Natural history.

How old is the Moon? That is totally the wrong question, man. What you really want to know is, how much does the Moon weigh? Or if you want to be more sensitive about it, ask it how young it feels.

Just reacting to the news this week about those Apollo 14 rocks. Man, those suckers took a long time coming back from the processing lab. Like my entire adult life ... and then some. (Editor's note: I was 12 when Apollo 14 landed on the Moon, so I was probably in the second year of building my four-foot-tall detailed Revel model kit of the Saturn V rocket. Now, of course, I am in my 47th year. Those damn engine cowlings!) News about the Moon always gets some attention around the mill, particularly in the dead of winter when there's precious little else to think about.

Any upstate New York musician knows this better than his/her own name. January and February have been the traditional dead zone for performing musicians in this area of the country. Of course, we don't really perform any more, so it doesn't affect us much, but I well remember my years as an itinerant musician, both in and out of Big Green, scratching out a living from a scattering of gigs, struggling to keep the wolf away from the door (though wolves can be very nice ... unless they wipe out whole villages), and pondering the age of the Moon. January/February were the months that hung me up the most, man. Big fat nothing.

Hey ... that's what you get for living in a backwater. No disrespect, my local friends - I freaking love it here. But staying busy as a musician, an artist, a writer ... anything creative has always been a struggle. It may be a bit easier now than it was twenty or thirty years ago, now that there are more local indie music venues and a whole "thing" that has grown up around that "scene", man. Yeah, man. So you have to store your nuts in the fall and hope you have enough to tide you over until the sun returns. Or at least until the moon returns.

And since we're on the topic of how old the moon .... how high the moon?