Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Trajectories

I don't know if it a factor of aging, but I do seem to drop a lot of things" coffee beans, keys, pills, change. I almost never drop breakable things fortunately. What i am noticing in this dropping syndrome, is that these things have this trajectory thing going on. I can drop something straight  down, like a lead balloon straight-downess, but somehow the dropped item seems do have a life of its own. I never can find anything by looking straight down. You can have clues, like the ping on a hard surface or the fwump on a soft surface, but if there's a scrritch of a rolling object all is lost. Almost everything manages to roll, even square things, at least in my experience. Or maybe they hop.
Has it always been thus? Maybe the earth is turning too fast, thus throwing off all logic  in the retrieval of fallen things by quickly spinning and carrying objects along to a new place. I drop a pill in the bathroom, f'rinstance, straight down. However, it is finally discovered in a far corner, one that I haven't dusted lately unless I've had company recently. I drop a coffee bean in the kitchen and find it in the hall. I drop a bracelet right next to my dresser and it ends up under my bed across the room.
Once when I was visiting my sister in Corning, N,Y. and we were walking down town, she met an acquaintance, chatted briefly and when we moved on she told me he was a blood splatter expert who had testified in the O.J. Simpson murder case. A blood splatter expert! A specialty for the high tech age. So I an wondering if out there  we might find a fallen object expert who could tell where that object might fall, as surely there is some sort of trajectory pattern not unlike the pattern of blood splatter. I mean, there's gotta be some sort of physics involved here, like Newton's Law. I know that somewhere there is a nerdy doctoral student working on a dissertation about this, perhaps a scatter theory. I'd be happy to be in the experimental group.

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