By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Blood Moon
As the clown caravan reloads post-election, ask how so many circus performers load into and spring from Volkswagen Beetles.
Contortionists can contract and pack in. Flat balloons stacked and blown up with helium could rise out of doors and sunroofs. A Bug parked above a manhole might admit endless climbers too.
The Cole Brothers Circus in the 1950s crammed gymnasts into comical compact cars stripped of seats which would wheel into center ring, then release as many as 28 bodies unencumbered by space-gobbling clown shoes, noses, hair and so on.
Political parties too find fresh or recycled hopefuls each election cycle. Desire to serve is infectious and mutates like any virus. Serve your country, community, truth, faith, self … surf them like serfs too. Once in office hear all and adhere to none. See how it comes out.
Clown masks reveal what they don’t exclude like our “real” selves, as fixed as they re-create. I ask that of representatives: Grow in office, evolve and share what you learn with constituents. Please do change. Be dynamic.
A blood moon, stained red, loomed election night. From 5:17 to 6:42 a.m. EST, Earth eclipsed direct sunlight on its satellite so the moon reflected coppery red from simultaneous sun-sets and -rises around our rims. From the moon, Earth’s dark surface was ringed by a red aurora.
The portent was unimportant. Bugs rolled up, clowns exited, then rolled out again. All became something else the same.
Saving Day
Time was turned back Sunday to save or lose day, depending. Clocks are arbitrary. The hour change made no difference to Earth tilting on its axis, decreasing sun exposure quantities and angles above the equator, going on through the winter solstice.
Elections aren’t natural cycles either. Most campaigns are lifelong. I’d ban books grooming candidates but love comic literature too much.
To be precognizant first be cognizant; study history up to this moment and its momentum. Mighty Mouse (“Here I Come … to Save the Day”) did it in the 1946-68 cartoon series It was easy.
One mouse, per his origin story, escapes a hungry cat for a supermarket, there buying Super Soap to bathe in, Super Soup to sip and Super Celery to crunch, plunges headfirst into huge piece of Super Cheese and emerges a two-footed, humanized mouse with a massive chest, powerful biceps, Superman-like powers, cape and costume. Mighty Mouse saves his fellow rodents and dispatches neighbor cats to the moon. Anyone could do it.
Mighty Mouse to my knowledge never ran for office nor was called on to ban Daylight Savings Time. That would be redundant.
Carpe Diem
To seize the day is another matter. In book one of Roman poet Horace’s 23 B.C. “Odes” he writes Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, or “Pluck the day (for it is ripe), trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.”
More than one tomorrow has passed the past 2,045 years, but I seize moments ceaselessly to this day. Precognizant, I meant to apprise you of the blood moon before it happened but print dead- and life-lines got in the way.
Stop the presses. Work too hard, play easy. Go to light, Mighty Mouse with a camera. Release shutter, open lens. Regret is re-get when you go back unforced or re-see image.
Vision
… sucked diagnosed in fourth grade when I first donned glasses. That, Mom fretted, was why I saw blackboards blurred and held books in myopic range where serifs and fonts meant as much as text. 2+2 lenses = 4 eyes with which to see.
Even one lens can confuse. Greeks Hesiod, Homer and Euripides spun stories about Cyclopes, on Sicily especially, building walls. Dragonflies, big for bugs but not mythic giants, have upward of 28,000 eyes, entomologists say. I’ve seen moons of many hues, through car windows mostly, but …
My Read/Write/Take Pictures Trinity tipped when You unfixed my focus, restarted every f-stop. This hate letter fills and enriches my every pore.