About Me

What in the whole wide world can I write here about myself that you’d ever believe?

When writing it’s always best to stick with what you know. Tempting as it may be to fabricate a bullshit persona rich in accomplishments that are not really mine, I will instead walk the high road and present honestly whatever unembellished truth is there to be found.

I am an Astronaut.

That’s right, I’m a card carrying, Buck Rogers style Astrocowboy.

OK, maybe that’s laying it on a little thick. While I really am an Astronaut, my area of experience embraces only a very limited, highly specialized field of space exploration. To be honest, the title “Astronaut” is just a technicality; while I have, indeed, flown several missions on the space shuttle my presence in space has been more in the capacity of cargo than flight crew. I am not allowed to touch any buttons, turn any dials or act in any manner whatsoever that might affect the outcome of a flight. While I am allowed to speak during missions, it is generally discouraged.

My job in space is janitorial in nature as once every six months or so they fly me up to the International Space Station to empty the trash cans and clean the toilets.

First, let me say that I really don’t care much for space travel – the ride is uncomfortable, cell phone reception is poor and the food sucks. Although there is a certain amount of prestige associated with the job, it is far less glamorous than one might expect. Being an Astrojanitor is hard work. It is a little known fact that Astronauts are basically pigs. Seriously! Especially the chicks! OMG, if you’d seen the things I’ve seen . . . look, I’m not even going to go into it. All I can say is that what I have seen in space is not what Kennedy had in mind. 

Still, the job has its perks. What I like best is the view. When I’m on mission (that’s what we in the Astrojanitorial Corps call mopping the floor) I’m pretty busy most of the time; but every once in a while I stop and call a “personal moment.” I set my mop aside, take off my rubber gloves, light a cigarette and just gaze out the window. It is thrilling to look down from orbit watching clouds roll along in thick, smog laden gobs as underneath them children play, lovers kiss and Arabs build car bombs.

I am frequently asked how I came to be the janitor on the International Space Station. Well, as is true of so many things, it all started with my father. Dad dropped out of school when he was 14 and ran away to join the circus. Having never graduated high school himself, he grew up convinced that school was for suckers and college boys were “pansies”. That is, of course, until he met a guy in the army who’d been a college professor in civilian life. Over the course of Dad's two year tour this pretentious bastard convinced my delightfully ignorant father and that college was a vital, life expanding developmental achievement that every young person should aspire to, regardless of their chosen profession. If I heard it once growing up, I heard it a thousand times, “Son, I don’t care what you want to be, you’ll be better at it if you go to college. You want to be a garbage man? Fine by me, (Ha ha haaaa), but you’ll be a better garbage man with the sheepskin, boy!” Through subtle maneuvering, cajoling, bribes and threats my father wove a tapestry of expectation.  I was to graduate from college, by God! 

“Go to college son!” he’d say, “People ‘ll respect you. You’ll wear a suit and tie, carry a briefcase and people will call you Sir!”

What a crock of shit that turned out to be.

Still, if I had to go (and believe me, my dad made it clear that I had to go), I resolved to defer life for long as was humanly possible. After earning my bachelor’s degree in philosophy from USC I hit dad up for the Master’s program at UCLA to study government administration. He balked at first, but when I explained that the city’s waste management authority was not accepting applications from philosophy majors, he relented. Having dallied at UCLA for two years, I graduated with a Master’s degree in French Literature (which is particularly impressive given that I never learned French). Dad was pissed, but when I explained that it was all a horrible mistake and that I’d taken all of those French Literature classes in the sincere (albeit, mistaken) belief that they were prerequisites to the engineering program, (“Believe me dad, nobody’s more upset about this than I am!”) he calmed down a little. He refused to finance any further study when, at my Phd commencement at Stanford, he learned that I had written my dissertation on the innovative china designs of Eva Zeisel, and had earned thereby an honest to God doctorate in "Russian Arts and Crafts". 

Having depleted most of my father’s retirement savings and all of his goodwill, I was 38 years old and thoroughly unemployable. Fortunately, dad was able to keep his job as a night watchman at the tire plant until well into his 70’s, but as his nursing home did not allow sleepover guests I was forced upon my graduation from Stanford to face some rather chilling financial realities. As luck would have it I still had facility available to me under my umbrella of Student Loans.  Temporarily flush with cash, I checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and used this transition time to catch up on some long overdue personal reading (Amy Tan – yummy) and worked hard to focus on myself and maintain the positive outlook so vital to any successful program of personal introspection.

