Okay, okay, okay! We’ve all been stuck with our four walls and families for an eternity, and it’s beginning to wear thin. We’ve cleaned out the fridge, we’ve cleaned out the garage, gone through 8 years of emails and binge-watched 6 years of television. We’ve organized the towels by fluffy, the food by expiration date and the underwear by number of holes. We’ve done all those stupid patio exercises and gained 5 kilos (11 pounds.) We’ve taught the kids all the math we remember and nobody normal cares how long the 30 Years War was. The dog is refusing to go “walkies,” and somebody stole the chocolate you hid in the tampons box (Steven, you bastard!) So, now what?
This is the perfect time to write a national anthem for The Moon.
Think about it! You definitely have some time on your hands. You wrote poetry when you were young, “moon” rhymes with everything (“swoon,” “June,” “raccoon”) and you can just steal the music from the public domain (“Moonlight Sonata,” perhaps?) Plus, how cool would it be to be the person who wrote the national anthem for The Moon? Like Way Cool!
The truth is, even though The Moon is central to the tides, the calendar and romantic love, humans have always treated it badly. For example, there are 181 moons in our solar system — from Ganymede (bigger than the planet Mercury) to Deimos (smaller than Liechtenstein) — and every one of them has a name — except ours. Ours is just “The Moon.” C’mon folks! Make an effort!
Meanwhile, people always say weird stuff happens whenever there’s a full moon. Hey, that’s celestial profiling. Venus doesn’t get that kind of abuse, and it spins backwards, for heaven’s sake.
Then there are the million and one songs supposedly written about The Moon that aren’t actually about The Moon, at all. We have blue moons, harvest moons, moons hitting your eye like a big pizza pie and even bad moons rising — but nothing about The Moon itself. You never hear lyrical lines like, “From thy rocky cratered majesty/Across your lifeless plain.” Nobody ever sings that stuff. No, Moon songs are always about love or lonely, or “My God, you make me horny.” We look at The Moon and gush our emotions all over the place like water from a runaway garden hose, but when it comes to praising our shiny little friend, suddenly everybody’s mute.
However, even though we’ve treated our closest neighbour despicably for centuries, that isn’t the reason we need a national anthem for The Moon. Here’s the deal! The way things are going here on Earth, we’re probably going be living up there sooner than we think. So, rather than getting caught with our pants around our ankles like we did with Covid-19 — let’s get prepared!
God save our gracious moon
Long live our shiny moon …
How am I doing?
WD Fyfe 