Darkness at Noon

 Although I use blackout blinds in my bedroom, I can tell when morning has come by the light entering at their edges. If I can’t see the lines, it’s still night and I can go back to sleep. Wednesday morning, though, I couldn’t see the lines but my body was telling me that my sleep was complete. I looked at my iThing, and it said 8:30am. That seemed weird. I went into the back hallway, and it was still dark out, but the sky was poisonous shades of orange. I checked the clocks in the kitchen, and they said 8:30. I was pretty sure it was not evening, but not sure of anything else. Finally, I checked my wristwatch, and it agreed on the time. Looked specifically for the “a.m.” on my device, then grudgingly decided it was indeed morning. But what a damn weird one! The sky was wrong, wrong, wrong.

This whole year is an adventure in wrongness: plague, economic collapse, racial strife, wildfires, and now something took away our morning! I was freaking out. I wanted to talk with another human being and see if she also noticed how weird this was. I contacted a friend, who kindly heard out my venting and confirmed that it was weird out there. This calmed me enough to seek enlightenment on FaceBook and check my email. FB was full of pictures people had taken to share how dark and orange the Bay Area was this morning. It was very comforting that others had experienced the same apocalyptic vibe. Then I opened an email with a satellite photo and explanation. A major pall of wildfire smoke had arrived in the Bay Area. At the same time, Mother Nature’s Bay Area air conditioning, the marine layer of fog and cloud, had come in overnight. It scraped the air clean near the ground, pushing the smoke and ashes up into the sky, where it filtered out the sun and all colors but the orange. So, it looked like midnight on Mars out there, but the air quality where we stood was not too bad. Goody.

My email also revealed that my doctor’s office had received this year’s flu shots, and I could drop in to get mine. My interior committee weighed in: the majority opinion was that I should get back in bed and stay there until true daylight. The minority had it that hiding out from the weirdness wasn’t worth screwing up my sleep cycle; I should just suck it up and go get my flu shot. So I did that very thing, walking a few blocks to the office on 24^th street. The last time I remember leaving my home in the dark, I was headed to a medical building for a sleep study.

It was very strange. Cars had their headlights on; streetlights were on. Lights inside buildings made it seem like late evening. The people I encountered in the office and the shops all commented on the apocalyptic look of the sky. Plague, famine, fire; every time we think we’ve hit bottom, things get worse.

Best to stay in the moment, and not borrow trouble. But the crepuscular world out there is awfully damn creepy!