Always Darkest Before Dawn

And then you go and try to look up who said that (it’s unknown, a very old proverb) and instead find some of the most idiotic comments in the world on some of the Yahoo! and Answers.com and Ask.com sites. Are folks out there really that freakin’ stupid, are they on drugs, or are they trolling to see how PO’d they can get folks like me when we’re already in a sour mood? Better than the “bro-dudes” and the outright racist and misogynistic trolling sites, but still…

So I go to try to be creative and play with PhotoShop, something I haven’t done in a while, and find that my 100% legal software that I’ve used for years now needs to be “re-activated”? What fresh hell is this, and why? How much time do I get to spend tomorrow “fixing” a problem that didn’t exist yesterday and shouldn’t exist today? At what point is it better to simply toss Adobe’s installation disks into the blender (yes, it will blend!) and downloading some freeware equivalent such as Gimp?

Surrealistic. And unrealistic.

Astronomically, the darkest hour, as far as the sun is concerned, is always at the point where the sun is exactly opposite of your longitude. But the moon is going to be up for a few minutes at least on most nights. And these days, there’s far more light pollution just after sunset since everyone’s still awake. Some nights there is lightning. An aurora displays. And fireflies. And noctilucent clouds. And supernovae.

I understand what the phrase means. I’m also thinking the sentiment behind it might be just as much nonsense as trying to make scientific sense (or justification) of a proverb that probably pre-dates the wheel.

How ’bout I just go to sleep and see what happens when dawn actually rolls around?