Kay 🌠

like you don't NEED to subject yourself to this

Portrait of a Sunflower

Paint the reality you want to see. Paint the dead flowers back to life.

He returns one night to his humble apartment, which is known to have vermin, and comes across a rat, which he could easily kill or set loose on the street.

But the rat- it is special. It seems to speak to him. Promises him every little thing he desires- talent, fame, and fortune. Recognition and esteem like he has only ever seen from afar; fine company like the wealthy men and women whose scraps he picks at over the sink.

Put me on your head, the rat says. Put me on your head and think of nothing.

It is strange at first, yes. Strange to feel another take control of his life and live it better than he ever could. To see miraculous things created with his own two hands, to feel his feet move in graceful and fantastic ways with a confidence he has never had.

But the rat delivers as he had promised: he receives promotions, notoriety, admiration. He is noticed. Envied. Every day is a waking dream, rubbing elbows with beautiful women and handsome men and influential personalities who lavish him with praise. It is addictive, this lifestyle- never mind that he is only ever truly conscious of it as a passenger of in own brain.

It is when he has reached heights few can ever conceive, with all that the rat had ever promised- a beautiful wife in a beautiful house with all the world in his palm, in possession of all the wealth and success a man could ever want, that the rat says that it is leaving.

Leaving? The rat cannot leave. Everything he is, the rat has provided.

"I have delivered on our bargain", the rat says. "I have brought to you all that you have ever dreamed. What more could you desire? I must live my own life, now."

The man is furious. He is terrified. He destroys the rat, in all of the ways that a rat can be destroyed, until nothing is left of it but a fine smear of marinara sauce.

He returns to the restaurant the next day moving like the shell of something hollowed-out and brittle. He cooks well- his fingers remember the movements, his eyes recognize the patterns, his mouth knows without his asking what orders to speak and what platitudes make patrons smile pleasantly with their straight white teeth.

He retains the talents of the rat. The charm of the rat. All the worldly pleasures the rat had provided him.

Still, it seems, he is little more than a vessel for the talents of the rat.

But the rat is gone.

The Earth does not exist in a bubble. It’s part of a dynamic and ever-evolving solar system, and galaxy and universe. He have to look at the earth in that context to be able to know and care for it. To care for a planet, we have to know how planets work. When doctors treat patients they look at the medical record, they look at family history, they look at symptoms and compare them to known diseases to find a diagnosis.

How did the earth form? What was it like in the past? Why did it change? That’s the medical record.

We’ve got the earths siblings in the neighborhood. Why is Mars a frozen desert? Why is Venus a molten hell scape? Could those things happen here? That’s the family history.

What kinds of things are floating around our neighborhood? Could they affect us? All this is necessary to diagnose the Earths problem, to anticipate the direction it’s going, and to help it heal.

a magnetar is a type of neutron star that we still know very little about, except that they exist. Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of stars that are about ~8x the mass of our sun or more after they've gone supernova - they're so tightly condensed that if they collapsed any more they'd be a black hole. They can range in size from 10-20km (6-13mi) miles across, but despite being so small they still retain nearly 1.5x the mass of the Sun, so one teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh like. One million tons on earth. Like, 900x the weight of the great pyramid of Giza or smth similarly nuts.

The gravity of these things alone is insane, but magnetars have another layer of weirdness to them that you can probably guess from the name - their magnetic fields are INSANELY powerful. Like. Remember, these things are roughly the size of Brooklyn, NY, but if you stuck a magnetar halfway between the earth and the moon - and you'd have to line the earth up about 30 times over to reach the moon btw, she's far away - the magnetic field would wipe every credit card on earth. If you were plopped down within as many as 600 miles (~966km) of a magnetar, the magnetic forces would be enough to immediately disintegrate every single atom in your body. (For context, that's about the length of the coastline of Great Britain from the northernmost tip of Scotland to the southernmost tip of England.) They also spin so fast they complete one full rotation about every two to ten seconds, which, believe it or not, is SLOW for a neutron star.

We know they exist because we've found about 30 of them total now, but we don't know much about how/why they form or how long they stay magnetars for because, well...we've only found about 30 of them so far. (By comparison we've found about a couple thousand other neutron stars.)

“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”

She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past