Escape Velocity - nirgle.net

Oh how I wish I could slip the surly bonds of Earth! If not slip, then at least threaten to temporarily break free. You know, from those oppressive shackles of gravity and these ceaseless laps around the sun. The escape velocity of Earth when standing on its surface is 11.2 km/s, which means that any leap upwards any slower than that, although certainly considered a good try, would ultimately be doomed by math and physics to conclude in an anti-climactic re-entry into the gravity field, and an anti-climactic re-entry into a freefall, albeit a pretty one (imagine the view). Ultimately you would end up back where you started from, likely dead from the attempt, or at least suffering from a small spell of hypoxia for your troubles.

My mother used to lose me a lot when I was an infant. I don't mean lose in the sense that she would bet wrong when gambling me at the horse races; I mean lose in the sense that she would realize I had not been making any noise for several hours and should be checked upon for possible physical maladies such as getting stuck under another bookslide of encyclopedias in the next room. She would pace around the house frantically searching for me, only to find me fast asleep half-way up the stairs. In prose they call this foreshadowing: this is where the world got a quick glimpse at things to come in the future life of me. But did anybody interpret this as symptomatic of impending psychological inclinations? Probably not.

These events happened during my toddler years, and I consider them to be my earliest experiments with escape velocity. Just old enough to crawl, I would see if I could make it all the way up the stairs without falling asleep, oh what an achievement for a one-year old! Up the stairs and off this rock, on to things more exciting and more stimulating than rolling around on the carpet with spittle dribbling slowly from my mouth. Surely I was not simply going upstairs to take a nap? What with so much else to do? But in the end I would get carried up the rest of the way and spend the rest of the afternoon in bed anyway, tucked under the blankets with my glowworm.

Zoom to the present time, pan the camera up a bit. I said up. Up here. No, here. Has it been more than twelve hours since my last sleep? Likely not. At around ten hours of heroic alertness, that's when I start to feel the gravity of sleep again, and then I'm back in the battle: trying to muster up a sufficiently energetic launch from laziness, enough to finally slip the crotchety bonds of my nature, even just for one full orbit of one fully animated day; oh what a treat that would be!