Too Soon?

The Dead Reap Their Reward, October 2015

Early on the people of Santa Cruz established their Catholic cemetery just outside the city's eastern limit. It's a fair number of acres reserved for that sort of dead people, be they the Iberian Portugese or Mesoamerican Mexican or Hibernian Irish variety of Catholic who, having inhabited the county in life continue to literally inhabit a certain amount of the county's space in theoretical perpetuity there in that ground, just beyond which lies the neighborhood of Live Oak, an amorphous stretch of unincorporated space between Santa Cruz proper and the city of Capitola, such as it is.

Here in Live Oak we appear to be rushing the season a bit, which for technical reasons, as if I need to repeat, is only supposed to last one day, be it Halloween or Day of the Dead or what have you, timed in ancient days to the night of the year the Pleiades rose in the east just as the sun set, a day set aside for wallowing in the sad repetitive downward spiral of the dispiriting existential nullity of it all, heralding the approaching winter of the year as it tends to do, all swept up together into that one fine day for overriding public expressions of dread of it all each year, and that day, the day the Pleiades and the sun stand across from each other in the sky, the sun giving way, the Pleiades ushering in the dour night sky, isn't meant to be spread like marmite over a season of it.

The power of just having the one day of it is vitiated, spread over a season the way it is now, in my view, which admittedly was all about the irrelevant candy of it for quite a long while.