from the pen of icarus blake

I had plans yesterday.

I had plans to finish the next chapter of Dogstar, to figure out the process of formatting and printing the beta version of my first novel, to get an oil change.

Guess how many of those things I did.

I woke up around 10, ready to take on the day.  I started fighting with B&N press and scrambling to find a decent free PDF editor.  Then the sun seemed to dim, and I got antsy.  It was imperceptible at first, just this feeling of wrongness that grew as the sky darkened ever so slightly.

Then I checked the time and realized that it was the eclipse.  I was cold, and it was dark, because the moon was crossing the sun, so I grabbed my partner and our eclipse glasses and we stepped outside to check it out.  Very cool, we got about 76% coverage where I am.  Enough to make the world cold, darken it a little, but not enough that you would notice consciously if you hadn’t known about the eclipse.

And it’s that strange celestial event that threw me off my game.  The darkening of the sky threw off my internal time.  My body knew something was happening before I did, and both myself and my dog started pacing around the same time.  The wrongness of the sun going dim in the sky impacted my animal body more than I expected.  There was another eclipse a few years ago that didn’t impact me nearly to this degree despite greater coverage — but I’d spent the day in the basement that time around.

I’m not surprised that eclipses in the past ended wars, or prompted mass human sacrifices.  I’ve never been in the path of totality before, but I imagine it feels like the end of the world for those few moments where the sky goes dark in the middle of the day.  One day, I’ll seek it out.  Go and sit in the dark and feel my animal soul recoil in cosmic horror as the moon eats the sun.  I imagine it’ll do something to me.

What a weird primal joy to feel like the animal you are in the face of the universe.