Blue Moon

Tonight, a full moon on Halloween, for the first time in 46 years, and a blue moon to boot. Seems like some kind of extremely rare coincidence, but come to think of it, any full moon on Halloween would be the second full moon of the month, thus "blue."

When I was in the Street Patrol, we had a Haloween security gig every year. Since there's a huge street party in the Castro District every year, and it's become well-known throughout the Bay Area, straight people come to gawk. This has basically ruined the event since the beginning of the 90s, with street-clad gawkers far outnumbering the costumed revellers, but what's worse is that homophobic teenagers see it as an opportunity to visit the neighborhood and bash queers. So we would make our way through the crowds for hours, clad in our fuschia berets, trying to stop evildoers. (Once we were on "60 Minutes.") The later it got, the more drunken and out of control the crowd became; after midnight, it would always get dicey. It got to where I would hope for rain to keep the crowds down and spoil the party, so as not to have to deal with violent drunks. Drunks are the most boring people in the world. It's like dealing with mean, stupid dogs.

But no chance of rain tonight. It's gorgeous today.

So I'm not exactly anticipating Halloween with much pleasure. In fact, since the Street Patrol broke up, I try to stay as far away as possible. I hate dressing up and I hate huge crowds and I hate drunks. It's sort of the worst possible place for me.

I've got some birthday shopping to do. My partner Cris' birthday is next week and we're off to Paris on Friday. So for several days this will become a Paris tourist diary, I guess.

Oh, and since it's the last day of the month, it's payday. I hate that I get anxious for payday to come. When you're a kid, it's okay to wish the days would go faster so that some eagerly anticipated day would come -- the last day or school, or Christmas, or a big date. But when you're an adult, as Joni Mitchell said, you drag your feet just to slow the circles down. And waiting anxiously for payday is just killing time. I hate that.

 
A confession

Okay, I actually wrote the last entry yesterday, before it rained. Then last night it started raining and sprinkled all night. So today I wasn't waiting for rain anymore. A bit of a fib there. But I liked the entry and I wanted to talk about waiting because it is, of course, an Advent theme.

In fact, pretending you're waiting when you already know what happened is a little like Advent too. Advent is half pretend and half real anticipation.

Because the season immediately preceeds Christmas, there's a feeling that you're waiting for Christmas to happen. And certainly, as kids, we did. When you're ten years old, last Christmas was so long ago that it may as well have been ancient history. December drags on, and you can hardly stand it. But what you're waiting for, as a kid, is Christmas and all the presents and cookies and so forth, not the coming of Christ.

As I grew older and came to understand that things really would repeat, year after year (and, incidentally, the presents got more boring), I came to focus on the process itself. We perform all these traditional actions, sacred and secular, because it is Advent. People say it's the Christmas season, but actually the season where we do all the shopping and decorating and preparations is really Advent.

When I became an adult and started working with the worship planning committee at my church, I really started to understand what Advent is about. During the four weeks of Advent, we live a double life, as it were. Through reading Isaiah and other prophets we become the ancient Israelites hoping for the coming of the Messiah. But at the same time, we are Christians who know that the Messiah has already come in the person of Christ, and it's not Christ's first coming we're preparing for, it's the second.

So like today, when I was sort of pretending I was still waiting for rain, in Advent we pretend we're still waiting for the Messiah. And we are, only the Messiah's already come.

The moon was gorgeous tonight -- full, or nearly so. And the skies were clear, washed by the rain.

 
Waiting

For four days they've said it's going to rain today. But here it is 1:00 and we've gotten nothing in downtown SF. I checked the radar image at weather.com and it wasn't encouraging -- a couple of bands of light rain off the coast that might not even hit the city.

Ever since I understood the annual weather pattern in San Francisco -- no rain between the beginning of summer until October, and then a rainy season that lasts until March -- I've waited with pleasant anticipation for the coming of the fall rains. The usual pattern was reinforced ten years ago after the big Oakland fire. That year (as in many years) the Oakland hills were tinder-dry by October. High east winds raised the temperature and made a small smoky campfire expand into a huge firestorm that killed a few dozen people and burned 5000 houses. A week later, heavy rains came, and suddenly everyone was afraid of landslides, as there was no longer any vegetation to hold the hills up. There were no catastrophic landslides that year due to the fire, but the fact that both the fire and the thread of landslides were related to the weather brought home to me just how important the seasons are here. So don't let anyone tell you that seasons aren't important in California.

I don't know if it'll rain today, or next week. But it will soon. That's enough for me.

 
Reformation Day minus 1

For many years I've wanted to write about Advent, or to keep an Advent journal. Now I'll try.

Advent is a season in the calendar of the Christian church. The church's calendar doesn't consist only of saint's days, although they're a big part of it. It also consists of seasons that cover the whole year, in the same way that summer, fall, winter and spring cover the earth's year. Everyone has heard of at least one of these seasons -- Lent, roughly the six weeks before Easter. Advent is, roughly, the four weeks before Christmas. More specifically, it starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and lasts until Christmas Eve.

Another thing about Advent: It is the first season of the church year. Instead of starting on January 1, the calendar of the Christian church starts on the first day of Advent, which happens to be Dec. 2 this year. But we're not there yet; still five weeks to go.

What's this got to do with Reformation Day, a Lutheran holiday? And what the heck is all this church stuff doing on my site anyway? More later.