Don't Watch This Space

Sam has had it up to here with space.
And I mean space as in the final frontier, not space as in a room, though I’ve had it up to here with that too.

Room used to be a perfectly good word to describe an area enclosed by walls and a ceiling and with a convenient doorway inserted to let you in and out, but it has been almost obliterated from the face of the earth since the art and architecture crowds moved in.No longer can you put up a bit of old sculpture or hang a nice painting in a room; no, now you must exhibit this stuff in a “space”. And it gets worse: when you finally leave this “space” – invariably having wasted a good ten minutes of your life staring dumbly at a few smeared blotches on a canvas entitled ‘Meditation On The Self’ – you no longer find yourself on the street or in a square; no, you’re now in a public space. Tune into The View any week and you’re guaranteed to hear more mentions of space than in an entire series of Star Trek.
And when it isn’t the pointy-headed ommentators who are colonising space, it’s the self-help crowd. “I’m in a bad space in my life,” they say, when what they mean is that their endless self-obsessed whinging has driven all sensible people out of their lives. No wonder they have a bit of space to themselves.
And don’t start me on inner-space, a place only ever viewed by those who have their heads stuck permanently up their arse. After all, navel-gazing will only ever get you so far.

Vast Reaches
But real space, as in outer space, as in the solar system, as in the vast reaches of the cosmos and great star-going vessels in warp drive – once upon a time that shit really used to pop Sam’s cork.He always liked that cartoon by Gary Larson, which showed a couple of ants staring up at an impossibly starry sky, and one is saying to the other:
“Gee, it kinda makes you feel all small and insignificant, don’t it?”
Now frankly when you’re as well on, well connected and well endowed as Samuel J. Snort Esq there isn’t much in this world to make a man feel all small and insignificant, but even a moment’s contemplation of the inexpressible vastness of the heavens, has caused Sam to stop and ponder the eternal mysteries: is there anyone out there? Are we alone? And I wonder what it’s like to shag an alien life-form?
Sam is long enough in the tooth to recall the excitement surrounding the moon landings. That was back in 1969, chillun, when going as far as Bray was a bit of an adventure, so conceive if you will of massive headrush to be experienced at the thought of humankind knocking about on the old lunar landscape.
Actually, the buzz was all in astronaut Aldrin’s first name: when Neil Armstrong finally stepped out onto the surface of the moon, the pictures were ghostly to the point of transparency and the sound not much better than a Foghat bootleg. (Although still better, of course). And then there was the way Neil also fucked up his big moment. To this day, waterheads reverentially quote his supposedly historic words, even though they’re entirely meaningless. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” must rank as the ultimate in tautology – what the big eejit should have said was “one small step for a man.”

Fantastic Being
Maybe we should have known then that space was not all that it was cracked up to be, but fed on a diet of Captain Kirk, Stanley Kubrick and, very well then, magic mushroom omelettes, Sam and his starry-eyed cohorts fully expected that it was only a matter of time before we either encountered some fantastic being on another planet or a giant mothership would descend out of the clouds and take us all off on the headtrip of a life time.But no, 35 years later, it’s the same old, same old. In that time, we’ve dropped probes on Mars and Venus, and what have we to show for it? A few fuzzy pictures of rocks.And it was déjà vu all over again when the Huygens probe landed on Titan two weeks ago. After a journey of seven years and a squillion miles, the prime time news showed pictures of boffins cheering wildly as the thing landed on the most distant spot in the solar system we’ve yet visited – and back came those thrilling new images of...rocks.C’mon, be truthful. Like everyone else, you did that whole ‘wow-isn’t-this-just-rilly-far-out’ riff for about one minute and then suddenly you just stopped and went ‘huh?’ Face it: you were hoping for something like the gatefold sleeve of a Yes album by Roger Dean and instead you got a postcard from the seafront at Bray. Without the sea. And the dodgems. Just the rocks.Space? What a waste of. Better off sticking to mescaline.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq