Supermassive (Part the First)
More of my sad, vacant jibberish. Here's part one of something I wrote back in '05.
Supermassive
By Michael J. Sherry
“Elvis Lives.”
* * *
The words are simple. The explanation is not. The truth lies amidst fact, fiction, M-Theory, and a white, diamond-encrusted jumpsuit.
You see, I, Michael Sherry, am a physicist. What is M-Theory? Well, that might be easier to answer if we could discover what “M” is. There’s been much speculation. Membrane. Mother of all theories. Mystery. Madness. I like the last one. Madness. An encompassing sort of word that opens a lot of universal, imaginative, and tangible doors. And it sets a mood, too.
And now I’m going to see the King down at The Big Tree Inn. Doing a gig. Don’t waste my time with your but he died in ’77 horseshit. You can come see this for yourself. What’s more is that – not only is he not dead – but he hasn’t aged a day since ’56. Yes. He’s still that Elvis. Well, he’s aged obviously – but what I mean is he’s still thin, good-looking, and hard rocking. For his age.
I walk in through the backdoor and light a cigarette. There’s a moderate crowd tonight, which is okay because it’s a Friday.
I order a draft and start moving toward the back. There are no tables left, so I’m going to have to kind of stand in a corner. As I step slowly through and around the other patrons I see a hand waving me over.
“Mike, what did you bring your briefcase for?” my good friend and fellow physicist Dr. Jeff Buss asks me.
“Always more work to be done,” I laugh.
We stand and watch the show for a while. It’s energetic for the most part. Dr. Jeff, in particular, is taken with the music. He is, unfortunately, one of those Elvis die-hards – the kind whose record collection is 75% Elvis, and 25% “The Golden 50’s” collections.
Elvis Lives.
Not such a complicated little phrase, but the inference …
Next he’ll … I mean, I’ll be writing all manner of sweeping, swirling expressions. Expressions that aren’t as simple as two words. I mean, two little words and in them worlds of speculation and creation and destruction, and all beyond the ability of the writer to accommodate.
Elvis Lives? What about something like Dragons Eating Humans. Or four words – The Ocean Is Poison. Or five – Hitler With Dark Magic Sorcery. You can see what I’m driving at here. It isn’t the truth or fiction of the words themselves that matters. Because truth does not become fiction and fiction does not become truth. The truth really is that Elvis Lives. Here. I can’t explain it all straight out, but don’t think that he exists because words were written. That is not the case at all. Elvis, you see, has never died. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to remember that I have an audience for this, and that my audience may or may not be privy to the same physics wisdom as myself. In other words – YOU DON’T KNOW ANY OF THIS YET. I need to let the story tell itself.
It would help, of course, if I knew who my audience was in the first place. That is what makes this all so difficult. You see, you might be you, or you might be some electric current, or you might just be a cloud of dust. You might even be me … in some sense. None of this confusion is helping my case. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing.
“That was a hell of a show,” Dr. Jeff says to me later that evening. We’ve relocated to Duff’s for some chicken wings and a few beers. There is an “entertainer” of some variety playing a piano – very familiar songs, only with his own satirically distorted lyrics. And he likes to shout, “NEW PEOPLE!” every time a group walks in the front doors. I feel that he’s a fucking idiot.
I know what Dr. Jeff wants to know. I obviously brought the briefcase for a reason. But I’m not going to explain it all to him just yet.
“Yes, it was quite a show,” I tell him. “Elvis hasn’t lost a step in fifty years.”
“You gotta admire the man,” Dr. Jeff says. “Never sold out. Stayed true to the integrity of his art.”
“NEW PEOPLE!”
“Yes,” I agree. “An artist of the highest sort. Where rock and roll is concerned, that is.”
There is a silence between us for several moments. The piano music is very loud, and the entertainer is doing his version of Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire.
Dr. Jeff, you should know, specializes in Supermassive Black Holes. It is, I admit, an intriguing line of study. Some of them can reach several billion times the mass of the Sun. They sit quietly at the center of every galaxy, spinning rapidly, and chewing up everything that gets pulled into their “event horizon,” a dark, crushing point from which there is no returning. Light, energy, mass – all sucked into a sudden state of nothingness. Fascinating.
“NEW PEOPLE!”
Blinking into darkness. Snap. Just like that. The whole damn galaxy is spinning around the thing. It lends a sense of destiny to things, doesn’t it? You know where you’re going. Not that you’ll be here to see it as such, but the matter that comprises you will be out there in some form or another, floating, swirling, faster and faster, closer and closer, and then … billions and billions and billions of years from now, in some horrifying epoch … the plummet.
Some people find this creepy. I find it comforting. Like pre-obtained closure.
“NEW PEOPLE!”
This is real, I’m afraid. In a universe where so much is a blurred wasteland between fact and fiction, this is where fact swallows all.
* * *
To be continued ...
