LXX
As a Christian, I have been assured of immortality; though in view of the Devil (whom I’ve been trying to ignore), immortality might not be the happiest thing. Still, it tends to reduce birthdays to their finite context. This morning I woke to realize that seventy finite solar years had now passed, since the 29th of April, 1953. My birth happened, so mother told me, in the middle of the night, depriving her of sleep. So my own insomnolence appears to follow on trend.
The morning woke incident seemed the perfect conclusion to a mostly sleepless night. As gentle reader may know, I am entirely opposed to woke and wokism in any form, and would prefer to sleep in. It “triggered,” while I was lying in bed, a calculation of the lunations since my birth. I finally settled upon 864; a number that divides by two, three, four, six, eight, and nine, to produce in turn highly divisible numbers. The Moon is Waxing Gibbous, so I suppose I should acknowledge a small fraction at the end, of just over a week. (The Moon is in Virgo. I remain perpetually in Taurus.)
I think here of the Gibbous Monkey that the neighbours kept (young German bachelors), when I was but a child, much less advanced in moons. This was in Bangkok, and their names were Arminius and Gunther. The monkey, cleverly denominated “Tar-saan,” was of course a master of brachiation, and could fly from tree to tree at incredible speeds, if he ever escaped his quarters. He could anyway leap about the longest room, without touching anything in transit, and was no more likely to collide with any object than a bat. But he protested his imprisonment, by walking upright in mockery of his human slave-masters, using his long arms for balance; and stealing shiny and valuable things, which he would irretrievably hide in the rafters.
Tar-saan could be amusing, but he could also bite, savagely. He was much too intelligent to make an agreeable pet.