A Tinker's Damn

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Usually, when I open the word editor to begin composing a blog entry I have something more or less on mind to begin with, but not always. This is one of those days that nothing halfway important is on my mind. The weather outside is... dank. It's neither rainy or foggy or cold or hot, it's just somewhere in between all the above that I call dank, but that may not be the dictionary meanding of the woid.

I spend too much time thinking about prescription drugs. I'd like to call them medicines, but I don't always think about them that way. I go to the VA Hospital to see the doctors there, but I don't always think about them that way either. Presently, I don't think too much of prescription drugs or doctors or the VA Hospital either.

Well, that's not exactly true. I do think about them a lot. When I write that "I don't think too much of them", I guess it would be more lucid to say I don't get much reward or hope BY thinking about them. I feel a little guilty about using the services of the VA Hospital because even I got shot at, I never got shot. Many of the veterans I sit with in the waiting room have. I'm not worthy.

The problem with that is that I have lived a sorry life, and the six years I spent serving our country never meant that much to me because at least I served, and many people not only didn't serve, but they went out of there way to avoid it. I don't give a tinker's damn whether they did or didn't, they're the ones who have to live with that.

There are people who I call "professional veterans" who wear parts of their combat uniforms as if a badge of courage when it appears to me that they're actually wearing them as an excuse to live like they would have lived if they hadn't used their military service as an excuse to not conform. Why would they not? "Its okay for me to hurt people because I was in the war and saw things that would horrify you." Yadda...

The new Mac operating system Snow Leopard makes the Unicode Characters even more available. I'm not exactly sure of what the symbol above means, but to me it symbolizes a singular experience I had once, but where it happened might be iffy. What happened was that the first crescent of the waxing Moon rose outta the east with the planet Venus conjoined. 

The Crescent Moon was closing in on Venus such that it "looked like" Venus was inside the crescent of the Moon momentarily, and that's impossible. Venus can't eclipse the Moon. Only the Sun can eclipse the Moon by dent of the Earth coming between the Moon and the Sun.

 Ahhhhh... that's how the term "dent" is used or more specifically, "by dent of". A crescent Moon (the Moon is the fastest moving heavenly orb we perceive from the surface of the Earth. It moves one celestial degree in two Earth hours.

The aforementioned phenomena happens by the Moon closing in on what appears to be a stationary Venus (the brightest object in the sky other than the Sun), and the non-collision appears to make a dent in the hollow of the crescent Moon. That is, until the unlit part of the Moon completely covers Venus from Earth's perspective.

There are all sorts of metaphorical stories about this event. I don't know how often it happens locally. Like the solar eclipses, it happens somewhere from some vantage point on the Earth's surface.

I think I saw it way before I studied astrology on my way down to Key West, Florida in my second hitch in the Navy while a paid passenger on a Greyhound Bus. The Navy sent me to a rocket school at the old Navy Station in downtown Key West. I was truly shocked there was any place like that in the United States that I could get in a car and drive too.

Seeing Venus appear to be inside the circle of the crescent Moon seemed even at the time to be some sort of privilege to me. I've only seen it once. I'm not exactly a star gazer. Astrology to me is an abstract system for thinking about things that I memorized for keeping it around all the time. I had no idea other people can't do that. I still don't. I think it's because they don't have the right inspiration to make the effort. They do other things with their memories as useful or more than what I've done.
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