Whirlwinds and platforms of ignorance
A Five Things, Smokin' Hot, Tired Writing exercise
It’s 101 degrees and I can see the heat rolling across the parking lot, ricocheting between cars, making its own whirlwind and whooshing my hair into whips1. I’d rather be home but today is grocery day, aka: social studies. You call it “people watching”, but from inside my introvert head I look out on a world full of contradictions and study this society, this melding of worlds, this place where we come together in business casual or pajamas and everything in between. We are a society in need of studying, and I’m not just watching people. I’m telling stories. And after I load my groceries into the hotbox that is my car, when I roll my empty cart back to the corral (I am not an animal), there is a puddle of pink ice cream pooled near an empty, boiling parking spot. Bubble gum ice cream, I think. And a cone, intact and empty. It looks like two scoops of reward or bribery, and sweet relief that ended saltily. Someone somewhere is sad. I am sad for them, remembering a triple scoop of maybe my first taste of disappointment some 45 years ago—dropped, as I rode in the back of a relative’s truck down the freeway. Social studies: why are we the way we are?
“If we can’t salvage the bits of memory and matter that have made us what we are, let us at least acknowledge the whirlwind.”2
Some people don’t take the time to study. I am irritated—not by ignorance, because that is just a good starting place—but by the platform of ignorance that speaks; shouts; leaves comments; fails at salvaging. If you are too lazy to study, remain silent (I am not an animal). Being misunderstood is okay. Being misinterpreted is irritating. I need the still, small voice.
At home, the day after the hot whirl that steals two scoops: The cows graze blankly as another chicken dies. They are unfazed by the massacre, living for their stomachs without rumination, comfortable on their platforms of ignorance, while our chickens get picked off one by one in the early mornings. Cows aren’t in danger and don’t care and are too dumb to care even if they were in danger. This morning I sit at my post in my son’s upstairs bedroom, with my husband’s rifle resting on the unscreened windowsill, pointing across the pasture and into the chicken pen. I’m reading Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone (I am not an animal) while I wait for a squawk from the rooster; wait for an alarm; wait for some bold sucker to slip silently through our fence in broad daylight for a second breakfast. What will I do? An eye for an eye, a coyote for a hen’s lifetime of eggs, or a raccoon for a rooster’s crow. Nothing happens. I finish a chapter and close the window before the heat.
“Why does one create? Two reasons: an overabundance of life and a deficiency of it.”3
This Five Things Essay is a combination of advice from John Blase in a recent post “Smokin’ Hot Tired Writing”, to write here on Substack without overthinking; and Summer Brennan’s always fruitful Five Things Essay exercise.
You must read it this way. (Say what, what way?)
from Zero at the Bone by Christian Wiman, chp. 21
Wiman, chp. 14
I love your "I am not an animal refrain."
And I love it whenever someone writes about the effects of searing heat. Load up that Yeti with ice, my friend.
This is solid, smoking hot writing, my friend. 💫 So glad you shared this.