Listen, friends and neighbors. I ain’t one to traffic in troubling omens.
But I’m troubled.
As it happens, I was at a friend’s beach house at Crescent watching the Gators put the hurt on Ole Miss.
And talk about omens – as soon as the Gators won, a beautiful Harvest Moon began to rise up out of the ocean.
As if on cue.
A celestial portent of good Gator times to come?
Or a foreboding warning of great expectations crumbling into dust under the sheer weight of life, the universe and everything?
All I know is that the moon I witnessed was drop dead gorgeous. And so I had to take some photos.
Alas, the only camera I had to hand was built into my puny iPad Mini.
And the shots all turned out to be feeble imitations indeed of the glorious orb I was witnessing with my naked eye.
All tiny and pale and unassuming.
Like the Campbell Camel offensive line.
But like I told you all before, friends and neighbors, reality is very much overrated.
So with with a little creative, um, photo editing…
…turning up the saturation here, piling on the sharpness there, dialing down the exposure, messing with the contrast, etc…
…I soon turned my pathetic iPad Mini images into astonishing, colorful, even explosive iterations on the original.
That’s when I started to fret.
Listen, I’m not sayin’ that some sort of supernatural being was guiding my editing hand….Ouija board style…but I’m not ruling it out, either.
All I’m sayin’ is, when I viewed the finished images…
…it was like something out there was trying to tell me that the universe isn’t ready for renewed Gator glory just yet.
Maybe the universe had fordained this to be Georgia’s year.
Or Miami’s.
Or, God help us, Lane’s.
Shudder.
And maybe my doctored photos were not just doctored photos.
But the actual Shape Of Things To Come.
What if this improbable Gators run has created, oh I dunno, a “disturbance in the Force”?
A warning: Go back! Go back!
Before it’s too late!
Nah. Not a chance.
Gators are gonna kick butt this season.
And if the Gods of Football don’t like it, they can supernova themselves back to where they came from.
Because it’s like the greatest supernatural force of all time…
…Tom Petty…
…said.
