Am in a bit of a Holiday Hollywood Funk now.  The script I spent a year working on and that was referred to as, “brilliant” is also, according to many those same folks who called it brilliant, too experimental to produce.  Consequently it is not-commercially viable script. Perhaps I’m spoiled in that, up to this point, all of my scripts (excepting my last full-length stage-play) have been produced, multiple times, in some sort of capacity. Though on a much smaller scale, obviously. Still, the thought of all this work, yielding no results, w/out more or less, restarting from scratch, bums me out since it feels over and done and I’m really not sure whether or not I’m up to the task of starting up from scratch when I could just start an entirely new script, instead.

Forty years ago today, the Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to orbit the Moon, were taken by surprise, upon encountering the earthrise for the very first time. And I’ve been watching earthrise on my laptop here, in my mom’s Denver, Colorado living room, 40 years later just by clicking play on the You Tube stream.

Above Hollywood. Beyond Hollywood. Clouds passing. Rising above. Connecting and reconnecting with the root source of wonder. The startle-zing of Apollo 8′s first confrontation with this unmitigated beauty. The starkness of this new unfamiliar, familiarness.

There’s even a bonus clip — Earthset. Taken from a Japanese camera is hard to believe it’s footage of something that was really going on it’s just so small disk geometrical.

Happy Birthday, Earthrise. To those who’ve been following my blog as well as those who’ve only just jumped on, Happy Christmanukkah. Happy Eid, to those of your who observe Eid. Solstice, as well, obviously. And for any Buddhists reading this blog, not sure that there’s a specific holiday for you this time of year but, peace, health and happiness to you as well. Happy Kwanza to those Kwanza observers out there. And for Atheists, Happy Sir Isaac Newton’s Birthday, as his birthday does, indeed, fall on the 24th of December. (Though there is some contention as to whether to go by the Gregorian calendar or not, lets just assume the 24th, for consistency sake). Wishing all of you a Happy Earthrise Birthday and the best of everything in 2009.