Moon Memo: A Place to Start

On the art of eternal evaluation

Recently at a new-ish clothing store in Los Angeles I was prepared to drop an admittedly exorbitant sum on an embroidered T-shirt. Needing validation, I asked M what he thought. “It’s cool…but it won’t be in a year.”

At first I was defensive, unwilling to admit that this thing I liked was, in fact, hype. The blinders of a trend are fun!

But also: can’t there be freedom in the awareness that relevance does not last? Sustained interest asks for continual evaluation.

Moon Lists began as a way to locate routes back to some semblance of “myself.” To better match up what I want with what I’m doing. To continually trick myself into finding new narratives instead of getting cornered into a stale script.

There’s an aside in Anne Truitt’s “Turn” where she writes:

“We dwell as strangers on the earth to become its wrack. We invent it for ourselves. We name it land and sea and sky. We divide its reaches arbitrarily into degrees of latitude and longitude, supplemented by a contrivance we call time. W…