The biggest solar eclipse of 2024 is set to premiere on Monday and I still don’t have dental insurance. It is bigger than the last big solar eclipse, seven years prior. Most of North America will experience some effect of it. A shadow across these United States. It feels fitting — a catharsis of sorts. Already a year of death and darkness, capped off by the muting of the sun. The veil across the sky. Everything is rendered obsolete during an eclipse. LA will only receive 50% totality, which feels fitting.
Last time there was one here, it was also on a Monday, and I didn’t have a job, so I went on the roof of the parking garage for the now deceased Arclight movie theater to view it. I’d lived in LA for 6 months at that point and my bed in my sublet had wheels. There were some other people on the roof, including my friend, who had also moved from New York, which was nice for me. In the first year I was here, I spent every other week thinking I didn’t have any friends. Then I discovered that you experience most things in Los Angeles completely alone, and I felt better. I didn’t experience this eclipse alone.
Sarah Jessica Parker watched it in 100% totality, on a boat off the coast of South Carolina, painstakingly documenting every few minutes on Instagram.
“Matthew, yes! Exactly!” She later exclaimed to her husband, Matthew Broderick in an Instagram video she posted when the eclipse was at its peak. “It’s so humbling!” I believed her. No is humbled by nature more than Sarah Jessica Parker. Lest we forget, Manhattanhenge 2014.
Trump was watching the eclipse too, on the White House balcony, sometimes taking his eclipse glasses off to stare with his bare, beady eyes. Later when I saw that John Carpenter ass photo of him and Melania, I felt disbelief that this man was forced to observe something with the rest of us. That he had to, in whatever way he does, metabolize the cosmos. That until then, there was a chance he did not know about outer space or about the sun. And here he was, in front of the world, beholding a thing that will take three billion years to die, just like him.
He might be a seer of something. A seer of the void. His biggest advantage is that an eclipse means nothing to him. I wondered what he thought as he took his special sunglasses off and looked directly into the sun, singing off retina layers.
Ow. Trump thinks.
Then he looks down, seeing an an ant scurry out of the way at his feet.
What, he thinks again.
Later, he waves at the confused crowds and foaming press and follows his wife back inside, flanked by secret service.
Leaving, he thinks, watching Melania hurry away with her aides, not looking back at him.
Walk. He starts to walk. Turn. Walk again. Person. Person again. Another person. Keep walking. Stop. Answer person. Keeping walking again.
To be fair, I don’t think an eclipse means anything to anyone who is president, even anyone who wants to be president. I’m sure Biden will creak his way out onto the balcony, hopped up on whatever adrenaline serum they give him each day, a strange, soma-grin plastered onto his lifted face, and don his special sunglasses and mouth “Holy Gosh!” before stumbling back to his office to sit and face a wall.
I wonder if an eclipse meant anything to the Oracle of Delphi either. Maybe she was so zooted out of her gourd from natural gas leaks that she didn’t know where she was. I think about Ms. Delphi sometimes— ol’ Pythia. She was a real worker among workers. An original SheEO. I imagine her clocking into work every morning, stumbling through temple chambers in the dark, powering through an ethylene hangover and muttering to herself about her distant husband and dumb kids before finding that very crack in the earth she sticks her face into each day to take a big whiff of the saccharine fog that lets her see the future.
The best kind of seer is a seer who does not want to see. Reluctant seers, trying their best to ignore the radiator hiss of what’s to come. The best oracle suffers. Like Baba Vanga, the blind Bulgarian woman who predicted 9/11 and Princess Diana’s death, who was suppressed by the Soviet Union until she died in the 90s. Now her house is a museum. Every photo of her looks like she’s screaming.
It looks people were always offering her flowers and gifts. In hard times, we turn to the seers. I wish I could have been a Baba Vanga Gay. I’d gas her up and agree with everything she said, and in return, I’d get to travel all over and wear all black. She might not ever ask me about my private or consider me anything other than an extension of herself, but I’d be living.
Then there was John the Baptist who ate locusts and got dunked by Jesus in a river. He yelled at everyone about the end of the world and then got his head chopped off. I am certain like Vanga, his vibes were atrocious. But unfortunately I would.
I know people think you might be the Messiah over Jesus, but can I suck your dick?
Consider being friends with a seer. You tell them about your nemesis at the office who has to work remotely because they have shingles.
Seer friend: An entire city swallowed into the sea, and the only thing I can do is watch and cry. Also, I have an entire shard of glass under my neck flesh.
You meet your seer friend for a drink at the bar.
You: I’m viewing a new apartment tomorrow and —
Seer friend: And the dead will rot in the house of flies before the fortnight has run its course, and the living will wish they were dead.
You let them crash on your couch while they’re in between oracle caves.
You: If you need an extra duvet, it’s right in that laundry closet—
Seer friend: We all live in a giant sarcophagus.
But I have to respect their commitment to the bit. Their hustle. They lived, they saw the future, they died in agony. That’s a stunt queen. We don’t have many true stunt queens left. The ones who think they are, simply aren’t. Our world is running out of time. And when the world is running out of time, the seers emerge. I hope we have a Baba Vanga of America. Some miserable old lady in New Jersey scaring every one at a Wawa when she’s struck with a vision she has no choice but to repeat. The most off-putting people are the people I trust. We need more oracles. We need more prophets.
John the Baptist... absolutely would
The American Baba Vanga absolutely lives in New Jersey