In 1998 I ran into a fellow UCLA alumnus who’d gone on after graduation to get a job as an administrator at the California Institute of Technology. I’d just finished wiping down the front windshield of a silky black Lexus at the corner of La Cienega and Wilshire and was approaching the driver for my tip when, contrary to all previous experience the car’s owner actually rolled down his window. “Bob?” asked the beefy man behind the wheel, his face scrunched in a mask of perplexed recognition. Despite my disheveled appearance and the unpleasant odor so common to the homeless, this long-lost acquaintance (who, to this day I do not remember from my years at UCLA) invited me to join him for breakfast. After reminiscing about old times (none of which I remembered), we spent the balance of this breakfast meeting exploring ways in which my unique background might be useful to the US space effort. The results of this pivotal meeting were overwhelmingly favorable as 1) I received a long overdue meal and 2) it paved the way for my entrée into the janitorial service industry, thus ending my prolonged post-doctoral career slump.

Although my academic achievements clearly weighed heavily in my favor, getting that first position at CalTech was not a slam dunk. Having lived in a cardboard box behind Trader Joe’s the previous three years, certain puzzling gaps in my resume were exposed during the course of the obligatory background check to which all CalTech employment candidates are subjected. Fortunately, I’d been a model citizen during my years at school, and for the rest, my father was all too happy to vouch for my subsequent period of self-employment after I made it clear to him that the result of this perjury would be to silence my monthly claim to a portion of his Social Security check.

This was actually the first “job” I’d ever held, and I must confess that my transition into the workforce was not without its issues and challenges. In the warm glow of my friend’s generous patronage, however, I slowly learned to pilot the stormy sea of employer expectations. Success breeds success, and after mastering the fine art of showing up for work on time each day, I moved on to broader areas of achievement including such skills as “speaking respectfully to supervisors”, “avoiding sexually inappropriate comments” and, my favorite, “while napping at work is bad”. Over the years I first mastered, then excelled in the execution of my janitorial duties. I had come so far, in fact, that by the time my friend was arrested by the FBI for selling secrets to the Bolivian government my star had climbed so high within the janitorial bureaucracy at Cal Tech that my career progressed unmolested despite the foul stench of my former friend’s perfidious treason. Indeed, it’d be vain for me not to acknowledge that the career boost I enjoyed in the wake of the whole nasty affaire was conferred (at least, in part) as expression of appreciation for my tip and the subsequent testimony that proved so pivotal to the government’s case.

In early 2004 I was approached by “Earl”, the FBI agent with whom I’d consulted during the course of my former patron’s investigation. Earl, who arrogantly referred to himself as “my handler”, explained that he needed my help on an ongoing investigation of “irregularities” suspected on the International Space Station program. He needed a man inside the program whom he could trust. In light of my earlier willingness to denounce my friend and sponsor, Earl made it clear that he did not trust me at all; however, given my demonstrated willingness to offer state’s evidence with nothing whatsoever to gain from the disclosure but mischief, he was comfortable that I was the right man for the job. Thus briefed, (Earl called it “turned”, as if I’d been heading in any particular direction to begin with) I was accepted into the space program, subjected to the grueling training and, despite having failed the psychological evaluation administered to all prospective Astronauts, given a mission date late in 2005. After our initial meeting I never saw Earl again; however, during the course of my training and until told otherwise, I was required to email periodic reports to “my handler” under the codename Templeton (a rather unflattering reference, I later learned, to a certain rat in E. B. White’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web”).

I remember my first shuttle flight like it was yesterday. My dad, of course, made the long trip to Florida to watch the launch.  He wept, I am told, as thundering rockets ejected me from the planet. 

The mission itself was uneventful. I went up, scrubbed some toilets and came down again. Easy, really.

Far more interesting than space travel, however, was the thrilling voyage of self-discovery launched as a byproduct of my periodic reporting requirement to Earl. Although from a National Security perspective I had absolutely nothing of interest to share, I had committed to weekly reports and so, by God, weekly reports Earl got. I tried to keep my briefs newsy and light, in the manner of a friendly note to an old buddy. In them I shared, among many, many other things my thoughts on public schools, what I’d eaten for lunch, interpersonal challenges and issues I was having with the other Astronauts and certain reflections about the meaning of religion in contemporary society. I wrote to Earl consistently every week for over two years. Although it was tedious at first I quickly came to find the writing process cathartic and grew to look forward to sharing my thoughts in these weekly missives.

