Tonight, I can see the moon from my window in this office. It's not full, but is reasonably close to being. I'm not sure if it is waxing or waning. I forget about the moon sometimes, for weeks at a time, and then I see it and the stars again and it all takes my breath away. The night sky has always filled me with a cool, clean feeling, like lying down in the middle of a frozen lake and closing your eyes and breathing in the wind that skims across the ice. When the sky is really clear, I feel like I'm inhaling a kind of exquisite celestial vapour and there is nothing so pure in the world. All that black and silver. But I guess that is just the distance. Up close, the stars are a mess, and the moon is a dusty, lonely place. You look back at Earth, all blue and friendly, and think, What the hell am I doing out here? Why would I ever leave that behind?
Back when I lived in the Caribbean, one of the most phenomenal meteor showers in decades took place (the 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower). It was absolutely incredible, like someone was setting off fireworks, like something engineered. I watched it from the house I was living in, up on a hill with Stumpy and Conrad and the unlikely trio of my housemates (a sailboat captain, a lottery winner, a radio DJ with an enormous pickup truck). But another friend of mine had the right idea: She watched the meteor shower while wading in the sea, which is full of tiny bio luminescent creatures along the beaches of the islands. They light up as you move through the water. So imagine that, watching the pitch black sky rain with light while all around you in the dark ocean, tiny little life forms make your every move glow green. How wonderful! What a world!
I watched a fantastic movie last night called "Splice". (Writing "glow green" up there in that second paragraph made me think of it.) I'm not usually a huge fan of sci-fi entertainment, as it doesn't usually feature period costumes, rickshaws, the Nile, gramophones, journeys overland by elephant, or chemin-de-fer (except, apparently, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, season 4, "Our Man Bashir"); they are also often very LOUD, which I'm coming to realize I do not love in movies. However, I thought Splice was a great success. Fascinating, weird, and kind of heart-wrenching; of course, it was pretty darned silly, too. I give it a thumb up. Stumpy does too. Two thumbs up from Stumpy and Stumpy.
Back when I lived in the Caribbean, one of the most phenomenal meteor showers in decades took place (the 2001 Leonids Meteor Shower). It was absolutely incredible, like someone was setting off fireworks, like something engineered. I watched it from the house I was living in, up on a hill with Stumpy and Conrad and the unlikely trio of my housemates (a sailboat captain, a lottery winner, a radio DJ with an enormous pickup truck). But another friend of mine had the right idea: She watched the meteor shower while wading in the sea, which is full of tiny bio luminescent creatures along the beaches of the islands. They light up as you move through the water. So imagine that, watching the pitch black sky rain with light while all around you in the dark ocean, tiny little life forms make your every move glow green. How wonderful! What a world!
I watched a fantastic movie last night called "Splice". (Writing "glow green" up there in that second paragraph made me think of it.) I'm not usually a huge fan of sci-fi entertainment, as it doesn't usually feature period costumes, rickshaws, the Nile, gramophones, journeys overland by elephant, or chemin-de-fer (except, apparently, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, season 4, "Our Man Bashir"); they are also often very LOUD, which I'm coming to realize I do not love in movies. However, I thought Splice was a great success. Fascinating, weird, and kind of heart-wrenching; of course, it was pretty darned silly, too. I give it a thumb up. Stumpy does too. Two thumbs up from Stumpy and Stumpy.
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