Universal Emptiness @universal-emptiness - Tumblr Blog

One of the most dangerous pictures ever taken - Elephant’s Foot, Chernobyl. This is a photo of a now dead man next the ‘Elephant’ Foot’ at the Chernobyl power plant.

The image distortions in the photo are created by intense level of radiation almost beyond comprehension. There is no way the person in this photo and the person photographing him could have survived for any more that a few years after being there, even if they quickly ran in, took the photos and ran out again. This photo would be impossible to take today as the rates of radioactive decay are even more extreme now due to a failed military experiment to bomb the reactor core with neuron absorbers. The foot is made up of a small percentage of uranium with the bulk mostly melted sand, concrete and other materials which the molten corium turns into a kind of lava flow. In recent years, it has destroyed a robot which tried to approach it, and the last photos were taken via a mirror mounted to a pole held at the other end of the corridor for a few seconds. It is almost certainly the most dangerous and unstable creation made by humans. These are the effects of exposure: 30 seconds of exposure - dizziness and fatigue a week later 2 minutes of exposure - cells begin to hemorrhage (ruptured blood vessels) 4 minutes - vomiting, diarrhea, and fever 300 seconds - two days to live

atomic-chronoscaph

Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979)

Jim Harrison

#jimharrison

rhetthammersmithhorror

#coffee #espresso #stovetop #moka pot #bialetti #alpine #hat coffee #novelty coffee equipment

Solstice Litany

BY JIM HARRISON 1 The Saturday morning meadowlark came in from high up with her song gliding into tall grass still singing. How I'd like to glide around singing in the summer then to go south to where I already was and find fields full of meadowlarks in winter. But when walking my dog I want four legs to keep up with her as she thunders down the hill at top speed then belly flops into the deep pond. Lark or dog I crave the impossible. I'm just human. All too human.

2 I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah. The hem of his robe was as wide as the horizon and his trunk and face were thousands of feet up in the air. Maybe he appeared because I had read him so much and opened too many ancient doors. I was cooking my life in a cracked clay pot that was leaking. I had found secrets I didn't deserve to know. When the battle for the mind is finally over it's late June, green and raining.

3 A violent windstorm the night before the solstice. The house creaked and yawned. I thought the morning might bring a bald earth, bald as a man's bald head but not shiny. But dawn was fine with a few downed trees, the yellow rosebush splendidly intact. The grass was all there dotted with Black Angus cattle. The grass is indestructible except to fire but now it's too green to burn. What did the cattle do in this storm? They stood with their butts toward the wind, erect Buddhists waiting for nothing in particular. I was in bed cringing at gusts, imagining the contents of earth all blowing north and piled up where the wind stopped, the pile sky-high. No one can climb it. A gopher comes out of a hole as if nothing happened.

4 The sun should be a couple of million miles closer today. It wouldn't hurt anything and anyway this cold rainy June is hard on me and the nesting birds. My own nest is stupidly uncomfortable, the chair of many years. The old windows don't keep the weather out, the wet wind whipping my hair. A very old robin drops dead on the lawn, a first for me. Millions of birds die but we never see it—they like privacy in this holy, fatal moment or so I think. We can't tell each other when we die. Others must carry the message to and fro. "He's gone," they'll say. While writing an average poem destined to disappear among the millions of poems written now by mortally average poets.

5 Solstice at the cabin deep in the forest. The full moon shines in the river, there are pale green northern lights. A huge thunderstorm comes slowly from the west. Lightning strikes a nearby tamarack bursting into flame. I go into the cabin feeling unworthy. At dawn the tree is still smoldering in this place the gods touched earth.

#solstice #poem #poetry #poet #jimharrison #tamarack #meadowlark #lightning #june #birds #rosebush #yellowroses #buddhists #windstorm #isaiah #theprophetisaiah #secrets #clay #claypot

50 years ago today, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

#Dock Ellis #baseball #lsd

gothicpunk

DONNA TARTT, LETTER TO JONATHAN LETHEM, DATED JANUARY 24, 1983 (DURING WINTER BREAK): I am now in Washington with The Man [Paul McGloin]. We have a nice little apartment in an old townhouse near Capitol Hill and all is well. . . . The raciest thing that’s happened to us was when we overheard a museum guard in the National Gallery mutter, “More faggots” as we walked into the room. (I was wearing a baggy sweater and trousers, no makeup, and my customary shapeless gray tweed coat. Perhaps I did look like a boy. . . .) It pleased Paul no end.

#Donna Tartt #Bret Easton Ellis #Jonathan Lethem #Paul McGloin #Bennington #college #homophobia #writers #80s #'80s #1980s #teenagers #books #Esquire

BRET EASTON ELLIS: Looking back, I realize I was popular. At eighteen, I had a handsomeness, and I was kind of groomed, and I was kind of sexy, and I was inundated with date requests and people wanting to take my picture. But inside I was a wreck. And I was alienated because I was a writer, because I was gay. And then there was my crystal-meth addiction. In retrospect, it’s like, Why were you so fucking depressed? It was awesome! Still, people were throwing themselves at me. I had girlfriends, I had boyfriends. I really got around.