For his part, Earl remained silent. In the beginning I’d send away a report and then excitedly return to my computer every hour or so to check my inbox for a response. None came . . ever. While initially I presumed that his failure to respond was the manifestation of some bizarre security protocol, over time I grew to crave some feedback and viewed his silence with mounting levels of resentment and bitterness. I mean, here I was bearing my soul as I laid my life on the line for my country and this asshole couldn’t be bothered to hit reply and send a quick “thanks for the note – I’m sorry about the whole situation with Tammy and, you’re right, she’s a bitch! Stay strong, Earl.” What did I get? Nada! Nuttin! Zero! ZIP!

Still, despite his obdurate silence I continued to write. And write. And write. The more profoundly I perceived his unresponsiveness as a subtle form of insult, the more prolific became my writing. By the end my friendly notes to an old buddy typically ran upwards of ten typed pages, complete with footnotes and annotated commentary.

It wasn’t until after I’d completed my fifth shuttle mission (the one in which I’d had to go EVA to roto rooter the waste disposal conduit underneath the port shitter) that I learned the true reason for Earl’s stubborn silence.

One day, about three months after the roto rooter mission I was polishing the brass hand rails outside the reception hall at the NASA training center in Tupelo, Mississippi when a thin, wiry man with graying hair and an odd limp humpled past me on his way to check in at the security desk. “Special Agent Flatbush, FBI” the man announced as he officiously flashed his badge at Lloyd, the day shift security guard. “I have an appointment to see the Director of Flight Operations.” Of course, I recognized Flatbush immediately. He’d been Earl’s partner when we’d originally met in 1998 during the Cal Tech investigation. Although Earl typically led the interviews, Flatbush was always present, listening and writing copious notes. Lloyd, in his typical laconic fashion, checked the man’s credentials, called upstairs to the Director’s office and, after briefly conferring with a secretary named Ethel (or, as Lloyd called her, “sugartits”), directed Flatbush down a hall towards the bank of elevators that would take him to the 17th floor and his meeting. Flatbush, barely waiting until Lloyd had finished, spun on his heels and limped off toward the promised elevator bank.

In this I saw, of course, an opportunity. On the very first day of my assignment Earl had made it clear that I was to tell no one about my mission; yet it had been over two years since I’d actually spoken to him or anyone else in the FBI. My mind raced, quickly calculating the risks of approaching Flatbush with the intention of passing along a personal “Howdy-do” to my old buddy Earl.

I’d just decided on a plan that involved tripping the cripple by means of a mop handle jammed between his legs as he passed, when the approaching Flatbush looked up and saw me. Our eyes met and within the space of two heartbeats his expression morphed from one of hostile boredom to rapt, frantic attention. Always appreciating having made an impression, I smiled broadly and lifted my hand in a friendly wave. To my horror Flatbush quickly brushed open his suit coat, reached awkwardly behind his back and produced an extraordinarily scary looking automatic pistol.

“Freeze, Templeton!” the lame FBI agent bellowed as he pointed the weapon at my head.

The reception hall, which had previously hummed with the innocuous buzz of people on their way to and from outer space, suddenly grew eerily still. Then, somewhere on the far side of Flatbush’s scary pistol, a woman shrieked.  As if they’d been waiting for the woman’s scream to signal “Go”, everyone in the hall scurried for cover.

“I said FREEZE!” shouted Flatbush, jerking the gun once towards my nuts for emphasis. I was frozen. I swear, I was frozen.  Every muscle in my body (including my heart) was stone cold frozen. Indeed, so frozen was I that I still wore the same stupid grin I’d plastered on my face as I’d raised my right hand to waive.  Bobbing like a cork on the swift current of my abject panic, the notion occurred to me that Flatbush might, just might see this smile as some form of threatening mockery; but I couldn’t figure out how to unsmile without violating his compelling freeze order and, thereby, earn myself a bullet in the head.

Jingle, Thwack, Jingle, Thwack, Jingle, Thwack.

Lloyd, who from armpits to scrotum was built like a sumo wrestler, but otherwise sported an Alfred E. Newmanesque frame rushed towards us, the ridiculous assortment of crime fighting paraphernalia on his Batman Utility Belt bouncing off his love handles in rhythmic slaps as he ran. “Freeze (gasp), Bob!” he contributed. I’m fucked, thought I - anything important enough to make Lloyd run must be pretty fucking awful.

