Moonstruck
It’s too hot to be Autumn.
And yet today is technically the beginning of it.
Shenanigans.
It’s officially been the hottest summer on record in the history of the United States of America. Hooray! Two Fifty! Look at us go… The previous record was held by last year. The previous record holder before last year was the year before that. And so on. It was so hot this year it started killing the fucking lions.
I am probably a bit jaded because I live in Nashville, which is quite literally the single hottest place on Earth. We also had a record ice storm back in late January. So, ya know: cool… I’m convinced that the hotter it is, the crazier people are. Look at the Middle East. Look at Florida.
Now look at Canada… So cold they leave their doors unlocked, eh.
I’m not really sure if the jury is still out or not on the whole global warming thing. My dad used to say that in the 70s they were sounding the alarm about global cooling and that it was “bullshit then and it’s bullshit now.” He’s not wrong about that - there really was a lot of news and scientific reports about a new ice age - but it was actually based on real science and not bullshit at all.
Turns out it wasn’t really the dawn of some new era, but rather us pumping sulfides into the atmosphere at an industrial scale. Regulation was put into effect, pollution and acid rain decreased, and the slight dip in global temperature normalized.
What my dad also didn’t know was that before that brief cooling trend in the data, the Earth had actually been warming since record keeping began. After that brief cooling period, it began rising again. Dramatically. Sharply.
This is often attributed to the rise of China as an economic powerhouse. They started rebuilding their country and churning out super cities at a rapid pace. This in turn exponentially grew their carbon footprint. The same thing happened in America, but we had done this in the century prior and had since begun to environmentally harmonize. Now, an equally gigantic - and in fact an oh so much larger - country was doing the same thing, and we had all this data to scorn them with.
We can’t really be upset that the fruits of technology and engineering are exported far and wide for everyone to use.
Speaking of which: recently, a rocket collided into the moon. SpaceX said it was an accident.
There was a little bit of hubbub about this on Twitter and elsewhere. People seemed to be upset about space debris and polluting a heavenly body. Fair enough. I for one don’t appreciate litter, of the space variety or otherwise. But what a lot of people didn’t realize is that this actually happens a lot. Pretty much all of the Apollo missions slammed their third stage rockets into the moon. They kind of had to - it’s just the way the physics of trans lunar injectional orbits work.
Neil Smoke-da-Grass gets into that here.
It reminded me of this painting I saw a few years ago. It’s called the Moonstricken Girls by Carroll Cloar. I saw it at the Arkansas Museum of Art in Little Rock back in 2024. Funnily enough, I was there because Little Rock was in the path of totality for the solar eclipse.
The painting depicts two little girls seemingly writhing in pain at the sight of the full moon overhead. They’re standing upright, but are in obvious distress, as if the trauma had just begun suddenly. Everything is pastel: soft pinks and blues, the sky an eerie green. There’s a lot of negative space - the pointillist violet grass is more than half the painting, and there’s only a smattering of ostensible detail: a few houses an acre from a row of trees. That’s the entire painting.
I’m not really sure what’s going on here.
Pretty much since the dawn of time there’s been a sort of mythology about the moon being associated with madness. Lunacy, literally meaning madness caused by the moon, was a real diagnosis until we eventually figured out it was - perhaps more accurately - just this little thing called epilepsy.
Maybe this painting is actually about the girls becoming witches. Who knows? The same themes could be derived, but it’s intentionally vague - more evocative of a moment rather than trying to explain anything - as a lot of good art tends to do.
I guess my point here is that we as a species sure are wrong a lot. From blood letting to leeches to smoking cigarettes to cure a stutter - all of human history can be seen as a cascading comedy of errors - we’re dumb as fuck.
Or at least, we have been, and in many ways will continue to be, but we don’t have to be and there are a lot of examples of us not. Like for instance: I just bought a new phone that has a 2nm process. “What’s that mean?” I hear you say when actually nobody said anything - I’m glad you asked!
They’ve gotten the silicon chip at the heart of every computer down to a size so small (and thermally efficient) that the theoretical size of each transistor is only about 2 nanometers in size. For reference, that’s about 8 atoms across.
That’s really small.
I’d highly recommend watching this video if you want to see how human beings can even make something that small. It’s so much more clever and ingenuous than you might think - it’s insane.
It’s crazier than staring at the moon.
Perhaps we’ll always be this mix of crazy and genius, dumb and enlightened. Perhaps it’s just human nature: integral to our very being, to be walking oxymorons. Creating technology to go to the moon only to mostly use it to cast intercontinental ballistic missiles at school children. Curing diseases with molecular microbiology only to weaponize the viri. Creating eternal power sources that can rival the surface of the Sun only to use them to vaporize our fellow humans beings.
…
I don’t really have some John Lennon imagine all the people line to wrap this up on, so uhhhhh byyeee see ya later. Sorry to be a downer, and I’m sorry I’m so slow drawing this comic book. I’d like to say I’ll get faster… but I won’t.
It’s just too fucking hot. I think I’ve been driven mad.
But hey, it’s starting to cool off.
