at the heart of :: the matriarchal :: matrix

   sh0n gRub   reporting  from his orbit about the  heart of the galaxy 

Take a quick glance  at   this    GREEN MAN   at the center of our Milky Way galaxy for a sec.  It’s the 2022 MeerKAT radio mosaic of the Milky Way’s center, processed by astronomer Ian Heywood and released by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). Only I colorized it green, see.  And I tilted it vertically.  Which really remains meaningless, meaning meaningful, if you see what I mean.  

     I mean, there's no direction in space, so I just wanted to emphasize the pregnant hierophant with a head like Alf holding it's arms out crossed and what appears to be a highlit blue egg in its uterus.   There's a lotta  wicker-wack lashing whipstrands of turbulent activity seemingly captured in this image.  Those are magnetized radio filaments, supernova remnants, stellar nurseries and portions of enormous radio bubbles extending above and below the galactic plane.  Pretty gnarly, huh?  Here's the image as I found it online: 

Image: I. Heywood/SARAO

   See now our super dimensional view of this region at the heart of our galaxy can be seen as the MeerKAT intended:  Red indicates strong radio emission; weaker emissions appear in grayscale.  The finished mosaic combines 20 observations, approximately 200 hours of telescope time and 70 terabytes of raw data.   Of course our Earth and Sun occupy the observational viewpoint behind this image.  That yellow eyelet indicates the Sagittarius A region containing Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole. 

     If you want to interpret that small orange yellow luminous patch as an eye, it would be staring right back at us here on Earth.   If you're wondering how much space this area takes, it's far less than 1% of the Milky Way—probably on the order of a few thousandths of one percent by projected area. The entire MeerKAT image covers only the central region of the galaxy—roughly 1,000–1,400 light-years in extent—while the Milky Way’s stellar disk is approximately 100,000 light-years across.   The whole rectangular field on display here  represents only around 0.01–0.03% of the galaxy’s projected disk area.

   The visualization is mapping radio brightness, not showing everything that exists there.  If you're wondering what size in relation to the yellow "eyelet fetus" kernel in the center the black hole within may be, it's far less than a single pixel within it, extremely miniscule by contrast as visualized on this scale.    Plasma and electromagnetic fields are indispensable to the observable universe. They govern stellar atmospheres, solar winds, jets, accretion disks, radiation, charged-particle acceleration and many features in this very MeerKAT image. Galactic magnetic fields extend across enormous distances, and the Sun’s heliosphere interacts with the surrounding interstellar medium.

   At the heart of the Milky Way, matter falls inward while radiation, magnetism and charged particles surge outward, contributing to a galactic circulation whose complete reach and significance remain imperfectly understood.  I've been researching this because this image has fascinated me more than anything since the Hubble revealed the Carina Nebula Panorama (which I wrote about in my first foray of experimental gravitational lensing poetry, on the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction).  I wrote a short flash fiction sequel to that one, based on an expanded and higher resolution image of the Carina Nebula, which never ended up getting published on the Freezine, something I've been meaning to rectify ever since. 

    Now that this MeerKAT Man, or WoMan as the case may be, has been revealed, this Matriarchal Matrix incubating a motha- freakin'  BLACK HOLE at the center of our universe - for all we know, the True Womb of our Creation  - a Paradoxical Phenomenon which Births Itself - )?(as in the ancient Hebrew wisdom that signifies God being created along with the universe) after having emerged from the utter nonbeing of the void which we cannot possibly wrap our minds around or understand -  [except as  AIN SVP AVR {Ain Soph Aur =  the negatively existent One; the limitless Expansion; the illimitable Light} - of which only a dim conception may be formed] - now that we can SEE some of it - as radio emissions - we can close our eyes and let our minds connect the dots.  What do you think it all means? 

  Gaze deep into the heart of our galaxy:

Less than a pinprick of a pixel in the center of 

this yellow mass lies a super massive black hole 

Sagittarius A contains Sagittarius A* (and Sagittarius A* 

identifies the black hole w/its immediate radiating surrounds)

s|x sHades

by sh0n gRub 

 for  John Shirley 

of darkening black gathering intensity as it forms the cloud polluting the eye that scans over the horizon to see what comes next seven blades of circumstance arranged in a flowering scale dripping diamond mercury drops in a stitch work buffeting a gale driven between gulfs sparked in the albumen of cold dark outer space while eight shadows stagger across this permutation still taking place and all nine entwined molecular chains separate into three trinities combined while we emerge from the tenth portal to find one packed homestead open to infinity dividing in twain to face each other off in a battle of tempestuous love giving birth to the third elemental which time will double into six other shades of blackened darkness gathering

