December 13, 2008

• tracicle! FUCK YEAH!
• I'll have you all know that last night's moonrise was AWESOME. haters
• cloud *sulks*
• yes, clouds foiled my view also. not a full sky of clouds mind you, but a bunch of em just hanging out right in front of the moon only. fuckers.
• I mostly just bitched about how bright my bedroom was while I tried to go to sleep.
• It looked really good through the stained-glass window at the top of my stairs.
• Bright, clear and bollock-freezing in Beijing! I did the sensible thing and stumbled around various whisky bars.
• Socked in here for the past two nights. And now it's snowing. No perigee in sight but the tide was bloody high. 'Tis a good night for rum toddies and hockey on the TV.
• Cloud, fog and pouring rain. Booo.
• Does this explain why I woke up on a couch this morning with things written on my face?
• The worse rainstorm in years happpened all day and night last night. Rrrrrgh.
• Lick Observatory Moonrise
• I saw that photo, homunculus. I was more impressed that you could see the moon through the silicon valley smog.
• I got to show it to Jack as we were coming in late from a neighbor's Christmas party. We had just enough clouds to give the moonlight something to reflect off. I didn't know at the time about the whole perigee thing, so I wasn't looking for it -- it stopped me in its tracks all on its own.
• I forget who posted this in another thread (surely, h-dogg) - - but I was very happy to hear about this. A portion of a painting I did back in '93 was based on the incredible visual I had of the perigee that year. I didn't know it at the time - I happened to be driving by myself on a dark stretch of highway in NC - and the moon broke out from the clouds in such an ubelievable fashion, that I had to pull my car over to the side of the road and gaze in awe. The newspaper confirmed it for me the following day... This one was also quite astounding - - the intensity of the moon was surprising! I was lucky that the clouds broke shortly after the moon began to rise - - and eventually the sky turned crystal clear. Good stuff.
• The solstice sunrise at Newgrange is going to be webcast live in a couple of hours.
• About damn time. I hate winter.
• It's slightly too late for 2009, but go look anyway (if you can). Should still be spectacular!
• Catch Winter's Comet Lulin
• The Present For the present there is just one moon, though every level pond gives back another. But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon, perceived by astrophysicist and lover, is milliseconds old. And even that light’s seven minutes older than its source. And the stars we think we see on moonless nights are long extinguished. And, of course, this very moment, as you read this line, is literally gone before you know it. Forget the here-and-now. We have no time but this device of wantonness and wit. Make me this present then: your hand in mine, and we’ll live out our lives in it. --Michael Donaghy
• Not The Moon What idiocy could transform the moon, that old sea-overgrown skull seen from above, to a goddess of mercy? You fish for the silver light, there on the quiet lake, so clear to see; you plunge your hands into the water and come up empty. Don't ask questions of stones. They will rightly ignore you, they have shoulders but no mouths, their conversation is elsewhere. Expect nothing else from the perfect white birdbones, picked clean in the sedge in the cup of muskeg: you are none of their business. Fresh milk in a glass on a plastic tray, a choice of breakfast foods; we sit at the table, discussing the theories of tragedy. The plump pink-faced men in the metal chairs at the edge of the golf course adding things up, sunning themselves, adding things up. The corpse, washed and dressed, beloved meat pumped full of chemicals and burned, if turned back into money could feed two hundred. Voluptuousness of the newspaper; scratching your back on the bad news; furious anger in spring sunshine, a plate of fruit on the table. Ask of the apple, crisp heart, ask the pear or suave banana which necks got sucked, whose flesh got stewed, so we could love them. The slug, a muscular jelly, slippery and luminous, dirty eggwhite unrolling its ribbon of mucous — this too is delicious. The oily slick, rainbow-colored, spread on the sewage flats in the back field is beautiful also as is the man's hand cut off at the wrist and nailed to a treetrunk, mute and imploring, as if asking for alms, or held up in warning. Who knows what it tells you? It does not say, beg, Have mercy, it is too late for that. Perhaps only, I too was here once, where you are. The star-like flower by the path, by the ferns, in the rain- forest, whose name I did not know, and the war in the jungle — the war in the jungle, blood on the crushed ferns, whose name I do not know, and the star-like flower grow out of the same earth whose name I do not know. Whose name for itself I do not know. Or much else, except that the moon is no goddess of mercy but shines on us each damp warm night of her full rising as if she were, and that is why we keep asking the wrong questions, he said, of the wrong things. The questions of things. Ask the spider what is the name of God, she will tell you: God is a spider. Let the other moons pray to the moon. O Goddess of Mercy, you who are not the moon, or anything we can see clearly, we need to know each other's names and what we are asking. Do not be any thing. Be the light we see by. --Margaret Atwood
• You, darkness, that I come from I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything- shapes and fires, animals and myself, how easily it gathers them! - powers and people- and it is possible a great presence is moving near me. I have faith in nights. --Rainer Maria Rilke
• Goodnight, moon. Or rather, goodbye. I'm tired of the tricks you've played on me. I'd rather go through night after night unilluminated and just a bit forlorn, a lone motorcyclist heading for home, than wander among your sharp shadows, sit on your white boulders, look down into the silver river, any longer. --Aaron Belz, "lone wolf"
• And The Moon And The Stars And The World Long walks at night-- that's what good for the soul: peeking into windows watching tired housewives trying to fight off their beer-maddened husbands. --Charles Bukowski
• Night Images Robert Fitzgerald Late in the cold night wakened, and heard wind, And lay with eyes closed and silent, knowing These words how bodiless they are, this darkness Empty under my roof and the panes rattling Roughed by wind. And so lay and imagined Somewhere far off black seas heavy-shouldered Plunging on sand and the ebb off-streaming and Thunder forever. So lying bethought me, friend, What traffic ghouls have, or this be legend, In low inland hollows of the earth, under Shade of moon, the night moaning, and bitter frost; And feared the riches of my bones, long given Into this earth, should tumble to their hands. No girl or ghost beside me, and I lonely, Remembering gardens, lilac scent, or twilight Descending late in summer on that town, I lay and found my years departed from me, And feared the cold bed and the wind, absurdly Alone with silence and the trick of tears.