w i n t e r
perigee
The December solstice occurs at 2:44 a.m. EST. This is when the Sun is farthest south for the year, when night is longest, and when winter officially begins.
So have a drink on me. 'Cause this is the start of the dark days, moments of cold and passion mixed with the ever present Gin & Tonic. Fog will roll over the foothills and mix in the trees down the street like dry ice. The mist will remind me of San Fran.
The fellas in the bars down the road will still try and pick up the same girls as always. The mahogany will go uncleaned, save where someone spills a beer, and the Black & Tans will still relieve the cold rain outside. Leonard Cohen will take my heart out and drop it on the sidewalk in front of me during some late night walk home, and I'll no doubt kick it about the asphalt happily like a soccer ball I can shelve when I get home.
Full Moon, called the Long Night Moon or Moon Before Yule. The Moon is at perigee, and when this happens near full Moon, coastal areas get unusually high and low tides.
They say this year is special. Like a once in a lifetime event, just hours away. See, on December 22, 1999, the moon will not only be full and at perigee (221,614 miles from Earth), but the earth will also be at the Winter Solstice.
I've heard this won't happen again in my expected lifetime. But there are lots of things like that. The time an ice cube was thrown across the kitchen, missing the sink, bouncing off the wall and spinning around the rim of a stray glass before falling with one plink into the bottom. Or maybe when work on the furnace shed was almost complete and someone tossed a hammer into the back of the old Ford, but it slid on the wooden bed, hit the far side, flew into the air and spun once, maybe twice, before coming to rest vertically on its handle.
Supposedly the combined elements will increase the pull of gravity on the earth, suggesting a possibility for some rather large earthquakes. One site predicts an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.5-5.0, likely to occur in Myanmar on December 22, 1999 at 17:33 UTC (GMT). But then again someone else says a larger earthquake may occur on December 23, 1999 at 6:40 UTC in the Gulf of Mexico, near the Yucatán Peninsula.
Who knows?
The only thing I'm hoping for is a clear sky for ten miles along highway 54, a snaking piece of old road linking I-85 to Chapel Hill. Tonight I'll leave a bar on Franklin St. and wander down a gravel alley on Rosemary St. before fumbling with my keys to get into a cold car. I'll crank over the engine and be gone in a cloud of exhaust, leaving two tracks in the empty lot.
54 will come up fast and I'll put the car through the motions, passing old silos and farm houses, the steel mill, the turnoff for Bynum, countless Christmas lights blinking and blue, covering the entire landscape for miles along either side of the dark highway. And then 15.4 miles out I'll round a corner, dip down a hill, disappear in the fog, and when I come out the moon should be there just to my left and I will chase it for the next 10 miles through the countryside.
They say tonight I won't even need headlights.
Winter solstice is at 2:44 a.m. EST
The moon is at perigee 5:55 a.m. EST
Full moon is at 12:31 p.m. EST
Have that drink on me (send me the bill) and stare kids, stare.
goodnight 12.22.99