We’ve had 115 degree temperatures in the Valley, and I’m nostalgic for my apartment in Santa Monica and the cooler weather.
During the California Wildfires of 2003, I lived ten short blocks from the ocean. Once seated on the beach I could fill my lungs with fresh air while the downdraft over the rest of LA County was hot and polluted with ash.
Holding hands as we walked past Shutter’s and the other luxury hotels on the boardwalk, my date, a proponent of radical liberalism, joked that he wanted to hire a limo to take me up to watch the burn. After all, what better expression of "the sublime" than a bottle of Pol Roger and a fireside limousine ride set to Bach.
"Grotesque dichotomy" would have been a better term. I made a mental short list:
•Sitting on the bluffs at Loyola Marymount where I watched plumes of smoke rise over Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots
•Living in the shelter of my home office next to the Newport Bay estuary where I watched the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on CNN
•Voting Nader in 2000, not for his platform, but for the "idea" of a third party; thinking that the dot-com boom would take care of domestic policy and taking national security and foreign policy for granted.
•Enjoying a white Winter up in Lake Arrowhead despite the uncertainty of New Years Eve 1999 (fears of Y2K disaster, terrrorist threat, the millenium "event horizon")
So this was yesterday’s full moon over Santa Monica:
(via LAVoice.org, from Jimson Weed)
The Full Buck Moon – July 29, 2007
Full moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior.
European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year.
Since July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur, the full moon of this moon is called the full Buck Moon.
Sometimes this moon was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, because thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
