I didn't hear about Neil Armstrong on the news. I heard about it on Twitter, in between a guy complaining about his cable bill and somebody linking a GIF of a cat falling off a couch. That's just how it works now I guess. Saturday afternoon, half-scrolling on my phone while I was supposed to be mowing the lawn, and there it was, three or four people all posting some version of the same thing within about ninety seconds of each other. Neil Armstrong died Saturday, 82 years old, complications from heart surgery he'd had earlier this month. First man to walk on the moon. Gone.
I sat down on the porch steps and just kind of stared at the phone for a minute, which is a weird sentence to type but it's true.
Here's the thing that got me though, and it's a small thing. I went inside and dug through a box in the garage, the one with all my old paperbacks I never got around to putting on a shelf when we moved, and I found my copy of "First Man," the James Hansen biography from 2005. Cover's a little bent, spine's cracked in three places because I read it twice. I bought it used for like six bucks at a library sale years ago and I remember being kind of surprised at how much of the book is Armstrong being almost aggressively private and unsentimental about the whole thing. He wasn't a guy who wanted a parade. There's a bit in there about how he turned down most interview requests for decades, not out of bitterness, just because he genuinely didn't think he was the story. The rocket was the story. The engineers were the story. He was, in his own words more or less, just the guy who happened to be driving.
That's such a weirdly modest way to think about being the single most famous human being to ever do a thing, and it's stuck with me since I first read it.
Anyway I ended up rereading the moon landing chapter that night instead of doing anything productive, which, fine, that's allowed sometimes.
What's been bugging me a little since Saturday is watching the reactions roll in online and noticing how many of them are just template grief. Not from anyone I know personally, to be clear, but you can scroll through the responses to any of the big news accounts and see the same three sentences rearranged over and over. "RIP legend." "End of an era." Somebody always says "we shall never see his like again" like they're auditioning for a Ken Burns documentary. I don't think there's anything wrong with people feeling genuinely moved by this, obviously most of them are, I just find the flattening of it into a template a little depressing to watch happen in real time. It happens with every big death now. It'll happen with the next one too.
NASA put out a statement, the President put out a statement, and honestly both were pretty good and restrained, which given the guy's own personality feels like the right call. There's something appropriate about the most understated astronaut in American history getting a low-key send-off instead of a three-ring circus.
Completely unrelated, or maybe not that unrelated: it's been a genuinely insane week for anyone paying attention to tech and current events at the same time. Friday the jury came back in the Apple/Samsung case with a verdict that's somewhere north of a billion dollars, which is a number I can't really process as a real thing that exists, it just reads as an abstraction at that point, like a sports score for a game I don's follow. And now there's a hurricane sitting off the Gulf Coast messing with the Republican convention schedule down in Tampa. I'm not going to pretend I have anything smart to say about either of those, they're just both sitting in the same news cycle as the Armstrong stuff, which makes for a strange few days to be a person who reads the internet a lot.
I still have Google Reader open in a tab right now with about 40 unread items, half of them Armstrong retrospectives from blogs I don't remember subscribing to. I'm not going to read most of them. I already read the one that mattered to me, and it's got a bent cover and it's sitting on my desk instead of back in that box.