“Another day of anger, bitterness and doubt.” Bob Dylan, “False Prophet”
I can always tell that the moon is full or nearly so by the behavior of the people I observe at the Market. It’s really uncanny but people seem to act differently, more befuddled and spaced-out than usual. Slower, indecisive, best evidenced by a woman with a basket standing in the center of the aisle, as if she’s the only person in the store, completely alone with no sense of time or space or the fact that there’s a man with a broom behind her, looking for a way past her so he can get on with his work, a determined runt of a man who tries to anticipate if the woman might veer left or right so he can dart by. For what seems an eternity she does neither. This is the time when customers ask all kinds of questions -- where’s the dijon mustard, where’s the sour cream, do you have crystalized ginger, can I buy just one stalk of celery. A tall man stopped me on his way out of the store with his grandson and asked me to examine a quarter to determine if it was real or counterfeit or foreign. He couldn’t read the inscription on the back, but I could and assured him that he had the real deal. “Old eyes,” he said. As if I’m the proverbial spring chicken. I’ll be sixty-three in a couple of weeks.
Full moon, odd behavior. Fuck, in the United States of America, the moon is always full and bright and fit for lunatics. The American era is ending and something new is being born, and it appears more authoritarian and cruel, driven by a perverse greed for wealth and power that is difficult for average people to understand. Without heed of consequences or casualties. Without shame. The will to power, I guess. I don’t have it, I may have many years ago, when I was in the Air Force, but the impulse flared and died. In my professional life I have always been honest and fair. The only job that I flat-out failed at was as an insurance salesman. Dark days, foolish days. Cold-calling from the phone book. Knocking on doors in the suburbs. I could do neither with any competence, I was struck with terror at the prospect and could never overcome the fear of rejection. Even when I got an appointment, which was rare, I was probably the worst closer on my best day in the history of sales work, statistically more likely to talk myself out of a sale than into one. Asking a stranger for money is what it comes down to and I couldn’t do it. For a certain time in my life I believed a lot of corporate bullshit and American hype. Strong military, free markets, low taxes, American benevolence, etc. I was as ignorant as they come about the history of my country, the theft of indigenous land and the enslavement of Africans, the causes of the Civil War, the Industry of American slavery, white supremacy. American imperialism. American-style capitalism. The only thing that saved me was a love of reading, a thirst for knowledge, and my own lived experience.
Fuck, on this full moon I committed a cardinal sin of a book reviewer and mispelled the names of two of the main characters in a piece I wrote, edited and proof-read. Fuck, double screaming fuck. The publisher brought the error to my attention, kindly, but I’m furious with myself, chagrined that I could make such an elemental error. No excuse, I fucked up. I fixed the review and sent my apologies.
Full moon decisions usually go sideways. There’s a lot of noise in this world, a constant, annoying buzz; we can’t get quiet enough to hear. Phones, sirens, radios, bells, beeps, chirps, screeches, chainsaws, leaf blowers, pneumatic nail guns, cement mixers, drills, endless and everywhere, poison for some, the kind that takes over the brain, and these days everybody’s got an opinion and some means for expressing it. Lots of noise, images slipping past at warp speed. We need to put our phones down, shut out the noise and the images. There’s too much talking, too much hypocrisy, too many lies and too many flim-flam artists, too many cowards.
But there are no saviors. Hold on. It’s the end of an era. And a full moon.
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