RIP Opportunity

Sad news from Mars today.

An announcement came from NASA. The Opportunity rover has officially been pronounced dead.

Last June, a sandstorm covered the planet Mars. It was thought that the dust covered the solar panels on Opportunity, causing it to power down. Once the storm subsided, Martian winds might blow the panels clean and the rover might once more respond to signals. Nearly 1,000 command signals were sent to Opportunity since last year. No reply ever came. After a last, longshot attempt went unanswered yesterday, NASA announced it was finally cutting off communication and pronounced the Opportunity mission "complete."

Opportunity first arrived on Mars in 2004. Since then, it has not only broadened our understanding of Mars immeasurably, its very engineering and the undertaking of the mission has granted humanity considerable experience with space exploration. Hopefully, we may parlay this experience into future endeavors and build upon it with more extensive Mars missions. And yet I feel uneasy...

I must admit, I'm feeling a bit sad for the inanimate rover. You see, for as dour as I can be about our future or the tendencies of human nature, I cannot ignore achievements such as Opportunity. The mission and the research gleaned from it stand as testament to what we can do when we work together as species, particularly when we have faith in reason, science, and a dash of imagination. As a writer, I tend to sometimes see things romantically, despite my penchant for bitterness. Opportunity represents the spirit of exploration and the acquisition of knowledge about not just another planet, but our universe. "What's over there? Let's find out."

Where else in our most immediate corner of the universe has inspired more wonder and attractancy than Mars?

Sure, would have been nice if it had come across definitive evidence of life, either past or present, on Mars. I for one was hoping Opportunity just might come across a rock that was a little more than a rock, and instead an artifact from a lost civilization. I can just hear the conspiracy theorists howling, but for the now...we have no such evidence. Instead, we have piles of data collected over 14 years, that scientists in various disciplines will be chewing over for a long while to come.

You have given us so much, Opportunity. We are forever in your debt. Rest easy, little soldier. Your job is done.

Now, a planet solely populated by robots must decrement its population by one.

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I am being haunted by Phil Collins

I play music before class.

Students who have had me before know that I take requests.

"I have a song," one of my guys said yesterday. "'In the Air Tonight' by Phil Collins.

After tossing my pen on the desk and rubbing the bridge of my nose, I played the song.

"Was there something else you wanted?" the student asked, taken aback by my reaction.

"No, no," I assured. "It's not that. It's not you. Let me explain my situation."

I am being haunted by Phil Collins.

It started just less than one year ago. After the collapse of Saint Joseph's College and the loss of my job in 2017, I had to get by with a few part time jobs. One of them was in the Writing Center of a local university. Students would bring in their writing assignments and I would help them either begin or revise drafts as best I could. In April, a student came to me with a dilemma.

She had a paper due for her Art Appreciation class. Page length was a hard maximum of four pages.

This student had close to eight.

Her subject? Phil Collins. Yes, this student was a superfan of the drummer, singer, solo artist, and member of Genesis. Well in order to meet the requirements of the prompt, something we professors are kinda big on, we needed to essentially cut her paper in half.

"How do we do that?" she asked.

"Well, we have to decide on what the most important moments of his life/career are and then ditch the rest," I said.

"Are you kidding me?" she asked, eyes bulging through her glasses. "It's all important."

We talked and wrote for over an hour after that. I argued for the significance of Phil's trans-Atlantic performance at the two Live Aid concerts. She lobbied hard for the inclusion of his starring role in the film, Buster. This was a discussion my grad work in composition/rhetoric did not prepare me for.

Nor was I prepared for what followed my shift in the Writing Center.

I began to hear Phil Collins everywhere. Turn on the radio and I'd hear "Two Hearts" or "Invisible Touch." "Take Me Home" came across the airwaves more than a few times and the lyrics truly resonated with me as I could not help but think of Saint Joe. Everywhere I went, I seemed to hear Phil Collins. I stopped into the vet's office and heard "Billy Don't Lose My Number," which I saw as a somewhat inspired choice by the universe as that's not really one of his go-to hits. Genesis' "Land of Confusion" even made an appearance once. Then came one Sunday when I finally had enough and began to think Phil was coming at me with full force.

On weekends, my wife and I enjoy listening to old Casey Kasem Top 40 countdowns on iHeartRadio. It reminds us of halcyon Sunday mornings of when we, albeit apart and unaware of one another, would listen to these countdowns, anxious to hear the number one song. Last spring, we came across one from May of 1984.

"Oh no, he's still following me," I said.

"Phil?" she asked, for I had told her of my experience.

"Yes," I said. "The number one song will be 'Against All Odds.'"

"How do you know?" she asked.

Sure enough it was. From that point forward, my wife dubbed my recurring quasi-paranormal experience as "The Philnomenon." I started to fall asleep reluctantly, afraid I would jolt awake and just see Phil hovering there next to me in the dark.

There is a concept known as "synchronicity." No, not the album by The Police.

Carl Jung, the famous scholar and psychologist, once described the phenomenon as "meaningful coincidences that occur with no causal relationship, yet seem to be meaningfully related." So in a way, like attracts like. So in theory, I spent so much time thinking about Phil Collins one night that I basically drew his music to me. Jung saw this as an explanation for the paranormal, meaning the human mind manifests these odd occurrences. What we are seeing in these sightings are reflections of what we are thinking, even if subconsciously.

Richard Dawkins blows all that up in his book, Unbending the Rainbow. According to Dawkins, these "uncanny coincidences" are woefully mundane, given the sheer amount of observations and encounters someone has during a day. It's only a matter of time before at least a few coincidences happen. Given that humans have this, at times garish, need for wonder, we attach more meaning and significance to these events than is warranted.

For example, it may be that I attach extra significance to any moment I hear a Phil Collins hit (and believe me, he had a lot of them) because he's just a bit outside of my musical wheelhouse. If I hear Duran Duran, U2, The Cure, or Echo and the Bunnymen multiple times in a day between radio and Spotify, that says far more about my tastes than anything synchronous. Then again, as I said, Phil isn't a musician I've listened to with any real frequency, so in that regard it is a bit strange. I'm with Richard Dawkins on many things, but certainly not everything.

What do I think? Is Phil Collins really haunting me? Probably not.

And yet...

And yet...

I have to admit it's weird. Plus, there were, right around the same time as the dawning of the Philnomenon, a good many changes that manifested in my life and every one of them was for the better. I got an amazing new job at a great college with fantastic co-workers. Home life became happier. Was the Philnomenon a side effect or perhaps a symptom of these roborant vibes? Maybe.

The whole thing has also made me consider just what the criteria in order to call oneself a "fan" of an artist. There are songs by Phil Collins that I think are great ("Take Me Home", "Another Day in Paradise", "Against All Odds") and others that I think all right if you're in the mood ("That's All!", "Sussudio"). Does that make me a "fan"? As I said, there are songs I certainly like, but what's the minimum count of "liked" songs before you reach the official level of "fan"? Then again, does the true definition hearken back to that of "fanatic," of which "fan" is a shortened version? I don't know much Phil Collins trivia, so that probably counts me out as a fanatic. I sure as heck couldn't write eight whole pages on him. Not with doing research on him.

It's not so bad being haunted by Phil Collins. Kind of a happy feeling, really. To commemorate the Philnomenon, my wife got me the shirt that's at the top of this post. It's pretty great, but I rather like this one, you'll excuse the profanity. 


   

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