14.7.11

Full Moon Over a Dead Earth

Last night.  Humboldt County.  In a recliner.  Open window with the sounds of people enjoying the evening filtering in.  Heating pad burning a hole through my back.  Flesh and Blood Compendium being read.  I caught it out of the corner of my eye.  So bright, so big that at first I thought I was hallucinating.

A beautiful full moon.

Clouds sometimes obscured it.  So much so that while on the phone with Girl I mentioned that, again, I thought maybe I had hallucinated it.  It's a rare day when I take pain meds, so they have quite an effect on me.  I get a little ... loopy.

I wasn't imagining it, though.  It wasn't some sort of CGI (Cerebral Generated Image).  It was a full-on, larger than life moon.  The kind of thing our knuckle-dragging ancestors would've worshipped when not splitting skulls and breeding.  It was one of those wonders of "nature" that puts me in awe, like silicone drops on a bed of water on a vibrating table or the ocean.

A werewolf moon.

No, I'm not a huge fan of werewolves.  I can see, however, how this can inspire such tales.  Me?  I like to think of it as a huge, cataract-laden eye looking over a dying planet.  Unblinking at the misery below it.  Where once it was worshipped, now it is just forgotten, a body to be landed upon from time to time if only to figure out a way to extract whatever resources we can from it.  A once majestic god above creatures who had no real working concept of fiction to a monument of failure in people who are nothing but fiction.

It was heady stuff for someone on medication who could barely text properly.

I'm sure quite a few other Humboldt residents saw it staring down on them.  The people in our county seem more in tune with nature than say the people of Los Angeles.  I'm sure there was more than one Humboldt County soul who thought something similar (after all, so many of us are medicated at any given time that it's amazing the drinking water isn't making us all zombies).  Then again, maybe nobody noticed.  Maybe they were all so wrapped up in the firing of the Eureka chief of police as a sure sign of Armageddon that they failed to take note of that eye in the sky.  Full moon over a dead Earth.  Kind of fitting.


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