Explanation

In lieu of a post, I'm blathering about the war in pixelshim's journal. (Yes, he's back!) It took me three freaking hours to write that latest (two part) piece of crap, and, of course, I'm not at all satisfied with it. I can't find half the stuff I wanted to make reference to, most of my arguments are fragmentary, and wander off the point, and I get the feeling I've left all sorts of stuff out. Now you know why I didn't finish college. The only reason I had a 4.0 while I was there was because I had no life outside school. (Here comes a Tolkien reference for weetanya.) I have always been more like Mister Butterbur than like Lord Denethor. Thinking tends to take me a long time. That's one reason I'll never start a war. Unfortunately, I'll probably never prevent one, either.

Tangerine Moon

In October, farmers begin burning the stubble in the rice fields which dot the Sacramento valley. From the clear mountains, I can see the haze trapped below, gauzy and tinted with brown. When the moon sets through the haze, it is the color of a tangerine.

Today, the clouds returned after an absence of several days. Their pale shadows drifted across the landscape like premonitions, brightening the distance and casting the nearby into a more mysterious form of itself. To watch a cloud in sunlight, or sunlight through cloud, lends the sky a greater presence. I am always surprised to see a bit of dust and condensation create an impression of vast weight, and of weight freed from the restraint of gravity. Soon, there will be a day when that wight will be too much for the clouds to hold, and there will be rain. But not tonight, I think. Tonight, the waxing moon glides behind the clouds and makes them shine as though from within. The particles that so recently were stubble in the fields are now risen into the sky, to drift and wander until they fall as part of someone else's rain. I stand in the diffused moonlight and watch them pass.

Later tonight, I will go out to watch the moon set, and perhaps it will still be the color of a tangerine, out there over the valley where the smoke of today's field fires is gradually drifting up to become part of tomorrow's clouds.