Following Flatbush’s steely direction I lowered myself onto the ground and assumed a posture of abject submission that I hadn’t revisited since my transitional days in the alleyway behind Trader Joe’s.

No one ever actually told me exactly what was going on, but summarizing hints dropped during 36 hours of interrogation in a narrow, windowless room deep in the basement of the training center I finally came to understand why Flatbush was so pissed. Earl, I learned, was dead and Flatbush believed that I’d killed him. That’s right! Dead! Indeed, he had been dead for quite some time – a little over two years, in fact. Wrapped in a shroud of secrecy (which even his own partner had not penetrated) and employing the full authority of the FBI, Earl somehow managed to shoe horn me into the Astronaut training program, instructing those responsible at NASA that I was to be fast tracked and kept in the program at all costs – or else. Then he abruptly died under peculiar circumstances, of course, (security Nazi that he was) leaving no notes or memoranda documenting the suspicions he was following or my participation in the resulting investigation. Whether it was ever Earl’s intention that I actually fly in space is now, in retrospect, questionable; but as far as the guys at NASA were concerned I was just some spook who was to be moved through the program at any cost (or else) until they were instructed otherwise, even if this meant bumping other Astronauts from the launch rotation and sending me up in their place. Did you know it costs $ 5.5 million to send an Astronaut into space? I learned this little tidbit from the Director of Flight Operations at NASA as he clubbed me about the head and shoulders with a rubber hose during the initial phase of my interrogation.

Flatbush knew nothing about any of this until eighteen months after Earl’s death when, during a routine system update at FBI headquarters in Washington, a secret email account belonging to none other the deceased agent Earl was identified. It was there that Flatbush discovered and read the weekly reports I’d so religiously submitted since my recruitment in 2004. I must confess that I was a little put out when I learned that Flatbush had read the PRIVATE correspondence in which I had shared some pretty personal information; but in light of the gimpy agent’s suspicion that the key to his partner’s murder was to be found in my body of reports, I was prepared to give him a break.

Anyway, it’d taken Flatbush the last six months to actually read and digest all of my emails. Apparently, despite the sheer volume of my writings, neither he nor anyone else at the FBI could identify any tangible details in the body of work that indicated who I was, where I was, what I was doing and why, in God’s name, I was corresponding with Earl. As I hinted earlier, I viewed these reports more as “stepping stones on a path of self-actualization” than as “potential evidence in a federal investigation”, and as such, tended to dig deeper on interpersonal issues than would otherwise have been the case. Rather than edify and inspire, however, I’m afraid my scribblings provoked Flatbush to develop a paranoid fantasy scenario in which I played a rather unflattering roll. After reading, reading and then rereading my reports Flatbush, for want of any intelligent ideas, theorized that I was actually a criminal sociopath who’d viciously and cleverly (hence explaining how suspicion came to fall on me) murdered his partner. Further, he convinced himself that I was actually taunting first the FBI, and then him, personally, with an avalanche of seemingly nonsensical (bullshit ? his word) emails. At one point he actually thought that I was writing in code, and assigned several of the agency’s top cryptographers to decipher the “true meaning” of my reports. After spending literally hundreds of man-hours on the task it was their collective (and, to my mind, somewhat ungenerous) professional opinion that I was, indeed, not a national security threat, but rather, simply a “whiny, self-absorbed asshole with too much fucking time on his hands”.

A break in the case came for Flatbush the previous week when I’d used the entire text of my report to discuss and rate the quality of shopping opportunities available in Tupelo and its surrounding suburbs. So proud of this discussion was I that I’d submitted the very same report (altered, of course, to include my own name rather than my rat cognomen) to the Tupelo Sun, who, being understandably impressed, reprinted large portions of the commentary in the newspaper’s Sunday Calendar section. I, of course, received a byline! The correlation between my “secret” report and the newspaper article somehow came to Flatbush’s attention. Armed with this Rosetta Stone, Flatbush set about to discover who I was, where I worked and how he could most efficiently engineer my arrest. As it turned out he was actually in Tupelo that morning to meet with the Director and discuss the details of the high stakes, multi-level sting operation he’d initiated to capture me, turn me (again with the turning, what is it with these guys?) and use me (what else is to be done with me after a good turning?) to apprehend my network of accomplices. Apparently I caught him off guard in the reception hall and when I shot him the goofy Gomer Pyle grin he panicked and, doing what any sensible federal agent would do when greeted in a warm and courteous manner, drew his weapon.

