Willie Smith on the Other Side of the
AD ASTRA
I never read the paper. But yesterday we landed on Titan. I wanted to
see the pictures. So I walked the mile to the public library. Pulled the
paper off the rack. Found a table in a corner. Sat down to gawk at the
photos.
Blocks of ice. Terrain eroded by liquid low octane. Seas of methane,
ethane, thane of cawdor. Skimmed the text, mind loosely at anchor. Then
spotted a tiny article down in the lower righthand corner, obviously used to
fill the odd space.
Some specimen in Brazil had tossed his eighty-eight year old mother
over a fence into the neighbor's yard, where two pit bulls mauled her to
death. The neighbor claimed the forty-eight year old alcoholic son had been
siphoning his mother's pension to pay for his rum.
Titan boasts an atmosphere one-and-a-half times denser than Earth's.
Which is probably in turn about a thousand times denser than the brains of a
south-equatorial mothertosser addicted to ethanol. Which is not to say it
might not have been some sort of octogenarian Lady MacBeth the pits chewed
up.
In his defense, the drunk offered that his mom had voluntarily climbed
the fence on her own. She was weird. She did shit like that. Anyway, who
owns two pit bulls in the first place?
Titan is named after the Hell's Angels types who allied themselves with
Saturn in the armageddon against Jupiter and his own pack of celestial
allies; most of whom, like Jupiter himself, were Saturn's own children.
After defeating Saturn and the Titans, Jupiter tied Dad up down in the
deepest, darkest hell of some unknown onion cellar. Presumably the old
bastard is to this day rotting down there.
Next to the largest moon of the sixth planet out from the sun, the most
famous namesake of the Titans is the Titanic, last observed spread out on
the floor of the Atlantic.
Walking home, I think to myself, because there is never anybody else to
think to, that we are indeed going to the stars; and the band is going to
play all the way down.
© Copyright Willie Smith 2006