In Santa Barbara, summer doesn't come on the first of June. Instead, it shatters across the seasons, tiny filaments glinting even in the darkest months, and casts a facade from their prisms. People are hungry for it. In June, tourists spew out of taxies, cruise ships, trains and planes like a tidal wave of vomit. Couples hold each other and their shopping bags pretending for the day that they too are part of this coy escape from the rest of the country. Surely someplace so akin to heaven is exempt from the corruption of consumerism and politics. People come here to forget. I've seen them, with their laughter. Families strolling down State Street dressed up, sun drunk, flushed cheeks pushed back by their smiles. I always thought it strange how all animals bare their teeth at each other for one reason or another.
Kepler-62e.
A planet with the potential to host life was discovered in the constellation Lyra, which I think is quaint and somewhat poetic, but the potentials won't know it, and when we tell them, they wont care and, most likely, laugh, however they do. Kepler-62e circles its star in 122.4 earth days. It can take much less than that to die from cancer and much more to realize someone stopped loving you long ago. In Greek Mythology, Orpheus, a musician poet prophet, was killed at the hands of those who could not hear his music. His head and lyre, still playing, floated down the to the Mediterranean shore where winds and waves brought them to the Lesbos islands before his lyre was carried to the skies by muses to spend eternity (or, the road to complete entropy) as a constellation. Sometimes I wish American politics was being strangled by mythology rather than monotheism. At least the Greeks didn't pretend any god made in the image of man was exempt from his flaws.
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