The Jigsaw Garden (Until We're All Blue)

  by Sh0n Grub  

   how dare   you take the one thing  

  they have left to play with 

 away from them with your 

sodden, rotten old justified self,

  die already. 

  just because you forgot the secret 

children have kept safe guarded

in their eyes for ever now 

  

      we can play inconspicuously

 in an innocent dance with death 

   until we're all blue in the face from

  failing to hold our breath   

doesn't mean the rest of us have 

  forgotten how to pirouette 

   with our shadows in time 

   or to court our own silhouettes

and how our relationships with

  the singularity and the apocalypse 

  as far as we can tell remain all 

  too personal to be believed 

  yet take one good long glance

   in our eyes and see if we don't 

  already, here and now caught up

  in the dead center crosshairs 

  of the world wide web, stare right

    back at you with full blown pupils

    caught up in skepticism and  

   belief in equal measure 

poised on the very threshold 

  of the expanding cosmos while

 you lie back in clueless abandon

  riding the waves of your status quo 

and we summon the courage to go

  ahead and believe any way, anyhow

 how dare you even acknowledge us 

  or our shadows slipping by in the gutter

  don't you know anything anymore 

 in this age of digital information 

  cramming your feeds until blind

 sided with your favorite subscriptions 

hush now don't you say goodbye 

   it would be a superfluous gesture

  considering we were never properly

 introduced in the first place 

  go on your way and we'll go on our own 

   it may appear we're all here in this

   together from where you perch on high

  but trust me this here's the smack dab center

of the Myriadverse, the wild spoked

  chrome hub of eternal recurrence

 intermittent superimposed and juxta-

 positioned origami blossoming 

 while we squat on the surface tension

   of this beckoning Jigsaw Garden 

  the weight of your convictions 

 sinks you far more rapidly into compost 

as we imagine in our hammocks 

   slung up above the water spiders  

  dreaming with the moccasins and lilies

  letting the rain clean the grime off our faces 

  

  

   

   

  illustrated by hand with magic 

markers on glossy photopaper    

 

   

   

Borderline Verging on the Threshold to Touch Upon the Immediate

 by your dedicated rogue correspondent Sh0n Grub (reporting for the Oscillating Oculus)

Tarzan the Mouse creeps up on a vine outside our window looking to get in the house

   Let's face it friends and sitters, dreamers and quitters, if any of y'all are getting an inkling of what I'm about to talk about, you're as stoked as I am for the incoming tidal shift of the innocuous sea change undermining the corruption calving icebergs of this desperado administration that's plowed through the old grand party like a mammoth in a China shop, wrecking more than just the economy and all our relations worldwide and setting a major tectonic paradigm shift I doubt even the Old Gods saw coming, and if they did they're left as clueless as the rest of us.   

 

    Despite my having foreseen the technological singularity advancing at geometrically enhanced stages of rapidity long ago (and written extensively about it enough to fill a 2-volume book) on the tails of absorbing 2009's Transcendent Man (about Ray Kurzweil) it's still monumentally shocking by how wide a margin I  (and I'd wager everyone else, frankly) missed the mark as to just how its manifestation would impact sending ripples through the fabric of our world (to the point its got everyone thinking there's something to the Mandela Effect and Hadron Collider theories having wrenched us into an alternate reality).  

    Let me simplify the truth of it for us.  As a matter of fact, there ain't nothin' supernatural or unusual about how we actually did get shifted from being on track to a better reality than we have today.  It's called the DNC throwing the good senator of Vermont under the bus ten years ago just so they could "fast track" their first female presidential candidate.  For reasons we'll never possibly know, Deborah Wasserman Schulz and even Hillary Herself didn't or couldn't SEE the simple, slightly-longer term strategy of prioritizing Sanders for a two-term election, so that it would pave the way surely for Hillary to successfully become president in 2024.  

   This remains a plain and simple explanation for where we're at today, folks.  Because obviously, the DNC decided the moment was hot and they had to strike right there and then, and democratic socialism be damned (as if they didn't understand the all too blue and American as apple pie benefits of what democratic socialism actually means).  Whatever their reasoning, it wasn't sound as near as I can tell, and look what it brought 'em (and the rest of us dumbfounded American dipshits).  DJT came roarin' in, seeing his window of opportunity to crawl into the White House and start fleecing the People every which way from Sunday. 

