Constants

"I need to look up the mass of the Sun."

"It's 1.989x10^30 kg."

"Wow. How do you know this stuff?"

How indeed, young man.

Once, when the world was young, or so I believed, for I was the center that could hold...

Once, I dreamed of distant space. It whispered to me in long, lonely nights. Within those distant, imagined lights--imagined, for the haze was strong, the neon maelstrom of brash immediacy strangled the utility of sight--I glimpsed a way out. Out of awkwardness, out of fear, out of the promised but never realized dangers of a mad father and the social anxieties of a grasping mother. Out! Out of the proscriptions and rules I had set myself to protect myself--or was it the other? It was high ground, the highest ground, from which all care and fear was unassailable.

Once, too, I climbed and flailed, begged and lied, stole and betrayed my way toward the light. I was a fool, but a fool can do much if he is motivated and remains ignorant of the hopelessness of his cause.

I drifted upward, ever upward. And when I met the stars, they farted in my face, laughed, and cast me down.

I awoke a half-blind bottom dweller, a trader of dreams and secrets, the greatest of which is that I am a promise that will not deliver.

"It's the mass of our Sun. It's important."