blue moon - 2009

It seemed appropriate to pay attention. A full moon lights this New Year's Eve, by necessity, a blue moon. At fifty-two, I have the time and relative lack of commitments to pause a moment, or two, or more than several and pay attention. They happen, or so I am told, about every nineteen years or so, or perhaps it is exactly and I wasn't paying sufficient attention. Nineteen years would mean that I had missed two previous New Year's Eve Blue Moon events. One at about thirty-three when I was distracted by the demands of a young family and the other at fourteen, when I was just distracted or conversely far too self absorbed to notice much outside my own evolving turbulent self. One cannot say really if another nineteen years down the road I will be here, or sufficiently aware to notice. So, I wandered outside, into the cold, well, this is Southern California and cold is a relative issue, and stared for awhile. A lovely moon set in a clear cold cloudless sky. Assuredly bonus points are allocated in some karmic register for noticing the turning of these cosmic cycles and I wandered back inside.

This site is somewhat abandoned, in disuse it would appear. Perhaps they are too easy to make, or people, this generation of the commercial driven attention span, the thirty second sound bite, are too easily distracted by the next game, the next crisis, the next toy. In any event, the shell of this site is lying here disused, so it seems reasonable to co-opt it, at least for a little while. Like a hermit crab, to try on the fit and see if it suits. Sites like this are armor, camouflage, perfect anonymity. You can say what you like and only a select few, who likely care little or not at all, will know.

So, it has been an odd year. A year sufficiently odd that I hesitate in contemplation of what to wish for. Wishes get twisted. So, here's to the New Year, whatever it might come to be, and the opportunity to see it through.

Republican Neo-Permissiveness

Since when did we, as a nation, as concerned citizens, as parents, lose the capacity to judge babies having babies, to condemn teenagers having unprotected sex?

What will it do to every American mother's and father's ability to discourage their children from having sex before marriage and to insist, failing that, upon proper precautions not just against pregnancy but against deadly sexually transmitted diseases if we rollover to a wave of Republican permissiveness and install the bad example of Bristol and Levi in the White House?

Is it fair to Palin to hold her responsible for her daughter's mistakes?

Certainly not. It is horribly unfair.

But since when has the national interest become secondary to fairness to politicians?