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Earliest Sunset
Dec. 9th, 2011 07:59 amOddly, weirdly wonderful: Yesterday’s sunset in New York State at 4:28pm was the earliest sunset of the year. From here on in, the sunsets don’t get any earlier – although the sunrises keep getting later, of course, which is why the days keep getting shorter. Has to do with the tilt of the earth’s in its elliptical (not circular) orbit. The point at which the sun is directly overhead, called solar noon, appears to move in the opposite direction from rotational spin, a peculiarity physicists have anthropomorphized as the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, in much of the same way that scientists dub the behavior of certain random particles charm.
Sun is up now, and everything is covered with a layer of thick, crusty snow.
I have a couple of days of really tedious, boring scut work ahead of me that I really need to be diligent about.
Had a kind of crisis of faith yesterday when I was dicking around with the novel which I do to amuse myself between other writing. It’s not a good thing to be doing so much writing from a purely psychological point of view. I end up spending entirely too much time inside my own head where the décor these days is backwoods squalor to say the very least. But it’s what I have an aptitude for and how I manage to tether body to soul these days.
However, nobody’s paying me for the novel and I just could not get behind the pivotal-in-its-own-way Carol/Joe scene and just felt like flushing the whole thing down the toilet – metaphorically, of course, since it only exists in digital form. What ever made me think I could write fiction? That anything that came out of my head could possibly have the power to divert, amuse or fascinate? I hear the dinosaurs tromping and baying – watched Margin Call last night, plenty of dinosaurs baying in that one – and all I could think was how helpless and powerless the vast majority of human beings are on this planet. In some ways I have it relatively good: Since at this point, I own relatively nothing, I’m not vulnerable to the threat of having what I own be taken away. In an odd way, I'm free. I think about my poor Tibetans buying so totally into the American consumer dream, little Buddhist hostages to artificially created demand, and it makes me very sad.
Such sadness, of course, is completely counterproductive. It broods, like some kind of primitive animal presence in my mind, squashing my ability to act effectively.
Well, I’ve done well by Robin. That’s been my one real accomplishment over the past two years. I took my erstwhile brother-in-law’s scolding email – How can you be so selfish? Put his needs first! – seriously. I’ll never get any medals for that one, of course: It’s only what any responsible parent should do. But damn! It’s been hard.
Sun is up now, and everything is covered with a layer of thick, crusty snow.
I have a couple of days of really tedious, boring scut work ahead of me that I really need to be diligent about.
Had a kind of crisis of faith yesterday when I was dicking around with the novel which I do to amuse myself between other writing. It’s not a good thing to be doing so much writing from a purely psychological point of view. I end up spending entirely too much time inside my own head where the décor these days is backwoods squalor to say the very least. But it’s what I have an aptitude for and how I manage to tether body to soul these days.
However, nobody’s paying me for the novel and I just could not get behind the pivotal-in-its-own-way Carol/Joe scene and just felt like flushing the whole thing down the toilet – metaphorically, of course, since it only exists in digital form. What ever made me think I could write fiction? That anything that came out of my head could possibly have the power to divert, amuse or fascinate? I hear the dinosaurs tromping and baying – watched Margin Call last night, plenty of dinosaurs baying in that one – and all I could think was how helpless and powerless the vast majority of human beings are on this planet. In some ways I have it relatively good: Since at this point, I own relatively nothing, I’m not vulnerable to the threat of having what I own be taken away. In an odd way, I'm free. I think about my poor Tibetans buying so totally into the American consumer dream, little Buddhist hostages to artificially created demand, and it makes me very sad.
Such sadness, of course, is completely counterproductive. It broods, like some kind of primitive animal presence in my mind, squashing my ability to act effectively.
Well, I’ve done well by Robin. That’s been my one real accomplishment over the past two years. I took my erstwhile brother-in-law’s scolding email – How can you be so selfish? Put his needs first! – seriously. I’ll never get any medals for that one, of course: It’s only what any responsible parent should do. But damn! It’s been hard.
