A-Musings

At Life’s Summer Solstice (Warning:  Temporary ranting ahead.  Hopefully the last time for a long time …) I have a problem with the solstices. Both summer and winter.  For the last God-knows-how-many years, I fall into a funk a few weeks before the longest and shortest day of the year.  In early-mid June and December, like clockwork, something shifts, and the world starts looking bleak and sad, hopeless and unpromising. A bi-annual, mini existential crisis smack in the middle of what should be the happiest times of the year. Of course, the December solstice takes place during the Christmas/Chanukah/Kwaanza/New Year holiday season, time of celebration and festivity, magic and wonder, giving and receiving, honoring the past while welcoming new beginnings, possibility and change. The June solstice brings graduations and weddings, school break and vacations, beaches and barbeque, fun in the sun, summertime and the living is easy.  Oh, joy. ...

Uh-oh.  Did I just, like,  blaspheme ?   Not sure.  Because as I walked home, luxuriating in February 2014’s final sweet, sunny Saturday, waiting for signs of God’s wrath to reign o’re me.   I look towards the perfectly clear, blue-blue sky for bolts of lightening and grumbling thunder, ready to strike me suddenly and totally dead dead dead with thousands of volts of nature’s electric energy.   I half expect that the pavement beneath me will suddenly tear itself asunder, and the open earth will suck me in, swallow me whole, and close in around me.   Or He/She/It will take a more stealthy, insidious and silent approach, maybe bursting an important blood vessel in my brain rendering me instantaneously and completely void of life, or maybe (just for kicks and giggles) a less major one, leaving me merely vegetative, useless, costly, inert and drooling.   Because I think I may have just, like, inadvertently flipped off God.  Inadvertently...