I stayed up for the blood moon. It was beautiful here in New Mexico, despite everything.

Up with the moon’s oncoming interlude, waiting for it to change with a line in mind: “You don’t get to break the broken world.”

Pondering who “you” is, I wondered, are these just fumes? Or is you you-know-who, or is you self-admonition, or could you be Buber’s You? When Jimmy Kimmel tonight, half in jest and half not, asked, “Where are you, God?” I felt myself asking also. His eyes seemed to fill with shiny reflections, as they often, lately, do. I can never quite tell what I’m watching: performance, polemic, therapy such as we have?

Arman and I celebrated our 24th anniversary of meeting tonight with a quiet dinner out. We shared a glass of New Mexican pinot noir. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. The rest of the meal was a treat and relief, as well, after rushing through students and work and worry and life to this point, however many minutes to midnight.

Last night, I wrote a statement regarding my stance on beauty for a literary journal that wanted one:

“I feel that beauty is a process of fulfillment, an embodied promise made and kept. Something other than energy reaching its lowest state and entropy its utmost uniformity (all things conquered and quelled); instead of denial and erasure; instead of saturation and certainty, beauty is nature's and our own capacity to rise and come to terms.”

I may be putting too fine a point on it. I do that. I yearn to flourish truthfully.

While waiting, I saw a math meme that claimed: 2² + 3³ + 5^5 + 7^7 + 11^11 + 13^13 + 17^17 + … + 89^89 is prime. A remarkable curio I wanted to confirm. I wrote a little code to check. It’s been running for hours because I don’t know how to do it in a sophisticated way. I just wrapped my prime checker in a little for-loop and set it loose.

I just did an envelope calculation and found that it would take my computer longer than my and the universe’s lifetime, by far (on the order of 10^70 years) to finish checking the primality of this sum. Whoops.

Moon, don’t get too ominous about this, how long we have and how long we don’t. You’re made of omens embraced with a brave face and held at arm’s length. We’re made of heartbeats one at a time.

I wake Arman to see if he wants to see the blood moon. The sky is clear and the eclipsed moon, even by binocular eyes, is a lovely sanguine sight for these rusted hours.

He does want to see it. Now he’s lugged our not-very-good, reward-points telescope out onto the porch to see what he can see.

A dark, auburn moon that fills the field of view!

A present without answers and a time that carries on!