I’ve just received a very serious wake-up call, from China of all places.

The unfortunate demise of The Dark Side of the Moon.

The Dark Side of the Moon is nearly a lifework, containing twenty years of my ponderings on the state of the state and the affairs of other’s affairs.

First of all, now that it’s ending and I’m moving on, let’s clear up issues about its name. Pink Floyd wasn’t on my horizon back then, but Mark Twain was: He wrote, “Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he turns toward nobody; you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.”

I’ve always loved that quote and spent a lot of time slipping around behind the news and newsmakers to see them more clearly. I wrote from the dark side of that moon I inhabited—and still do, at least in essence. But then China got into the space-game, poked around the moon and exposed the hut from which I wrote:

China’s Lunar Rover Just Discovered A ‘Mystery Hut’ On Far Side Of The Moon. Landing in January 2019 as part of China's fourth-ever mission to the moon, the Yutu 2 rover just encountered a mysterious cube-shaped object in the moon's Von Kármán crater.

Nothing mysterious there, China. That’s my crater and my writer’s shack. Now that you’ve outed me, I’m forced to move elsewhere and rename my blog. Inconsiderate as hell, but then China is known to have civil rights issues. The only upside is that the wi-fi access up there was spotty and upload times outrageous.

So, The Dark Side of the Moon has now taken on a more down-to-earth perspective and renamed itself Wake-up Call.

Twain doesn’t have any quotes on wake-up calls because the mechanics behind the term were not yet invented. But Demetri Martin has one I rather like: “I ordered a wake-up call the other day. The phone rang and a woman’s voice said, What the hell are you doing with your life?”

That made me smile. And with that to think over, I welcome you to Jim Freeman’s Wake-up Call on Substack and look forward to the opportunity to share another twenty years in your company.

Enjoy. I’m not yet ready to give up the chase.