Am2PM
F. Zeeshan Choudhury
Somewhere in space the moon moves around Earth which moves around Sun & their paths cross every 18 months or so which isn’t so special except it’s happening in Europe, but was exciting for the sweaty men asking for eclipse glasses in front of me, in line, while I bought a beverage at AM2PM, East London’s worst corner store, which always loses my packages and smells of stress.
Nobody is talking about how right now here (Earth) we are moving through the dust trail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. Two men called Lewis and Horace respectively slapped their names on it in 1862. The dust trail is also called The Perseid meteor shower which sounds scarier and more refreshing.
If you wanted to watch them, dull rocks pockmarked by collisions, tonight at 2am they will look like shooting stars, light catching on debris. (Of course you’d need a telescope probably, and to be standing on a big dark hill away from any major road or city, which would be hard.)
But at least you could look with bare eyes and not be in line at AM2PM, sweat dripping off your six pack, begging for some glasses.
Or you could try
to look. The
eclipsed sun would burn through the cornea, which is a clear outer dome that bends light into the pupil, which would contract just slow enough that it (the light) would burn your retina which has no pain receptors to warn it when the damage is happening. Lucky.