaSnakSo. I’ve received no reply as of yet on my offer to be their first Off-Earth Snacks Ambassador. 

I’m beginning to feel highly irritated. 

Like my dad says, a speedy “no” is the second-best answer to a quick “yes.” But a slow “no” is just plain rude.

In case you’re wondering, the XNR doesn’t run on chlorophyll like most vehicles, it uses powdered seaweed. It’s an extremely modern fuel system.

But the car’s best feature is that they built it to look space-worthy. 

Incidentally I heard that on the Moon you can’t drive a lunar rover till you’re 21. So Taji’s gonna have to find a new hobby.

He should focus on artwork. There’s a whole dome in Cosmopolis with artists’ workshops and studios. 

Taji could do all kinds of paintings there, using outer space for inspiration. 

I’m pretty sure the paintbrushes and stuff are free.

More soon,
Boon

Blast-Off Minus 13 Days

I, Byron Barnett, just mailed another letter to Galactic Snacking Solutions.

I kept a copy for my files. Here it is:

To: The Board of Directors
At:
Galactic Snacking Solutions Headquarters
1 Galactic Circle
Delicious, Colorado, USA

From: Byron Barnett
At:
My Bedroom
3rd Floor
The Barnett House
3210 Desert Drive
Access, Arizona, USA

Re: My Ambassadorship

Dear Members of the Board:

Following up on my other letter to you where I proposed being your first Off-Earth Snacks Ambassador, I wanted to make sure you realized I’m moving to the Moon in 13 days.

Since there’s not a lot of time to iron out the details, I have six important points to make:

1) You don’t have an Off-Earth Snacks Ambassador yet. I can fix that.

2) As your Ambassador, I can be the face of space-based snacking in ads and whatnot that your company puts in magazines and comics.

3) I can also be in charge of lunar snacking events. I suggest once-a-week giveaways of Space Gazelle Space Cakes and other edibles, with members of the press in attendance to write articles about how generous GaSnakSo is. 

4) I’m not new to the food-and-beverage industry. I’ve been a loyal customer of yours for five years. I know your product line by heart. So I won’t have to learn on the job.

5) My brother works after school at a photography studio here in Arizona. He’s quite good at portraiture. When we’re up on the Moon I could ask him to take pictures of me posing for the ads. I could be holding Galactic Snacking Solutions products with the solar system in the background. Then send them down to you to paste in your logo and stuff before you put them in magazines.

6) Did you know that the average human tongue has between 2000 and 8000 taste buds? But my research suggests that my tongue has between 10,000 and 20,000. I was born to be in the snacks biz.

Let’s make this work.

Expectatiously yours,
Boon

P.S. I have an idea for a new product. “Moon Nuggets.” They should look like silvery moon-rocks but actually be highly crunchable cookies. Chocolate mint is a good flavor to start with. The kind where you bite into chunks of mint inside the chocolate, not the kind where the mint is already all mixed in and smooth.

Here’s a picture of a prototype for you to mull over. (It’s a real moon-rock, so just use your imagination and think “mint.”)

Blast-Off Minus 12 Days

I, Byron Barnett, would like to point out that three suitcases is sorta ridiculous.

For moving to the Moon, an individual baggage allowance should be more like seven suitcases at bear minimum.

Actually I don’t think they care how much luggage you bring into Cosmopolis, it’s just that The Biarritz doesn’t have the cargo space for more than three bags per person on the way up.

Which makes packing a challenge, since I could be living on the Moon for at least two years.

The relocation packet gives you some guidelines: 

• Don’t bring winter clothes, cause the temperature in Cosmopolis is always 70 degrees.

• Do bring a swimsuit and swim goggles. They have six pools: one freshwater, one saltwater, three clorinated, and one with reduced gravity. (That one sounds interesting.)

• Make sure all clothes are washed with allergen-remover before packing, to get rid of any dog or cat hair and various pollens, since they like to keep the air in Cosmopolis extremely fresh. (They have air filters and all, but like my doctor, Dr. Delsalto, says, it's easier to prevent a cold than cure a cold.)

• No perfume or colone allowed in Cosmopolis.

• Shoes should have rubber soles or you might slip getting onto or off of the autowalks.

