Showing posts with label summer solstice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label summer solstice. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
June 21, 1990 - Paris - Journal Entry
Rainy day in Paris. A great title for my sixth novel, which I will finish when I'm 110. 2062. Spook Jacobs sent my lease renewal for 256 East 10th Street along with letters from the past five months of my travels; two from AJ, one from Sharon who has been released from rehab, from Nina Gold in London, Carmen in Cancun, one from my sister Pam, another from Miranda Seymour, who had been married in LA. Considering that I sent out over sixty letters from Biak, Bali, Penang, Bangkok, and Kathmandu, a 10% return was darned respectable, especially since correspondence by letters has fallen into disuse at the end of the 20th Century.
I had been a math major the first three semester of university. I divined numbers in my head. 300,000,000 seconds and counting until 1/1/2000. Not accurate, but close.
Humans have fast ascended into a time of literate illiteracy.
People in the West can write, but don't, because they have nothing to put down on paper or no paper or pen at hand. TV junkies with all their thoughts born from the marketing agencies of the corporations. I seek the road of a poet. Luckily I have resisted any desire to imitate Proust or TS Eliot. My friend, Rick Temerian, said once, "Your first writing was like you were trying to be Scott F Fitzgerald."
I didn't take the comment as criticism. I love THE GREAT GATSBY and have always imagined that Gatsby was a roaring 20s version of my old boss from the after-hours clubs Jefferson and Continental, Arthur Weinstein, operating an outlaw club in the wealthy East End, paying off the cops and dealing with the filthy rich and cocaine runners. I wouldn't mind writing a new 1984 or Maxie Laing's RUNNING a novel about an Irish tinker. No choice other than to be a populist writer always dedicated to 'smash the state.
A LITTLE LATER
I had lunch with Corinne at le Comptoir. I was blathering to my sometimes lover about literature and amity with ex-s, when she interrupted by saying, "I have a story to tell you. you know Claude Aurenson."
It was not a question. Claude was the manager of le Privilege, Paris' premier boite de nuit under the Palace theater on Rue Montmatre. Corinne worked the Bains-Douches upstairs bar. She knew everyone on the scene as did I having been the doorman back in the 1980s. "Well, I see him at the bar. Last week. I hadn't seen him in months, but he invites me to a party at le Privilege and asks my name. So as a joke I gave my nom de familie as the town of my birth. He looked at the name written on the paper and says, "I was born there forty-three years ago. I asked him about his family and he revealed that he was a bastard. He was born during the war and that was common in those years, but strangely he tells me about this man who never wanted to see him and I realize his father was my uncle and Claude is my cousin. We hugged like long-lost cousins and we take a trip to Toulouse together for a family dinner. I say nothing about this story and when my uncle comes to the house, he looks at Claude and is introduced to him. They share the same first name. Claude says nothing. I go into the kitchen and my Uncle Claude follows me and asks, "Who is that man?" I tell him just a friend from Paris, but he knows full well who Claude is. their faces are mirrors. One old. One younger. "That's my son." asks Uncle Claude. I say yes and he rushes out to hug his son. After forty-three years they were reunited and see each other all the time."
I cried happy to have heard such a beautiful story. Not everyone has a tale of woe.
A LITTLE LATER AT THE BRITISH PASSPORT OFFICE.
I have noticed that my journal entries have nothing to so with events. Days, weeks, or months. There is precious little happening in the outside world. Paris is Paris. Les Parisiennes are preparing for Le Grand Depart on July 14. The USA economy is in danger of collapse as always. Unrest in the Eastern Europe threatens the Iron Curtain and soon the World Cup begins.
Fuck Italy__
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Much more to come__
Saturday, June 20, 2026
Summer Solstice - June 21, 2024
Yesterday 4:52 PM marked the beginning of the summer solstice, the little best day of the year on the Northern hemisphere. People have celebrated this day since time immemorial across the globe. The word Solstice means “sun standing still” or “grianstad' in Celtic. This morning I awoke at first light. 5:14 AM.
Back in the last century my friend AJ and I went out to Stonehenge for a neolithic day trip. I hugged the monumental stones and cried as one with Celtic blood, even though the monolithic stones were erected by an unknown race many millennium before the Irish wandered northern Europe. Since that visit the Crown, which claims ownership of the ruins, has restricted entry to the ring of stones. Today thousands of pagans greeted the dawn at Stonehenge. New Yorkers for the most part ignored the yearly phenomena, even though Manhattan's East to West streets from 14th to 155th are aligned with sunrise and sunset during the three-day solstice period.
According to Wikipedia the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 arranged the street grid for most of Manhattan according to the azimuth at sunset to 299° (i.e., 29° north of due West), so he island's sunset aligns with the streets on that gird.
Tomorrow morning I will greet the sun naked in Montauk.
Enjoy the cosmos.
It's in our blood.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Summer Times Blues
Yesterday was the last day of the thrre-day official summer solstice for the northern hemisphere. The day lasted almost sixteen hours in New York and the sun never set in Murmansk, Russia. I woke well before the dawn and went to sleep far past sunset, as the Earth polar cap tipped toward the nearest star 93 million miles away from our home planet.
Five hundred year after the discovery of beer by the Celts the Druid priests gathered the unknown tribes to erect this monolithic bluestone clock to record the rising and setting on the sun and the passage of the stars. To this day modern archaeologists will not attributed this great feat to the Celts, because the true tribe supposedly arrived in Britain in 600BC before Caeser's reign over Rome.
Fucking Brits haven't even discovered its ancient name.
No one has come even close.
No one.
Not even us remaining Neanderthals.
The Avebury henges followed Stonehenge's creation.
Back in 1994 I drank in a good pub at the northern entrance.
I also climbed to the top of the Sillbury Hill.
Scientist have calculated that its construction took five hundred men fifteen years.
And over two seas of beer.
The exact purpose of the hill remains unknown.
The view from the top is good, but nothing special.
Stonehenge has its rivals such as the Hopewell Project in Bangkok
.
Or Manhattanhenge in New York.
And who can forget the eternal bliss of Foamhenge in Virginia.
It's now 2:33PM
In Brooklyn.
I am ready for a nap.
Longest day of the year or not.
With my head to the west.
As it should be on the summer solstice.
tNothing like Blue Cheers SUMMERTIME BLUES
THEY WERE ONCE THE LOUDEST BAND IN THE WORLD.
Saturday, June 22, 2024
The Longest Day Of The Year - Stonehenge - 2014
37,000 people gathered at Stonehenge to celebrate the dawn of the longest day of the year. Police arrested a number of people for reefer, which the BBC referred to as 'drugs'. I stood on my roof at dusk.
Naked to the sun.
No one else joined me, which is a good thing.
Getting arrested for public indecency would be a horrible way to end Litha, the pagan day of the sun standing still.
Bain sult as or enjoy in Gaelic.
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