About ten years back, as a friend was driving three of us stooges, along for a small desert adventure, I started playing an old audio tape from 1990 that (half-jokingly) claimed my lifelong dream was to go up in space in a lawn chair -tethered by hundreds of helium balloons and a B-B gun for ballast purposes. The friend driving, begin to laughing to the verge of tears. During his spasmodic breathing and convulsions, he could barely see the road and had to reach deep within to not wreck.

Five years later, when the next wave of amateur lawn chair balloonists came into vogue, he called me to tell me other people were achieving my lifelong dream, which started me laughing so hard, I immediately pulled over from driving as a joke-proof preemptive measure.