No matter how many scientific facts are placed before us, people will still believe in the irrational and unprovable. Many Christians prefer to accept a 5000-year old planet opposed to the millions of years suggested by evolutionists. People will swear by their horoscopes and psychic hot-lines instead relying on straightforward common sense. I will receive chain letters by people afraid of bad luck if they don't bother ten other people for no reason. Black cats, broken mirrors, walking under ladders. Everyone has illogical superstitions that can not be changed regardless of any proof. One of mine is the belief that many bizarre behaviors can be explained by a full moon.

Three days ago on the first day of autumn, I sat on lounging couch when I heard a loud crack. A quick debate occurred in my head over whether the sound was a gun shot or a firecracker. Before I could decide, the pop happened again. That's a gun shot, I concluded. Another crack. After that, I wanted to hear the trigger being pulled. It was. One more time. Four gun shots, probably a couple blocks over. Just because four spaced out shots happen, it doesn't mean any malevolence is at work. The Wild West mentality still runs rampant where I live, and it is not that out of the ordinary for someone to pick up a gun and shoot it off in the air. It turned out that something nasty was at work, because the police blocked off three block just to the west of me. That night, the moon was a sliver away from full.

I worked at a homeless shelter during the winter three years ago. When a full moon came around, the drunk homeless got drunker, the belligerent homeless picked more fights, and inevitably something would occur that no one would want me to repeat to others. It was at the shelter when the full moon theory was explained to me. The moon controls the waters around the world, affecting tides and what not. Since human are made up mostly of water, it wasn't much of an extrapolation to see how the moon could affect the water in out bodies. Emotions and moods which normally we wouldn't express suddenly come to the forefront.

The last couple days, I've had an uncontrollable (and unwanted) urge to take stock in the direction my life is headed. Always a dangerous task because I've been bushwhacking without a trail in sight for a few years now. It was like a bad hallucinatory trip. I couldn't help how I felt, and the only thing that made me feel better was watching Pink Floyd's The Wall. Sometimes, someone else's madness can curb my own.

East Carolina defeated Miami 27-23 in college football last night. East Carolina?

My mountain biking buddy stopped abruptly during our ride yesterday to announce he was too tired to keep going and just wanted to nap. The week before, he was pushing me to get down through a hairy section of rocks and boulders on a much rougher trail.

After steadily losing value for two months, America On-line jumped up 16 points on the final two days of trading last week.

Basically, everything has been a little off the last few days, and I think the full moon played a little part in it all. Some full moons are more potent than others. I've gone a few months without feeling the effects of the glowing globe in the sky. But there are two or three times a year when the moon is tweaking the gravity or swirling the tides or doing whatever it does to screw with us, and I feel it. That's when the werewolves come out, Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde, and all the fiction we're told not to believe in comes to life.

Chris Jungle accepts responsibility for all of his moon-induced behavior.