At its beginning the interrogation went poorly, and in the initial hours, as Flatbush pounded on the table and called me all manner of unpleasant names, I became convinced that I would spend the next 15 years of my life in a compound on Guantanamo Bay. Flatbush was invested in his paranoid theory and would not be moved from it. I, he maintained, was a secret agent for the Chinese government who’d infiltrated Cal Tech and passed along to my patrons all the sensitive information available to me in my capacity as a janitor. When Earl discovered my affiliation with the Asian menace, Flatbush’s theory continued, I executed him, and then avoided capture by becoming an Astronaut and flying off into outer space to mop up vomit on the International Space Station. Why this harebrained notion seemed more reasonable than the truth – that I was homeless Doctor of African Studies who was recruited by a now dead FBI agent to infiltrate NASA and was thus, shot off into space – is beyond me. Yet Flatbush clung to his theory stubbornly . . . pathologically.

The tide turned when, half way through the second day, a new team of interrogator’s arrived from Washington to support the now exhausted Flatbush. Thoroughly briefed, yet understandably skeptical, they attempted to carry on with Flatbush’s passion the same line of questioning pursued by my nemesis. The wind slowly leached from their sails as the manifest absurdity of Flatbush’s suppositions became as apparent to them as they were to me. “This is stupid,” announced one of the new interrogators to his partner half way through our session. Four hours later his exhausted partner concurred, pronouncing Flatbush’s case an “an idiotic pile of crap”. About this time Flatbush returned to my little cell, rested, refreshed and ready to tear into me. As a matter of good form the new investigators retired, leaving me for another 12 hours to the tender mercies of my demented tormentor. When they returned to find that Flatbush had not progressed one inch in the support of his claims, the replacement investigators quietly pulled him aside and instructed him to return with all possible speed to Washington. With Flatbush gone the new team allowed me to sleep for a few hours and then resumed their questioning. The tone of this interview was far more courteous and productive than our earlier sessions, and I explained to this sweetly reasonable duo every little thing that had happened to me from the date of my high school graduation until that very morning. They asked a few questions, but mostly just sat there with dumbfounded expressions on their faces as I recounted how it came to be that I was an Astronaut. At the end of this session the pair politely thanked me for my cooperation and offered, quite kindly, to drive me home.

It is my understanding the Flatbush is still with the FBI, and works as a field agent in bureau’s Boise office. His job, I hear, is processing asylum applications for foreign defectors requesting Idaho as their state of relocation. The former Director of Flight Operations at NASA is now retired, and tends orchids in a zero gravity hothouse in Shreveport. My father is well and, having been forcibly retired from the tire plant last June, now supplements his income by swing shift work at the 7-11 around the corner of his retirement home. He complains that the work is boring and that he’s perpetually exhausted, and I’ve suggested that he consider enrolling in college so that he might get a degree and thereby do a better job serving slurpees to the drug addicts who appear at his store in the middle of the night seeking refreshment.

Earl, as I’ve already mentioned, was dead.

For my part, I am still with NASA and am scheduled to take my seventh shuttle flight in April. Understandably, following my interviews with the FBI there was quite a bit of discussion among the top executives within the space agency as to my future with the program. Oddly, there seemed to be a certain element within this august group who felt that I should be immediately terminated (I’ve always assumed that by this, they meant my employment). Still, when it became clear that should the truth of my odyssey become public information the fact that NASA had spent over $ 25 million dollars training me to be an Astrojanitor and then launching me into space just because a lone FBI agent said so might prove embarrassing for the beleaguered bureaucracy. Thus is was deemed wise to keep me close to NASA’s bosom, and in exchange for a binding non-disclosure agreement and a promise not to prosecute the former Director of Flight Operations for his assault on me with a rubber hose I was granted a small monetary gift and allowed to keep my job (complete with scheduled missions on the shuttle).

I recently stumbled across the Blogspot web page and saw in it an opportunity to share my story in a forum which, as I am certain no one will ever read this, does not violate the provisions of my non-disclosure agreement. So to you blog-loving phantom’s who will never visit this website, welcome, and for you young people who’ve made it this far remember, go to college so that someday you too can serve slurpees in outer space! It has been brought to my attention that this "About Me" section is a little long and, without paragraph breaks, difficult to read, and I'm curious whether anyone has actually read this to the end. So, as an experiment, I'll pay $ 10 to the first person who reads this and emails me back with the answer to the following question - What is Lloyd's nickname for Ethel?

All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 by Robert Owen