The Fewer & Far Between

  by yr reporter yet roving in the land of the living  sh0n gRub  

       All my old dead friends of a long lost lifetime appear to have since slipped into a sort of gray subtext that I can’t quite place into words, but it seems as if they have been subsumed into the sparser population of fewer friends that I have left—these newer friends who didn’t even know my older friends that died. It’s almost as if my old pals' ghosts haunt this side by adhering, on a strange molecular level, to wherever it is my spirit touches.

   For example, my best friend Greg. I think of him after he passed on in 2018—soon to be nine years—and I feel that his spirit lingers here in my mind. It’s a common theme when we lose those close to us, friends and family, behind. But I feel there’s a new way of haunting, augmented by the digital world due to our interactions with people online. There are many on the World Wide Web that I have known for decades, including some I’ve never met in person, and I know they are real, even if our relationship occurs in an uncanny way. I feel somehow that those I’ve known who died have been subsumed into the fewer of us who’ve been left behind, here on this other side. 

   It leads me to wonder, for example, if my fondly remembered best friend hasn’t accreted somehow into some of my current friends—and what the difference is between that notion and my superimposing him onto others, almost as a self-fulfilling wish-prophecy—or if it’s just my strong desire that my dearest buddy hadn’t died and was still here to listen to me; for us to share our strange ideas the way we used to, always on the same wavelength, after having left me with the need to have someone else fill that role.

   It makes me wonder. To what extent exactly do those who have passed remain here with us? In what ways do the dead continue to linger here among us, the living?

   I can’t help but feel they don’t just haunt decrepit, empty buildings and abandoned homes the way all the familiar ghost stories showed us, so much as they fill our bodies—our blood vessels and plasma, the neurons in our brains—possessing our spirit, so to speak. Engendering a sort of displacement with the dead.  

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