    Sure it's a tragedy, and if you ask me I can only sit back with a sigh and consider that we must've deserved this.  After all, it happened, and just like those prone to conspiracy-think are spinning in their heads faster than ever now, he did it again to become Forty-Seven.  Thought we were gonna stick a fork in it last year, well think again.  And now the real damage and corrosion to our democratic institutions has begun, in earnest.  As of this morning, we have none other than Todd Blanche narrowly voted in as US Attorney General.  How on Earth do you like them apples.  You thought Pam Bondi was bad, well we just got dipped in corrosive and unholy waters of Hell one inch deeper, enough to burn the downy hairs off our jewel sacs, each and every last one of us.  

    Like they say, "It's in God's hands now," and while there's plenty of evidence mounting each and every day that there Is No God in reality, it begs the question in my mind, then what unlikely forces of holy divinity stretched out across the spacetime continuum that account for this vast equilibrium suspending the starry night over our heads since the days we were born WILL balance out this shitty equation unfolding before our eyes?  Some call it Karma, I like to think of it as Luck, but with a catch.  And that's the fact that so-called "luck" ain't necessarily good; there's bad luck, too.  So it's like a mythical Buffalo Nickel getting tossed in the air, and we sit back and pray hope or wish it comes down "heads," assuming that's a good thing. 

   I'm a Taurus so I tend to think so.  I used to believe in Karma, what about you?  Yeah I know, don't bother answering, Karma's real sure, but what's reality?  That's the great unanswered question despite the fact we've been breathing it, seeing it, hearing it and tasting it, smellin' it and feeling it and living it since the days we were each born.  That's reality for us, ain't no question about it.  Only that we've been asking the wrong questions our whole lives.  So you know what I think?  It's about time we stop asking questions, and just be grateful for what we've been given, and what we do have, while we have it.  Time ain't runnin' out on nobody, we're the ones runnin' out.  We'll be runnin' out the door and soon enough, out of each other's lives, because we all know deep inside that the good ol' Grim Reaper may come for us on any day, at any time, for any reason whatsoever.  So maybe grab that old menu from the DEATH DINER and crack it open for a quick look-see inside.  The specials are on every day, and they’ve never been finer; the doors are open 24/7, and if you skim down the menu, you'll see all the countless forms it may take any single last one of us at any living second.  But here we are, all the same. 

      Kick back and read yourself a good book, or listen to an album you haven't pulled off your record shelf in a good long while.  Maybe go outside and...nevermind. I forgot it's likely 105 degrees Fahrenheit out there, regardless of where you are.  Stay indoors then, and be thankful you can still get yourself a glass of water.  At least for the time being, anyway. 

    

   

There he goes on down the vine outside our house the mighty Tarzan the Mouse

Don't Panic, It’s Just the Cosmos: Calibrating Our Reality Settings in an Age of Clickbait

  by your dedicated rogue correspondent Sh0n Grub (reporting for the Oscillating Oculus)

Einstein Crater region near the Moon's northwestern limb 

Source: Sergey Kuznetsov / Getty Images

    By now we've all been sideswiped against the calcified inner walls of this cavernous metropolis of hollow hallways so many times, it's a wonder we're still conscious.   Well I'm here with our latest update on the state of our natural world and existence, brought to you with the same unflinching and deadpan seriousness and stunning degree of impartial fact-checking you've come to appreciate over the years here at DUMZINE.  

    You know you can count on me to bring you the facts and nothing but the facts, and not only that, to preserve them with their proper sense of context.  It's a big world we all dwell upon. So big, in fact, that the reality of it exceeds all of our expectations, and that's something you can come to count on.  Let me give you an example.  

   About twelve hours ago, at approximately  12:35 AM Mountain Time, a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage brought an end to its 18-month orbital drift by striking the lunar surface near Einstein Crater at roughly 5,400 mph. Originally launched in January 2025 to boost two lunar landers into deep space, the four-ton, school-bus-sized piece of hardware exhausted its fuel and became an unguided satellite. Over the past year and a half, a complex push-and-pull of solar radiation pressure and gravitational perturbations slowly warped its orbit until its path finally intersected with the Moon, leaving behind a fresh, 15-meter crater, and adding one more tiny human mark to the quiet surface.

