Category: Big Picture

Of this website, that is. In case you missed my earlier announcement, I want you to know that timeagan.com will be folded up and put away for good at the end of June, 2023. I also want to thank you for your attention and support over the years. It’s been challenging and fun.

You’ll have another four weeks or so, then, to take a last look or two at everything collected here. After that, the my web presence will be limited to Instagram (under “timeagancartoons”). Beyond that, I will still be spending time in my studio working on other art projects…and my memoir.

I’m enjoying writing the memoir, by the way. It’s partly for my own satisfaction, but of course it is also meant to be a communication with a my reader. I just don’t know yet who that person might be. Maybe no one, but that would be a shame. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got a few weeks left at timeagan.com, and I’m not quite done yet.

I don’t know how much thought you give to the Earth’s molten core, but of late it’s been front and center in my mind. Even if you weren’t about to ask me why, I feel compelled to tell you.

For starters, I recently learned that our planet’s iron-and-nickel centre, according to a team of crack geophysicists, actually spins independently of the rest of the globe (the crust and the mantle, taken jointly). I’ve also learned, to my slight alarm, that the core spins at higher rpm’s than the non-molten ball that contains it.

That just seems a bit odd, is all. Imagine tossing a jelly donut up in the air. If the donut is twirling, you’d expect the filling to twirl at the same speed as the rest of it. Not so, apparently, with our giant, filled pastry of a planet. Its red-hot fruit coagulation normally twirls faster than its soft, buttery dough. If anything, you would imagine that it would lag behind the speed of the exterior. But no.

Unfortunately, the jelly donut metaphor is complicated by the fact that the molten core itself has a core of its own. The outer part is liquid and the inner sphere is solid. It’s the solid part that’s got its own particular spin. To preserve our metaphor, I’m going to say this inner sphere is a whole (pitted) cherry.

Okay, that is still pretty odd, but I suppose there’s no reason to panic. I didn’t panic when I first learned that the surface of the Earth is moving at a thousand miles an hour, either. Our planet has spun along for eons without anybody jumping up in the air…and landing in the next county. So I guess it’s not a problem.

Similarly, our ball-within-a-ball-within-a-ball has been rotating in there for millions of years, and nothing has gone wrong. Recently, however, the cherry inside the big blob of hot jelly may have begun to spin more slowly. Still faster than the dough, they say, but it’s decelerating for some reason. It’s a bit unsettling that there is another spinning ball inside the Earth — about 3100 miles underneath our feet — that operates on a schedule all its own.

But I could live with that, too. Stuff is always slowing down and speeding up in nature. There is, however, another possibility that our team of researchers has suggested: maybe, just maybe, the cherry in our jelly blob may have begun to rotate in the opposite direction!

I’m sorry, but that is too much. I simply cannot live with the possibility of two planet-sized balls, one inside the other, spinning in different directions. And did I mention that the little one is hotter than the surface of the sun? To me, that is a cataclysm waiting to happen. But it turns out I needn’t worry. Science itself has come to my rescue…in the form of another team of crack geophysicists. This group says that it’s way too hard to tell what is happening inside Earth with the limited amount of seismic data we have. They point out that "none of the existing models really explains all the available data well.”

I’m with those guys. I say our molten core is not spinning separately, after all — in any direction. I do not take this position because it is obviously correct. I have no idea, really. I’m just looking for anything that confirms a stable universe where I can enjoy my donut in peace.

As I sit here in the darkness, waiting for power to come back on, a familiar thought enters my mind: what if it never does?

And by that I mean, what if civilization just died? Because of some natural catastrophe…or because we messed up and killed it? What then?

What would happen to me and my 8 billion fellow humans and planet Earth and all the wonders we have wrought? And what of the story of our species, both good and bad? Would that history, that struggle, that aspiration, simply flicker and vanish?

Wup! The power’s back on! Awrite!

I wonder what’s on the tube?

Okay, it’s done. Head First,my pull-out-the-stops graphic novel set in the parallel universe of Subconscious Comics, has finally arrived from my printer in London.

They surpassed my fondest hopes. It is gorgeous. Two years of hard work under a pandemic lockdown and forty years of cohabitation with my characters have produced — dare I say it? — a work of art.

It’s a limited run. I suppose there could be a second edition someday, but it won’t be like this one. Not of this size, not on such heavy paper, not with a hard cover, not nearly so nice. Nor will there sales on Amazon or any attempt at broad distribution.

This is it. 325 copies, half of which are already spoken for by my peerless backers on Kickstarter. The rest, I know, will find good homes.

Feels good.