Why I am afraid of the Moon and other ridiculousness that keeps me up at night.

There are some nights when the Moon is so orange and low in the sky I'm determined it's coming toward me. I'm walking down the street, toward the thing at dusk, but suddenly it's getting bigger. It's growing and growing and I'm forced to run away from something that is so big that no matter how far and how long I'll run, it's going to squash me. And that's the thing. I don't imagine it hitting me with a big kaboom! and debris flying everywhere. I imagine a cartoonish squish or maybe a splat and my Nikes sticking out from the crater, an image I've stolen from The Wizard of Oz.

The other day we found a show called "If There Was No Moon" on the Discovery channel. Patrick Stewart narrated. If there was no Moon, he said, the Earth wouldn't have an axis. Then, a cartoon drawing of the Earth, wobbling like a top on its last couple of turns, then computer generated images of snow on the sphinx and Antarctica hot with dry, cracking soil. Then, scientists debating on where the Moon came from. Another planet? A meteor? A piece of the Earth that broke off once, before anything, when the planet was spinning and spinning and spinning?

This picture scares the shit out of me. But I can't stop staring at it:

Then theories about two moons at one time. Two moons. I'm afraid of two moons. I'm afraid of two moons in the sky, one higher than the other, one orange and one gray, both coming at me. What if you were looking into space and you saw one crash into the other? And then everything went dark? The image on TV was of two moons. I gasped and covered my eyes with a blanket. It's so scary.

And how does anyone walk on the Moon. How does anyone just walk around, looking at the Earth, where everything else is hanging out. Astronauts, after a stroll, go to get back into their spaceship and the engine won't turn over. It's time to go, one says, and he puts the key in the ignition, and rer-rer-rer-rer-sput. Rer-rer-rer-rer-sput. And they're stuck in space forever. I'm afraid of space. Ironic, because I'm really claustrophobic.

The Moon used to follow me to work every morning on the bus. I used to watch the Moon follow me to school every morning from Elgin. It's just hiding something. And I don't know what it is.

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I probably should stop reading so much before I fall asleep, but what keeps me up at night includes the fact that I haven't read enough Shakespeare. That I don't know enough historical information. That I have no fucking clue how the stock market works, that people sort of "invented" how the economy would work, how money would be handled, and I can't even organize these thoughts in my head. How could anyone just figure that out? Or war strategies. How long would I have to study battlefield theory before I really got any of it?

This is like a wikipedia addiction. You look at a page, you learn something new, but it just reminds you of everything that you don't know. I don't know enough about teaching theories. This is why I have teaching nightmares every night. I don't know how much stuff I'll get with my classroom. I'm never sleeping again. How do I know that what I've learned about history is true? I mean, I just watched a show about the Boston Massacre that told me that what I thought I knew was a lie, and I didn't even know that much.

How can anybody study the Moon. How could someone say: hey, I'm pretty sure the Earth is round without having seen the pictures we've seen? Where do all of these people come from, knowing what stars are, and just figuring out how we can launch humans into space and walk in space suits on the lunar surface. How is somebody willing to be the first person to do this? It would take three years to get to Jupiter. Who is going to be the person who spends six years in outer space, and how could they ever do it without ridiculous psychological damage from isolation, and how could you land on Jupiter? It's just gotta be too fucking cold, right? I mean, the Moon gets to -150 Celsius at night.

Fuck you, rocket scientists.