Exospheric Vantage Point

1,4-dichlorobenzene – the active ingredient in modern mothballs. And the figurative ingredient in this blog’s hiatus. It was mothballed.

Mothballs, as we see in the compound word, are teeny tiny moth reproduct… wait, sorry, that’s not the accepted denotation. For moths at least, they are spherical deterrents. Orbs of repugnancy. When a moth detects the sweet benzene aromatic ring of 1,4-dichlorobenzene, I suppose it’s like an Ewok looking up at the Death Star.

In the floral-language version of mothballed, as in the commonly used connotation, this hand-typed woolen blog was tucked away on a shelf. And while not forgotten, it sat and sat. The website was archived for years. But, in the meantime, I wrote content elsewhere. So, for housekeeping purposes, all posts dated August 24, 2023 are links to articles written elsewhere, roughly between May 2014 and present – which I populated onto this site in one afternoon.  Those posts/links prior to August 24, 2023 were posted to this blog during the original iteration of Exospheric Vantage Point. All articles were written by me.

Back to mothballs – they sublimate. When changing phases from solid to gas, they skip that pesky liquid state. Unlike water, which behaves primly by going from ice, to water, to New Jersey summer humidity.  So, what looks like a white cheddar cheeseball is actually a subliming moth point-source pollutant. Moths, lacking their own Environmental Protection Agency, have no means for remediation. Fortunately, having an opposable thumb and a larger cerebrum, I can simply throw the mothballs in the trash.

But words, like this blog, evolve. The root word of sublimate, sublime, is now most often used as an adjective – “tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality or transcendent excellence” (so sayeth Merriam-Webster).  And hopefully, going forward and as time allows, you will return to this blog for a sublime stopover. Like a moth drawn to a flame.

Now, it’s time to air this place out… it smells like mothballs.