The one about no colone is too bad, cause I have some bath bombs that make you smell quite citrusy throughout the day that I was gonna bring.

Question: how do ghosts wear clothes? It makes no sense. 

Are the clothes ectoplasmic too? If so how? Not that I want to see a naked ghost. I’m just pointing out the paradox of ghost-garments.

The relocation packet says they have four clothes stores in Cosmopolis with a couple of tailors on staff to do alterations and such. But I’d rather not have to rely on whoever stocks those stores for how I look. 

I need more room in my suitcases. 

Maybe I can stuff some extra shirts inside José Ignacio’s framework.

Or would that count as smuggling?

More soon,
Boon

P.S. I guess I can’t bring my orange fur jacket. Takes up too much suitcase space, and I’d get hot wearing it in 70 degrees. It’ll probably be too small for me by the time I move back to Earth, even though it’s my favorite article of clothing. Irritating.

P.S.S. Here’s a picture of it. 

P.S.S.S. That’s not me wearing it, that’s a fashion model. Mom saw it in a magazine and bought me one in a kid’s size cause she knows orange is among my favorite colors. (I also like his hat.)

P.S.S.S.S. Guess what the fur’s really made of. Seaweed! After they bake it and soak it and mash it and spin it they run it through an extruder and it comes out as super-soft fabric that they weave into fur. 

Ingenious, no?

Blast-Off Minus 11 Days

I, Byron Barnett, am writing an article on the Ninth Dimension.

It’s the most fascinating of the dimensions.

I’d like the article to come out in the next edition of “Physics & Phantoms.” That’s a magazine I like that’s all about matter, energy, and ghosts.

It only comes out quarterly (which means four times a year), so I’ll already be up on the Moon by the time the next edition is available for purchase. But I saw in the relocation packet where they have a library, a bookshop, and a newsstand up in Cosmopolis. So I could sign copies of the article and/or the cover of the magazine at those venues.

I haven’t written to “Physics & Phantoms” yet to tell the editor-in-chief about my upcoming submission, but I’m sure she’ll say yes. Who knows the Ninth Dimension like I do?

Nobody.

She might even want to publish a whole series on all the other dimensions, specifically One through Eight, after my article on the Ninth comes out and she gets a big reader reaction. 

(I rarely go to the other dimensions anymore except for the Seventh, since that’s the way into the Eleven Deadly Realms. But I could make an exception if my editor insists.)

Also the Ninth is the most dangerous dimension by far. It’s where I got the Golden Eyeball. So now I’m the Keeper of the Golden Eyeball. That’s a story for another day.

The most interesting thing about the Ninth Dimension is how the laws of physics are somewhat different there. Gravity and electromagnetism and time and such. Just the kind of thing that “Physics & Phantoms” likes to keep their readers informed about.

I know some people think I shouldn’t be risking life and limb by going into the Ninth at all.

But remember what Albert Einstein said: 

Life is like riding your bike, if you don’t keep pedaling you’ll fall over. 

Albert Einstein was one of the smartest human beings ever born. He came up with that famous equation:

E = mc2

It means “energy” equals “mass” times the speed of light squared. (“c” stands for the speed of light.)

It’s all about the relationship between energy and mass. It’s highly elegant the way Albert sums it all up. (May I call him Albert?)

He leaves out ghosts of course, but nobody’s perfect.

Too bad he’s not still alive. I could’ve taken him into the Ninth for a research trip.

Bear in mind that E = mc2  doesn’t work in the Ninth. So Albert would’ve had to come up with a new equation to make sense of things on the interdimensional level. He enjoyed brain-twisters though—he probably would’ve found it quite a treat. 

Did I mention that things also look different in other dimensions? For instance, here’s how the Moon looks in the Ninth:

And here’s a side-by-side of Albert in our dimension and in the Ninth. (I asked Taji to help with this one. It only took him a couple minutes at his workstation with me describing it.)

Albert looks kinda kooky in my artist’s conception of him in the Ninth, but he looked fairly kooky even here.

And yes, the rumors are true: I almost got burnt to a crisp last time I went to the Ninth because that solar storm flared up out of nowhere. I took a snapshot with the flames nipping at my heels:

But I got out just in time. I usually do.

More soon,
Boon