05 | May | 2023 | MY ENDURING BONES

RDP Friday: ALIGN

There is a school of thought that says when Mars, Venus and Pluto align a certain way in the sky, it affects our lives and our destiny, our creativity and in some cases our electronic devices.

I say if those are the guideposts you look for to get through your day, happy trails.

However, take a look at the surfaces of these planets and bear with me to the end of this post:

This is Venus:

VENUS
Source: NASA/JPL
Published: February 10, 2012
“Crater Farm”

This is Mercury:

North Pole of planet Mercury. This image is a composite.
Original caption: “NASA
The dark region at the center of this image, pieced together from photographs taken by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, includes the north pole of Mercury. Because Mercury’s spin axis is almost exactly vertical, sunlight never reaches the bottoms of craters near the poles, and water ice can persist in the ultra cold temperatures there.

And this is the surface of Pluto:

An image of the bladed terrain of Pluto’s informally named the Tartarus Dorsa region, imaged by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Image Credit: New Horizons.

These worlds would drop you stone cold dead if you managed to make it to their surfaces. They would show you zero mercy and I mean NONE.

To illustrate my point let’s pretend you stood on the surfaces of Mercury, Pluto and Venus with no space suit:

Artist Unknown

Venus has a very dense atmosphere so she would squash you like a bug and then she would vaporize you. You might live for a second on her surface. But by ‘live’ I think that means as long as your heart is pumping and you have a glimmner of brain activity then you are ‘alive’. Venus is clearly not a human friendly world.

Depending on where you landed on Mercury you would either instantly freeze or be turned into a carbon brick ( which is a nice way of saying you’d be roasted ). Mercury has no atmosphere so unlike Venus you wouldn’t get that second to live. Mercury might be little but it has two very distinct ways to kill you, so don’t underestimate its committment to homicide.

As for Pluto- it’s 3.7 billion miles from the Sun. It’s super cold and on top of that Pluto has no magnetic field so radiation would rip your cells apart in seconds. I mean Cell shredding is a grusome way to dispatch a living organism.

Title: George Stubbs, A Horse Affrighted by a Lion, an etching
Date Created: 1777/1777

Speaking strictly for myself, if I were going to chose something to guide me through life and explain the world around me- I wouldn’t look to three worlds who in the grand scheme of things are bloodless killers.

Just think about it the next time you look up and wonder what tomorrow will bring and find that Venus is looking right back at you and it looks like she’s winking.

Daily Writing Prompt: What does freedom mean to you?

When I was about 10 or 11 years old I loved to listen to music.

I had a pretty nice record player and a decent sized collection of 45’s- own your own favorite song for seventy-five cents- what a deal!

Because the records were so inexpensive I could also buy my favorite magazines and posters featuring my favorite bands, so really I did enjoy that hobby.

Right off, I should say I wasn’t one of those wise little kids who was drawn to rock bands where most of the members were as old as my parents. I listened to bands aimed at kids my age- the Osmonds, The Defranco Family. I also loved the Carpenters because I liked Karen’s voice and the fact that she played the drums.

But my favorite band was the Bay City Rollers.

The problem was the older kids I went to school with- including some in my own family went out of their way to tell me how awful they were and a few of them gave me some pretty graphic descriptions about what Gay men did to each other. It was a sickening thing to do then and as an adult I still see their reaction to a bubble gum band and the ten year old girl who liked them to be just as despicable.

To hammer the point home, I was told if I EVER wanted to be a real musician or a REAL rock and roll fan I WAS SUPPOSE TO listen to bands like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones- bands to me who were just old and not fun at all. Plus at the time I didn’t get what they were singing about. On top of that I thought some of them were nasty looking.

Except for Roger Daltrey. He had a nice smile and I liked his hair.

When I became a musician myself and I had a better understanding of music theory and record production I learned that from listener to listener each person was going to hear something different and each reaction may be rooted in the same feeling but that those songs were going to be taken in and processed differently by the listener.

That’s the way the visual arts work too.

To answer today’s question is, what does freedom mean to me, I think I have a good answer.

Now that I am older I have the freedom to listen to anyone I want to listen too. I don’t have to explain my selections to you, the guy in front of me at the lunch counter or my friends. I can just flick through my musical library and listen to Mozart or Abba, I can listen to songs from the Swing Era or the Ramones. And if someone is critical of what I like, I can tell them to Eff-Off with gusto.

When I think about it, that’s what freedom is- doing what brings you happiness without having to stand with your head bowed and explain ” WHY. ”