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A calendar for the Space Age

I have been fascinated by calendars all my life, from Aztec to Julian.

In 1995 (38/39 space age) I was beginning to learn hypertext markup language and publish my poetry on the internet, while reading every day the postings at the spot — a soap opera multiple diary experiment. I was thinking hey, I can do this, I can write a diary on the internet, but I need to be real, not fictional (well, that was before I came to my semi-fictional senses [including this statement]... and)...

...and I wanted to have a different calendar to use in my web diary.

That much, at least, is true.

My first feelings were I wanted to tune my calendar back to ancient rhythms of sun and moon. So, instead of months, I would have seasons and actual "moons" — the original "months" (or "moonths" as it were).

That was the easy part. There are only four astronomical seasons on our planet, regardless that many complain there are only two real seasons in California and at the north pole. There is, nevertheless, a regular rhythm of days getting longer and shorter, warmer or cooler, as spring turns to summer and fall into winter. All over the globe. Different but all over, depending on latitude and all that.

So, as I say, that was the easy choice. I would count the days by four seasons of 90 to 92 days, and moons of 28, 29 or 30 days. Except that each moon and season would start with day one, not day zero.

But I soon came up against a real smacker: how would I number the years, and what would be my New Year's Day?

My first thought was — oh it's my calendar I'll make it start on my birthday.

But then I thought, no, I need something more universal, something not simply selfish, but something which is really historically significant, the date of some event which marks a real change from the past into the future, something, probably in the 20th century, a date that marked a watershed moment for all of history. That would give its name to the age to come.

I thought maybe electricity, the electric age; or the first atomic explosion, which was quite a change from the past warrior age into the atomic age. But electricity was too simple, with no single date of creation I could see — although I am deeply fond of Benjamin Franklin and I toyed with idea making him an icon for my calendar — can't you just see him, now, holding his kite, getting hit by lightning?

But no. I decided I couldn't do that to him. And as for the bomb, it was dramatic, yes, but too violent, too destructive, too limited to the havoc which we are capable of wreaking. I wanted an event of major change, yes, but one which included both the good and the bad, the promise and the threat. The good, the bad and the beautiful, not just the ugly.

Then, I am not sure exactly what day it was, but I think it was in Debbie's little coffee house and carry-out sandwich shop Cine Cafe (previously Mekka Java but they went bankrupt) on K street by the corner of 4th Avenue in the Gaslamp district of downtown San Diego, across the street from where I was serving as volunteer host at the Republican convention protest zone (where I wrote [and then posted @ Xanadu] an unbelievably long-winded and boring protest zone journal). Debbie's cafe is also just down the block and around the corner from the import warehouse store where I would soon work for three some years (39-42 [and while there I would resist the temptation to write about that place and get us all fired for the rats in the shelves and other... um... managerial indiscretions]).

I remember I often just sat in Debbie's shop, reading the newspaper and writing and occasionally chatting with George, the Yugoslav who worked there with Rosy (his right hand he said served him better than any wife ever had). I remember showing them my notes and plans for the calendar of moons and seasons, and they laughed and shook their heads. By then they already knew me pretty well.

"You've been watching too much Babylon 5," George said. I always went to watch that show on their big-screen TV — they had cable and I did not, not in my little hole-in-the-wall ex-storefront under a factory converted into lofts, no.

Anyway, it was during those months — I guess it must have been the summer of 39 — that the idea finally came to me of what was the watershed moment par excellence in human history that marked a change pregnant with both promise and threat, a change that should transform us from a one-planet Telusian culture into an interplanetary and even interstellar life form.

Have you guessed it yet? October 4, 1957. (12.12.1)

The date that the first human satellite was launched to successfully orbit the Earth. Beep-beep-boop-bop.

The Space Age had begun.

I was pleased, because it is right near my birthday, and is usually the feast day for the patron saint of the body of water where I was born. My grandmother was a mermaid who fell in love with a sailor on San Francisco bay. Not that I haven't thought about that a lot. I have.

I also discovered, after checking ephemeri and calculating the count of seasons and moons, that that year the 4th of October was both the twelfth day of autumn and the 12th day of the moon. That coincidence pretty much sealed my decision. 12.12.1. I like coincidences. I hunt them down and eat them for hors d'oerves. Then go on to the main course. You.

So that, in a nutshell shelled by a nut, was how I decided the Space Age would be the name of my new calendar, and its new year's day would be the 12th day of autumn (not always the 4th, by the way), and that the celebrations of new years would stretch to include the fourth of October and the twelfth day of Autumn and whatever days were necessary to encompass the 12th day of the moon, too. Oh, and my birthday and San Francisco, too.

And that, as "they" say, was that.

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