Chace Randolph

Tight Beam Volume 8 September 2024

Hello, it’s a new month, and that means it’s time for a new edition of the Tight Beam news letter. It’s crazy how fast time moves. I have some good news and some bad news. I’ll just tear the Band-Aid off quickly to get the bad news out of the way. My original plan had been to publish the book Altar of Scales, the second weekend of September, the 14^th or 15^th, but now, that’s not looking like it’s going to happen. Life has happened. My wife’s car broke down, lost the timing belt, doing an engine rebuild, and it’s not gone well, taking a lot of time. I just haven’t got as much recording or editing done as I wanted for the audio book. Things just aren’t ready yet. I’m not sure why I am struggling so much with the car, I like to think of myself as a decent mechanic, after all, I have made a career out of working on first commercial jets and now military missiles, little four-cylinder car shouldn’t be a problem, but it is. Hopefully, I turn out to be a better writer than a mechanic.

The good news is, I did have that face-to-face meeting with my beta reader, and they could in detail explain the “sentence fragment problem, and we worked through the first fifty pages of the book, correcting those issues as we found them, and some other typing mistakes along the way. So I’m doing are read of my book, to clean up things as I go, one last time, just to be sure. And, I’m working on recording and editing the audio book, but I also have the responsibilities to my wife, and her broken little Hyundai accent. What’s more, I have a trip out of the country early in October. I hope to push the book out before then, and then write the next one after I get back, before the year is out, but I can’t commit to anything now, not after the way the past 6 weeks have gone.

That’s the plan, publish book one before October, write book 7 before new years, and then I can get working on edits and publishing of the second book early next year, but everything since April, has not gone according to plan, so we’ll see what happens. Now that the good news and the bad news is out of the way, here’s for this month’s short story. Well, it’s not even really a short story, more of a musing, a Wonder, if you will.

Wonder

To wonder is a strange and unique ability. It is part of this odd condition of human consciousness. No other creature, of all the feeling, crawling, flying, swimming animals in the world, was burdened this way. For all their hunger, their lust, their hatred, as far as we know, they don’t wonder. They don’t contemplate like we do. This strange ability to wonder is what makes us human. Wonder is the fine line between us and the animals, between civilization and savagery.

This ability to perceive, to comprehend, to consider the unknown in an objective manner is a powerful thing. To predict, to observe, to theorize gives us insight and perspective unlike that of any other known creature. When done regularly, correctly and thoroughly, it can be used to discover, make connections and intuitive leaps, sometimes a seemingly supernatural power, as someone from the outside can not see the same threads of the spider web you are looking at.

It would do us all some good, not just to stop and wonder about everything and nothing, but to consider our ability to wonder. To contemplate human contemplation and all that has arisen from it, nihilism, utilitarianism, the theory of evolution, or relativity, physics, the sciences, the arts, the pyramids, stone henge, religion and all the other strange, wondrous human creations that give us pause.

We as outsiders who didn’t wonder those things ourselves struggle to understand and comprehend them, and we can see how they are assembled. Much less to have discovered the pieces and fitted them together of your own accord. The people should dare to build and assemble their own creations, their own Chapel with ceiling art. That people should dare to wonder, to not be an animal.