We should never do this eclipse thing again...
9:11am
I’ll try to write this in real time. It’s solar eclipse day. I don’t really know how to act. I work from home, from my basement office, so I’ll have to set an alarm or something. There’s no windows down here. The dogs are upstairs. They won’t hang with me down here, preferring to guard the first floor from UPS and FedEx drivers. I usually let them out around noon, so there’s no worry of them needing protective googles or anything. Facebook has been warning me to keep my pets inside during the actual event so they don’t go blind while they are sniffing the grass for 15 minutes and then deciding that they are not going to poop after all. I’m not sure how we ever survived without Facebook.
I’ve also learned that along with the eclipse, there may also be a rapture. There have been many promised raptures before, of course. None have come to pass. It’s a bit like an ecumenical power ball drawing. As a non-believer, I am immune from the rapture business, but secretly hope it happens, and not just for the sudden extra parking. Rabid evangelicals are some of the worst people in the fucking world, so a good cleanse would do nothing but improve things down here. Not to mention doom Trump’s chances in November.
More alarming are the rightwing conspiracy theorists. One, who has over a million twitter followers, is predicting that “Masonic, Satanic, Esoteric, Gnostic, Brotherhood of the Snake and other occult-like groups will be performing….” If so, since there’s only a small window of time, presumably the performance would be something like a Super Bowl halftime show, with truncated versions of the greatest hits.
The Assyrians have been charting eclipses since the year 763 BC, by the way. This was long before the New World Order and the lizard people and Marjorie Taylor Green showed up. Science is quite the thing. More of you should try it.
So yea, I’ve been doing a little research, and I also found that the last total eclipse visible in Pennsylvania was in 1925. We’ve had “partial” ones since then. Self-explanatory, that. We have also had “annular” ones, which I had to google. This is when the moon covers most of the Sun, leaving its outer edge visible as a bright ring or “annulus” around the darkened Moon. This seems very cool and much more photogenic than complete darkness, which is what we’re promised in a few hours. That is of course unless the rapture brings with it its own lighting, which could ruin everything and make you feel really stupid for buying those glasses. Anyway, the last annular eclipse visible in Pennsylvania was on May 10, 1994. I don’t remember it. Of course there was no social media at the time so it could be that everybody just missed it.
10am
The traffic is going to be as bad as it was during Woodstock. Millions of people are driving all over upstate New York to get a better view, or descending on the Canadian side of poor Niagara Falls, one of the supposed epicenters of this thing. I’ve been to the falls and under normal conditions the place is so crowded you just want to snap and heave everybody with a camera into the rapids. Canadian authorities have declared a state of emergency in an attempt to deal with the influx, but at the same time are not adverse to a little America-inspired price gouging. Bring your wallet, in other words.
I’m going to see the same exact thing from my back porch, perhaps at a slightly less thrilling angle, but we can compare pictures of the blackness and then you tell me if your $1000 a night hotel room and $25 Molson was worth it.
12:47pm
This whole thing has one of those July 4th “I just know somebody is gonna lose fingers” vibe to it. There are waaaaay too many adults screeching online about not being able to find eclipse glasses so they can safely stare into the teeth of the sun for 2 hours, and it just feels like solar retinopathy could be a thing over a thousand mile front, proving yet again that Americans are some of the dumbest people on the planet.
Also, in Scranton the cops were just called because somebody was reported burning a live chicken to death with a blow torch in their backyard. A little eclipse pre-gaming in NEPA.
1:32pm
People are just starting to realize that they live in NEPA, which is an Indian word for “no sun”. Clouds have rolled in, and there’s even some rain coming. So this entire thing is likely to be a complete bust, with thousands of people driving hundreds of miles to witness, essentially, dusk. This is why we can’t have nice things.
3:40pm
I surrender. We should never do this eclipse thing again. The entire thing has made me nostalgic for the Canadian wildfires. At least that shit brought some sepia toned panache to our shallow little lives. Clouds obliterated whatever it was we were supposed to see today. Also, I was told that it would get dark outside. Unless that part comes later, it’s no darker than usual at 3:40pm in our little sun-starved, rain-soaked piece of dirty ground. I haven’t been this let down since Geraldo cracked Al Capone’s vault.
In a bit…
—tf