I personally have always been somewhat partial to that pale sphere orbiting around our planet. I appreciate the moon in virtually any phase of its cycle, especially the quintessential crescent moon. However the full moon is another phase that I find to be highly alluring. I appreciate how the rays of the sun reflect upon its entire visible surface such that there is very little, short of very heavy cloud-cover that can mar such a night. This totality is never quite so brilliantly illustrated as on the night of a lunar eclipse. There is something particularly magnificent about how the moon is not merely full but seems afire with a more solar glow, particularly in the minutes preceding the start and following the conclusion of an eclipse. It can be quite captivating.

It is during nights such as these that one who works by night can appreciate the silver lining. To be able to look up at the sky, to watch the waves gently and yet energetically lap up upon the shallow incline of the relatively unpopulated beach, to feel the slight but welcome breeze shifting the warm air, to know that a snack is just two Euro pounds and a quarter kilometre walk away, it all just kind of jars pleasantly against the chaos of Paceville less than a half-kilometre away.

Above and beyond the booming music heard from a distance, above the chinking and skittering of ever-shattering bottles, above the rabble of hot-headed drunkards and so-called bouncers who shame the rest of their kind with their violent dispositions, beyond the skyward lighting of more prominent buildings, exists a universe beyond our atmosphere that is both seemingly constant in its cycles and yet ever-changing. We are, for instance, ever so slowly losing our moon. The distance between the planet and her moon is growing. The tides and the weather have grown less harshly defined compared to that which history and prehistory have witnessed.

In the context of the grandness of this same universe we again return to the small-minded revellings of individuals in Paceville looking desperately for a little excitement and to add a little meaning to their lives, a mission as daunting as finding water in the middle of the Sahara desert. What is the point of inflating one’s ego every day or every weekend in the context of the enormity of the planet, let alone the universe? I do understand why many of them do it however, and the reason can be found within the history of the industrial revolution, where beer was used to placate the workers, to deaden them to their everyday misery, of toiling through a self-destructive routine to earn one’s daily beer and forget one’s misery while making the few wealthy, riding upon the sweat of their subordinates’ toils.

The moon witnessed it all before just as she witnesses the same today. The enslavement of the many by the few, not through banded shackles of iron but through the very legal system that is supposed to uphold justice in the country and in the world. Through this system the few enact new obligations for the many and machinery of exploitation for the few. They call it fiscal policy. They make the many think that they are doing them a favour, first raising the prices sky-high, and then ‘generously’ offering you the ‘opportunity’ to be their monetary farm. They give you the present and take away significant portions of the future. They have many ensnared within their trap of legal slavery and the moon can only remain silent in her witness as the many drink in futile attempts to drown away their worries and their sorrows. We have seen it all before and it never went away.