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As I've said before, astronomical events are convenient markers, and rare astronomical events the more so, as they present a chance to begin something new, mark something old, or break with the Way Things Have Been. Tonight, of course, presents an extremely rare event, and the completion of a cycle. This is the fourth and final of a tetrad of lunar eclipses that also included October 8, 2014, part of a coincidentally closely-linked date/event which, in my personal universe, should have been a place of celebration and which was instead one of the great debacles of my life.

And now, a year later, in spite of my rationality and my understanding of cosmology and odds and probabilities, I can't get past the feeling that if that minor coincidence of astronomy and calendars resulted in the garden-gnome disaster (which sounds a lot funnier than it was) and subsequent upheaval in my life, this one's going to be flat-out crippling. It's bullshit, of course, but humans are wired to think like this. Seeing patterns is an evolutionary Good Thing. But it keeps us hammering away at it, even when when we know better, when there are no real patterns to see and there's no Virgin Mary burned into the toast.

So, what patterns are not there?

Tonight, as noted, is another lunar eclipse, one vastly more portentous than last year's rusting-crimson disaster if pattern-making can be used to estimate portent. The full moon is of more than passing meaning to me; special full moons, the more so. But those are the marking of a special thing, a beautiful thing, and are set aside for...well, are set aside. Last year's eclipse of the moon coincided with another date of significance, and should have been special indeed, if one believes in that sort of thing. Coincidence, of course, an artificial calendar we've adopted from a centuries-dead pope. No such coincidence on a Hebrew or Chinese calendars. It's all a matter of how fragments of time are arranged, right? It meant nothing. But it did, and even now after all this time it is...it was significant in deep and terrible ways.

So now it is the fourth of the noted tetrad of eclipses, each 6 months apart, and separated by five full moons each. Last year at this time, the eclipse was the second of four. This eclipsed full moon is a supermoon, a moon at its perigee, the closest it ever gets to earth, the brightest we'll ever see it. It's the last lunar eclipse of any kind this year, and should be a spectacular sight.

Eclipsing a supermoon is vanishingly rare. The last one was in 1982, and the next won't be until I'm in my 80s or (more likely) long dead. There are usually only four or five of these things in a century. This will be the third one I'm around for. And again, like any primitive counting sunrises with a mark on a wall, this is also a date of apparent significance. I am ##000 days old today, exactly. You know what the odds against that temporal odometer rolling over zeros on this specific day is? About the same as it is for the other 9000 or so surviving Americans who were born that day. But still, out of a population of 310,000,000, that's still only about .000003 of the population (or about three one-thousandths of a percent, if that's how you measure things.) So, happy birthday to me...seems that an actual count of days is more significant than a mark on a calendar, right? As if it matters either way.

A trick of numbers, meaningless to anyone but me, I imagine.

So, I go into the dark maroon near-twilight tonight to watch with the rest of the world, or at least our part of it, and I'll be holding my breath in that dusky, dry light, and cursing myself for doing so. And if I live, I'll be back to this blog. A year of mourning is enough. It's never over, never goes away, and I doubt it will. But time to get up off my ass, and this coincidental astronomical place, this break in the thousands, is as good as any to set a beginning survey mark and move on.

In Our Next Episode: I grit my teeth and put something else up.