JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Too big a deal is being made of today’s eclipse. I watch for signs of the apocalypse, and I don’t think it is one. It’s not extraordinary enough. There are five, six eclipses every year, and the red moon stuff sounds like fear-mongering—it makes people think of war and Old Testament plagues. (I hate to break this to you but the world is already at war, there’s always been a war going on in some corner of the world, and war is big business.) In many ways we’re still the ancient tribesmen beating the drums to keep the moon from swallowing the sun.

My druid kept getting text messages from people asking about the effect of this eclipse upon their personal destinies. Her answer: Probably none. We were at a bookstore and two kids asked the staff for a book called Eclipse. We thought they wanted a science book, but it turned out to be a young adult novel with a vampire protagonist. So we started riffing on eclipses: that movie about Rimbaud’s affair
with Verlaine starring Leonardo DiCaprio, that horrible Bonnie Tyler karaoke staple that makes me want to rip people’s throats out through their noses, and the Antonioni movie with Alain Delon and Monica Vitti in which they arrange to meet but neither one shows up and for about ten minutes the camera shows the empty street corner, lampposts, random pedestrians, and you figure something has to happen, and then it’s The End. My friend came up with a great idea for a costume party with an Eclipse theme. Half the guests show up as the sun, the other half as the moon, and they take turns covering each other. On the way home I noticed an Eclipse gym. What profound insights am I trying to impart? None. Absolutely none.