    Let's put this in perspective.  To put that spent booster into true physical context, consider the natural bombardments that have shaped the Moon for billions of years: while the Falcon 9 stage weighed roughly four metric tons and hit at a lethargic  5,400  mph, average space rocks strike the lunar crust at ten times that speed, with high-velocity comets reaching   speeds up to  160,000  mph! Even a modest iron meteoroid weighing a few dozen pounds delivers vastly more explosive kinetic energy than our four-ton piece of space junk.  At the absolute extreme end of cosmic violence sit titan-class impacts like the one that carved out the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Formed roughly four billion years ago by an asteroid estimated at over  100  kilometers  in diameter, that single collision excavated a colossal crater roughly  2,500  kilometers (1,550  miles) across and over 8 kilometers deep:  a scar wide enough to span half the continental United States. Next to all the multi-kilometer basins and millions of natural craters dotting the surface of our moon, a human booster carving out a temporary 15-meter pockmark doesn't even qualify as a drop in the ocean; it's a microscopic fraction of a droplet, not even worthy of measurement against the colossal and scarred satellite which we take for granted as the moon. 

   Look, I'm trying to tell y'all something, here.  Do you remember back in 2018, when that volcano went off in Hawaii?  Kīlauea erupted along the Lower East Rift Zone on Hawaii’s Big Island, sending relentless rivers of lava surging down into the Puna District near the coast. Between May and August, the flows swallowed entire neighborhoods—demolishing 716 homes, displacing thousands of people, and completely reshaping the shoreline as molten rock poured straight into Kapoho Bay. It served as a stark, violent reminder of what real geological muscle actually looks like when the Earth decides to reshape itself.  Except for one thing: despite the extent of the damage, and in no way, shape or form do I intend to diminish that, it must be understood in its proper context and scale.  Online articles almost always work as "power presentations," invariably showing a map of the Big Island, and a large "X" or "O" to mark the spot, a circle on the map designating where the volcano is located.  And always, these graphics drastically exaggerate the true proportions into something that gets translated in our heads into hundreds of thousands of times greater than it really is.  Because if we were to have taken the trouble to identify the square miles size of the area around the volcano itself, including the neighboring homes that were devastated, we would find it to be barely a pixel on the extreme edge of the map of the island.  

    Let's face it.  It's time for us reasoning and reasonable human beings subject to the whims of the internet to adjust our "reality knobs" to calibrate with the actual scale of places and events in our lives.  And the truth remains.  We not only dwell in cities that are bigger,  in counties that are much larger than we'd typically imagine; in states whose dimensions exceed our ordinary expectations, but comparatively speaking, to states such as Texas, and then Alaska which happens to be more than twice its size, we human beings dwell on a planet so much vaster and larger than we're ordinarily capable of appreciating, well it goes without saying that our moon itself is so much farther away and larger than we really know, and that's just the start of it.  

   The distances between our planet and Venus, Mercury, and the Sun; and the distance between us and Mars, and the asteroid belt, and Jupiter, not to mention the remaining three gas giants, all the way out to Neptune, just happens to be on a scale so much greater than we are normally wont to consider, that if we were to be exposed to the actual ratios and distances, it would more than stagger our minds, it would leave us stunned bordering on miscomprehension, and that's not even leaving our solar system yet.  

   My point remains sharp and focused, as lucid as a cricket hopping outside in your yard, as serrated as a blade of grass zoomed in upon in all its intricate and glorious organic machination.  We exist in a world whose intricacy and  size  so outstrips our everyday, normal default setting of perception that I want you all to consider what the ramifications of this may be.  It's simple, really.   Howard Phillips Lovecraft famously wrote, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."  

   Well I have a somewhat extraordinary inverse view to that outlook.  For me, the fantastical and bordering on supernatural size and complexity of the cosmos begs a different reaction.  It becomes the ultimate source of reassurance.  Because we were all born into this life however many years of age we each happen to be.  For me, it's bordering on sixty years.  Yet here I still am, wondering at the vast complexity and miraculous nature of our existence.  You see, don't you, as I do, that the absurdly enormous distances between our planets and Sun and neighboring stars in our galaxy are all linked together by electromagnetic forces we simply have barely even the slightest clue about, don't you?  There's a certain amount of scientific faith one may become vested in, considering the totality of that scale. 

   And I'm here to tell you, breathe in . . .  breathe out . . . everything we read online  (and I do mean everything without exception) regarding world events and natural calamities gets amped up and blown out of proportion so radically off base from the true and actual context in reality that we are more often than not click-baited into feeling inordinately more anxiety and discomfort than might be allocated for us, when you stop and think about it for a few sobering moments.  This has been your daily announcement from DUMZINE to get us all to breathe a little easier and try not to succumb to the disproportional and sensationalist news bait articles vying for our attention.  Instead, sit back and relax and try to enjoy your time here, if even for an hour or two.  If we train our minds to stay on track with this reality, we might even enjoy a perpetual feeling of peacefulness and relaxation, knowing that the miracle of our existence remains something we'll never fully understand, so why not let it all go and enjoy the ride?