There Goes the Sun (♬doot-'n'-doo doo♬)
Our warming orb is fading away, and won't be back for months. Who planned this, anyway? WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
THE SUNLIGHT IS SLACKING. THE DARKNESS ADVANCES. Every day we northerners lose a little glimmer, and become a little glummer. It’s called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD.
:(
“Here Comes the Sun” has been replaced by the Ride of the Valkyries, and I don’t like it one bit.
My yoga teacher tried to reframe this as a yin/yang thing:
According to Chinese philosophy, Yin—the dominant mode for the next six months— was associated with the moon, the shady side of the mountain, all things female (hey, I didn’t make this up), the passive, plus wetness, cold, and darkness. Comin’ atcha, northern hemisphere!
Yang, on the other (warmer) hand, is everything we’ve loved about the last six months: all things masculine (ditto, not my cosmology), engagement, the sun, warmth, dryness, riding roller coasters—in short, all the things you might experience on vacation.
Here in the north, you could either be sad about this, or else…well, you could be really sad about this. Not that I begrudge our southern neighbors anything, but they’re mostly fish. Eighty-one percent of the southern hemisphere is ocean, after all, while only 61% of the northern hemisphere is submerged.
Is that fair to us land mammals?
Not that the universe gives a damn about fairness. In the interest of girding our loins (do people still do that?) against the chilly times ahead, I present this cartoon as a public service, and warning: It’s dark, and getting darker.
Word to wise:
Thanks for nothing, sun.
Changes are afoot, and they smell like nutmeg.
I hate nutmeg.
Which would you prefer?
Come to think of it, the people you actually see at a nude beach are never the people you want to see at the nude beach. Clothes were invented for a good reason, it seems.
Choose your shovel.
On the other hand, and thankfully, snow never gets in your bathing suit.
In the end, we’re all screwed.
My brother always points out that, as of the Winter Solstice (December 21, at 8:27pm, this year), we begin gaining sunlight every day, and building toward the summer of 2024.
Optimists are annoying, aren’t they?
Hey, you’re kinda creative, I finally realized. Where’d you get that, from pablum your Mom forced down your throat, from 3 years of middle school lunches of French fries and deep fried carp, from 1,000 days in a row of ramp ramen in college, or from the last 10 years eating only power bars washed down with vodka-laced power drinks, just askin’?
You have to bite your tongue a little on this, being a downhill and cross country skier. Good thing you always find humor in the glummer (is that a work?) downturn of daylight.