Signs in the Heavens

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

Gravity waves? What the hell is that?

There’s been network disruption all morning here in Southern California, because the satellites have shifted slightly in their orbits and the local cable companies had to realign their dishes. Weird.

We got service back about noon, about the same time the national TV feeds came back on. It’s the same all over the country. The world too, I guess. Everybody who came in for lunch was talking about it. A couple of them said that it has something to do with the comet, and that’s what’s causing the quakes too. Only it’s not a comet, according to John (I didn’t have time to watch the news, he kept me busy washing dishes and cleaning the walk-in cooler all day).

The Palomar pictures I saw on the tube in passing looked like a comet. Not that I’m any kind of expert or anything – they didn’t offer astronomy 101 in prison school and the Army taught me to keep my eyes on the ground. Grunts with their head in the clouds don’t last long, cops neither. Anyway, John said that the tail is pointing the wrong way, roughly towards the sun instead of away from it. It beats the shit out of me; I always thought that comet tails trailed out behind, like a girl’s hair in the wind. He just laughed at me when I said that. It’s even weirder than that though, according to John it’s too far away to even have a tail. Exactly how far away it is, even John doesn’t know because according to the eggheads up at Palomar they can’t seem to get a fix on it. First they said it was inside the orbit of Mars, then beyond Neptune. They said a bunch of other stuff too, which I caught in between stocking the counter and emptying the trash cans, something about neutrino emissions and increased gamma ray flux. Gamma rays I’ve heard of, I had NBC training in the Army, but I had to look up neutrinos in the wiki, can’t say I understand the explanation. Like I said before, it beats the shit out of me. If the eggheads don’t know what’s going on, I don’t have much chance of figuring it out. Like anything else, I suspect this will be old news in a week or two anyway. I think people are interested just because it’s something other than the endless war headlines and body counts.

Besides I’ve got more important things to worry about. I’ve got to meet with the PO tomorrow, and I’ve got to find a more permanent place to live – I found rat shit in my clean underwear this morning. It looks like the job with John is going to be OK. He doesn’t seem to hold my past against me, which is more than I can say for myself. He knows what I did, but he hasn’t asked me about it and he’s giving me time off tomorrow to find a place and go to the parole office. The job isn’t hard. Its menial labor, but a least it’s honest and there’s plenty of it. And it’s something I can do and it keeps my mind off the past, so that’s a good thing.

Damn, just had a little quake. Half a dozen glasses fell off the counter and busted all over the concrete. This is getting a little worrying, wished I could move somewhere a little more geologically stable. I guess a bunch of little ones are better than one big one though.

Back to work.

Posted by VanDerDecken at 1:22 PM