Supermassive
By Michael J. Sherry
“Elvis Lives.”
* * *
The words are simple. The explanation is not. The truth lies amidst fact, fiction, M-Theory, and a white, diamond-encrusted jumpsuit.
You see, I, Michael Sherry, am a physicist. What is M-Theory? Well, that might be easier to answer if we could discover what “M” is. There’s been much speculation. Membrane. Mother of all theories. Mystery. Madness. I like the last one. Madness. An encompassing sort of word that opens a lot of universal, imaginative, and tangible doors. And it sets a mood, too.
And now I’m going to see the King down at The Big Tree Inn. Doing a gig. Don’t waste my time with your but he died in ’77 horseshit. You can come see this for yourself. What’s more is that – not only is he not dead – but he hasn’t aged a day since ’56. Yes. He’s still that Elvis. Well, he’s aged obviously – but what I mean is he’s still thin, good-looking, and hard rocking. For his age.
I walk in through the backdoor and light a cigarette. There’s a moderate crowd tonight, which is okay because it’s a Friday.
I order a draft and start moving toward the back. There are no tables left, so I’m going to have to kind of stand in a corner. As I step slowly through and around the other patrons I see a hand waving me over.
“Mike, what did you bring your briefcase for?” my good friend and fellow physicist Dr. Jeff Buss asks me.
“Always more work to be done,” I laugh.
We stand and watch the show for a while. It’s energetic for the most part. Dr. Jeff, in particular, is taken with the music. He is, unfortunately, one of those Elvis die-hards – the kind whose record collection is 75% Elvis, and 25% “The Golden 50’s” collections.
Elvis Lives.
Not such a complicated little phrase, but the inference …
Next he’ll … I mean, I’ll be writing all manner of sweeping, swirling expressions. Expressions that aren’t as simple as two words. I mean, two little words and in them worlds of speculation and creation and destruction, and all beyond the ability of the writer to accommodate.
Elvis Lives? What about something like Dragons Eating Humans. Or four words – The Ocean Is Poison. Or five – Hitler With Dark Magic Sorcery. You can see what I’m driving at here. It isn’t the truth or fiction of the words themselves that matters. Because truth does not become fiction and fiction does not become truth. The truth really is that Elvis Lives. Here. I can’t explain it all straight out, but don’t think that he exists because words were written. That is not the case at all. Elvis, you see, has never died. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to remember that I have an audience for this, and that my audience may or may not be privy to the same physics wisdom as myself. In other words – YOU DON’T KNOW ANY OF THIS YET. I need to let the story tell itself.
It would help, of course, if I knew who my audience was in the first place. That is what makes this all so difficult. You see, you might be you, or you might be some electric current, or you might just be a cloud of dust. You might even be me … in some sense. None of this confusion is helping my case. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing.
“That was a hell of a show,” Dr. Jeff says to me later that evening. We’ve relocated to Duff’s for some chicken wings and a few beers. There is an “entertainer” of some variety playing a piano – very familiar songs, only with his own satirically distorted lyrics. And he likes to shout, “NEW PEOPLE!” every time a group walks in the front doors. I feel that he’s a fucking idiot.
I know what Dr. Jeff wants to know. I obviously brought the briefcase for a reason. But I’m not going to explain it all to him just yet.
“Yes, it was quite a show,” I tell him. “Elvis hasn’t lost a step in fifty years.”
“You gotta admire the man,” Dr. Jeff says. “Never sold out. Stayed true to the integrity of his art.”
“NEW PEOPLE!”
“Yes,” I agree. “An artist of the highest sort. Where rock and roll is concerned, that is.”
There is a silence between us for several moments. The piano music is very loud, and the entertainer is doing his version of Jerry Lee’s Great Balls of Fire.
Dr. Jeff, you should know, specializes in Supermassive Black Holes. It is, I admit, an intriguing line of study. Some of them can reach several billion times the mass of the Sun. They sit quietly at the center of every galaxy, spinning rapidly, and chewing up everything that gets pulled into their “event horizon,” a dark, crushing point from which there is no returning. Light, energy, mass – all sucked into a sudden state of nothingness. Fascinating.
“NEW PEOPLE!”
Blinking into darkness. Snap. Just like that. The whole damn galaxy is spinning around the thing. It lends a sense of destiny to things, doesn’t it? You know where you’re going. Not that you’ll be here to see it as such, but the matter that comprises you will be out there in some form or another, floating, swirling, faster and faster, closer and closer, and then … billions and billions and billions of years from now, in some horrifying epoch … the plummet.
Some people find this creepy. I find it comforting. Like pre-obtained closure.
“NEW PEOPLE!”
This is real, I’m afraid. In a universe where so much is a blurred wasteland between fact and fiction, this is where fact swallows all.
* * *
To be continued ...
posted by Il Pazzo @ 9:59 PM
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