Last night was smudgy. The air was smudgy, the sky smudgy, and all that smudginess did psychedelic things to the moon. I’m a moon fanatic. I came off the train, into the smudgy black night, not a breath of air moving anywhere, it’s been dreadful here the last couple of days, and I glanced up, like a little cat, trying to catch a stray breeze, and in looking up – I saw the moon. I sound so much like Anne Shirley right now, but the sight of that moon sent soul-shivers running through my body. It was low in the sky, and one day past fullness. It was enormous, and looked almost swollen with its own color, like an overripe plum. The sky was black around it – and the moon was not white, or golden, but a kind of sluggish dark red, like the storm swirling around Jupiter. The moon: sullen, swollen, smudgy, gorgeous. The whole sky looked like a charcoal drawing that someone had rubbed their arm over, blurring the boundaries. The dark sullen red of the moon seemed to smudge into the sluggish black of the sky … and perhaps because the moon was so low in the sky, hovering just above Wall Street, it looked abnormally huge. As though it were about to pop. The swollen-ness of the moon added to the smudgy energy of the night, when people were literally lying out in Frank Sinatra park, at 11 pm, in their bathing suits, sluggishly waiting for something, anything … waiting for the pressure to break. The Hudson was still and black. Unreflective. Not moving. Boats churned by through the black, causing a thick resistant wake to come our way, but other than that – stillness. The Hudson looked solid enough to walk across. A slab of thick black. I couldn’t get over the red-ness and full-ness of that moon. It looked almost satanic. Like a sentient being up there. There was no breeze. It’s a thunderstorm right now – but we’ve had two days of unearthly stillness, heaviness, and mugginess. Nothing moving. You ACHE for the air to just … MOVE!! The pressure still has not broken, and the late afternoon sky is a sickly green – and it has lost its sluggish smudginess. Something’s coming.<\/p>\n
Last night when I first saw the moon, it so struck me that I was compelled to talk to a stranger. I feel like ancient Druid like people would see bad (or good) omens in such a moon. They would huddle together in their communities, glancing up fearfully every now and then, providing sacrifices, whatever they needed to do. You don’t see a moon like that every day.<\/p>\n
I needed to share my awe with someone. It was an instinctive thing, I didn’t overthink it. I saw the glowing deep red ball and gasped, to the guy next to me – “Oh my God. Look at that moon!!” A more girlie comment would be difficult to imagine. Well: “I prefer Tampax to OB” is pretty girlie as well. But still. Moon-beauty-gushing is really girlie. And it was great: The guy who happened to be next to me was big guy whom I would describe (lovingly, by the way) as a “meathead”. He is a total Hoboken type, (but not drunk enough to be evil<\/a>) – he had “frat boy” written all over him (literally – Greek letters on his sweatshirt, and on his backwards baseball cap) – you can tell that he is no stranger to a weekend kegger – and … it just was so funny – I MADE him deal with the moon, and he was so nice. He looked up and said, “Oh man. Yeah!”<\/p>\n He could have scorned me. Many people would have been like: “Uhm … what is your problem, lady? So it’s a big red moon, so what?” But he, although he was taken aback, and although he didn’t go on and on about how he agreed with me about the moon … he was kind. He looked up, he took it in, he commented enthusiastically. He did not judge.<\/p>\n I look for kindness wherever I find it. Even in a meathead stranger on a smudgy black night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night was smudgy. The air was smudgy, the sky smudgy, and all that smudginess did psychedelic things to the moon. I’m a moon fanatic. I came off the train, into the smudgy black night, not a breath of air … Continue reading