Up on melancholy hill
There’s a plastic tree
Are you here with me?
Just looking out on the day
Of another dream
Well you can’t get what you want
But you can get me
So let’s set up and see
‘Cause you are my medicine
When you’re close to me
When you’re close to me
So call in the submarine
‘round the world we’ll go
Does anybody know
If we’re looking out on the day
Of another dream?
If you can’t get what you want
Then you come with me
Up on melancholy hill
A manatee?
Just looking out on the day
When you’re close to me
When you’re close to me
When you’re close to me
Super Moon? How About a Super Sun!
“On May 5, 2012, while everyone else was waiting for the “Super Moon” astrophotographer Alan Friedman was out capturing this super image of a super Sun from his back yard in Buffalo, NY!
Taken with a specialized telescope that can image the Sun in hydrogen alpha light, Alan’s photo shows the intricate detail of our home star’s chromosphere — the layer just above its “surface”, or photosphere.
Prominences can be seen rising up from the Sun’s limb in several places, and long filaments — magnetically-suspended lines of plasma — arch across its face. The “fuzzy” texture is caused by smaller features called spicules and fibrils, which are short-lived spikes of magnetic fields that rapidly rise up from the surface of the Sun.
On the left side it appears that a prominence may have had just detached from the Sun’s limb, as there’s a faint cloud of material suspended there.”
Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening around him, decided, finally, to off himself. There was no problem in the circles where he hung out in putting an end to yourself. You just bought a large quantity of downers and took them with some cheap wine. The planning part had to do with the artifacts he wanted found on him by later archeologists. He had spent several days deciding, much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and an unfinished letter to Exxon, protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way, he would indite the system, and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved. At the last moment, he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the pills with a connoisseur wine, instead of Ripple or Thunderbird. So he set off on one last drive, over to Tiny’s Liquors, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 2001 Azalea Springs Merlot, which set him back almost seventy dollars. Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, and then, with a glass of Merlot, gulped down all the pills at once. However, he had been burned. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed, looking down at him disapprovingly.
Freck: “You gonna read me my sins? - Eh, it’s gonna take a hundred thousand hours…”
Creature: “Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.”
Charles Freck wished he could take back the last half hour of his life.
Creature: “Charles Freck Sins: “… theft of fingernail clippers…” “… you did knowingly and with malice…” “… punched your baby sister, Evelyn…” “… December, theft of Christmas presents…” “… one billion lies…”
One thousand years later, they had reached the sixth grade, the year he had discovered masturbation.
Creature: “… November fourteenth, Percodan… Vicodin… Cocaine…”
Charles Freck thought, “At least I got a good wine.”
— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
