Lunar Pennsylvania

'Member a couple of weeks ago when I was whining about how sick I was? Well guess who spent the week battling a bad cold?

Unbelievable.

For the past three days, when I wasn't working, I was sleeping. And sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. For no reason I can think of, I'm not doing much in the way of medicating these days. And my bed just felt so right. I still have the winter flannel sheets on, and on top the Warmest Down Comforter In The World. Ask Alpha when you see him! It was way too warm for him. Feverish as I was, it was mighty toasty in there. I felt like I was sleeping in a warm fuzzy cloud. And sleep I did. I actually skipped Starbucks and skipped church on Wednesday night (I. Skipped. Starbucks. I. Skipped. Church. You read it right) and just came home straight from work and went to bed. And slept in an hour the next morning, making me late for work, but they were lucky I was there at all. If'n I worked for a place that offered paid sick days, I wouldn't have been.

Misery! Misery! Misery!

Okay. Here's the good part.

Last night, at 4:30 a.m., I was suddenly wide awake. And I immediately realized I felt good. I guess it had broke.

And my mind was just behaving like the school of Athens or something. It was all so clear.

I guess my body had been working overtime fighting the infection. And suddenly, the battle was over. My lymphocytes had won. And all that psychic energy became surplus in an instant.

I came up with all these ideas for work--the new job at work and all. Some of it was twenty-twenty hindsight, along the lines of "what I should have said" and therefore useless, but a lot of it was good. (I'm doing really well with the new job at work.)

But here's the really cool thing: I started thinking about the moon.

The moon. Living here iin the Howling Wilderness, I'm aware of the moon. Every night, when I walk Faithful Companion, down the driveway, left onto Tollgate Road, down to the Rock By The Phone Pole where F.C. invariably turns around, crossing from the pee side of the road to the poop side of the road (F.C. is sooooo particular about these things), then back again, stopping so my boy-boy can make, up the driveway, and home... there's the moon. Or not. Sometimes, when it's only a sliver, it's obscured by clouds. Or a new moon. Then it's really dark. But more often than not, there it is, hanging high in the sky, riding through the Zodiac signs. The moon. When it's full, it's bright as daylight out here. My shadow is clear on the road under my feet. The milky light even sparkles with F.C.'s little stream of piss. ("Atta boy!" I always offer encouragingly.)

The moon.

And then, last night, I had this idea.

That isn't the moon riding overhead, it's the earth. Somehow, I'm on the moon.

It was such a strong impression. Like I had solved some great mystery.

Right! That's it! I'm on the moon.

All that stuff... The men I'd date, running the needle exchange, long weekends away, the front room of my apartment with the St. Andrew's Cross in front of the brick fireplace, that was back on earth. Not here. Not here on the moon.

Now, oddly, I see only by the light reflected from the earth. Now, there's less gravity. Less to hold me down. I head off in one direction, and my feet tend to leave the ground, tethered only by my slender air hose. And at this point, I've been breathing that canned air, brought somehow from earth, for so long, I don't even notice it anymore.

Life on the moon.

When I was a little kid, there was a show I loved on television. It was a british sci-fi thing, in syndication, called "Space: 1999" The premise was simple. On the moon, the United Kingdom had built something called 'Moonbase Alpha.' It must have been the UK, because everyone there seemed to have BBC accents. Before the action of the show, a catastrophe had occurred. On the far side of the moon, a repository for nuclear waste had been established. There was some kind of a mishap, and an explosion, and a chain reaction, so that the force of the explosion was great enough to propel the moon out of earth's orbit. And Moonbase Alpha along with it. And in that startrekian way, space is not endless empty void, but every week, they'd be encountering some new thing out there.

I was fascinated with the show. My lifelong hobby--drawing floorplans and elevations--for a while became drawing layouts and elevations of Moonbase Alpha, envisioning it as it was portrayed in the show, as "New London," a sort of model city in geodesic domes, as earth of course, had become an unsavory place because they didn't recycle way back then in the '70s or something.

But I think the thing that really intrigued me about "Space: 1999" was that they dealt. It was like, Okay, the earth is gone, who knows what we're going to encounter out there, what's for lunch?

Here on the moon, it's different, but you make due.

And, I get to make trips back earth. Why, I'll be there tomorrow for softball practice. And it's an important practice. I'll be spending the day on the pitcher's mound. First time ever. I'll be the pitcher.

And then I'll come back here to the moon.

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