![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's been a lucky summer here for smoke. That much by way of luck no one could argue, and with friends seeking better air by fleeing from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles -- Los Angeles -- that much luck is a lot.
Still, we aren't actually blessed by protagonist rules here (and when the big quake comes everyone will remember that). Sometime in the night the wind from Washington state turned north and the smoke began to creep in under the doorsill, as it were, of the sky.
I first noticed the smoke on Saturday. The change was subtle -- just a shift in the spectrum of morning light that could have been an especially mellow late summer glow, except that we have learned over the last, what, eight years or so, that this aureate turn, though beautiful in its early stages, signals no good.
Still, subtle. Just that extra dose of gold in the September sunrise, and a faint smell that could have been someone burning brush in their yard, if the yard wound through the whole city. I was more telling myself a story about smelling smoke than actually smelling it.
Today when I opened my eyes to check the two rectangles on the ceiling that signal what kind of day it's going to be, they were a fiery orange, and I knew the smoke had settled in like a big mean marmalade cat stifling the city under its belly. (There's my Raymond Chandler moment.)
I shut my windows and checked the air levels, which I haven't done all year until now. They were off the top of the chart, in that no-soul's-land above 10 where the technicians just wrote "+", like those radiation counters at Chernobyl that only went up so high. How bad is the air? + bad. I stayed inside until early afternoon, for reasons including, though certainly not limited to, the smoke.
By the early evening the air had cleared out to a 4, the low end of moderate risk; I sat in the square with K., drinking Limonata to wet my dry mouth, and we talked about personal narrative and trying to find readings for my course that are more... cheerful? Funny thing to be talking about, really, in the smoke, in a street patio that exists because of a pandemic, in, you know, the world that is the world, but you do need to give people some variety or they'll think writing is just a record of individual and collective doom.
Which, maybe, but there can also be jokes.
On that note, the sustaining literary middle C, if you know of any good personal essays that are funny and/or celebratory (they don't need to be wholly cheerful, just not unremittingly bleak -- uplifting of at least one corner of the blanket fort) -- wow, would I like to hear about those. I'd be grateful and so would my students.
* * * * * *
Because it's the start of term, and because I am who I am, I have a toothache, broken glasses, and bloodwork that needs to be filled (after I accidentally put the last order through the wash.) Oh, and I'm supposed to find someone who has a home blood pressure cuff, which, my doctor assured me during our video call, is not that unusual.
Quick poll (I can't do polls): do you own a blood pressure cuff and how many blood pressure cuffs are owned in your immediate circle, however you define it?
{rf}
Still, we aren't actually blessed by protagonist rules here (and when the big quake comes everyone will remember that). Sometime in the night the wind from Washington state turned north and the smoke began to creep in under the doorsill, as it were, of the sky.
I first noticed the smoke on Saturday. The change was subtle -- just a shift in the spectrum of morning light that could have been an especially mellow late summer glow, except that we have learned over the last, what, eight years or so, that this aureate turn, though beautiful in its early stages, signals no good.
Still, subtle. Just that extra dose of gold in the September sunrise, and a faint smell that could have been someone burning brush in their yard, if the yard wound through the whole city. I was more telling myself a story about smelling smoke than actually smelling it.
Today when I opened my eyes to check the two rectangles on the ceiling that signal what kind of day it's going to be, they were a fiery orange, and I knew the smoke had settled in like a big mean marmalade cat stifling the city under its belly. (There's my Raymond Chandler moment.)
I shut my windows and checked the air levels, which I haven't done all year until now. They were off the top of the chart, in that no-soul's-land above 10 where the technicians just wrote "+", like those radiation counters at Chernobyl that only went up so high. How bad is the air? + bad. I stayed inside until early afternoon, for reasons including, though certainly not limited to, the smoke.
By the early evening the air had cleared out to a 4, the low end of moderate risk; I sat in the square with K., drinking Limonata to wet my dry mouth, and we talked about personal narrative and trying to find readings for my course that are more... cheerful? Funny thing to be talking about, really, in the smoke, in a street patio that exists because of a pandemic, in, you know, the world that is the world, but you do need to give people some variety or they'll think writing is just a record of individual and collective doom.
Which, maybe, but there can also be jokes.
On that note, the sustaining literary middle C, if you know of any good personal essays that are funny and/or celebratory (they don't need to be wholly cheerful, just not unremittingly bleak -- uplifting of at least one corner of the blanket fort) -- wow, would I like to hear about those. I'd be grateful and so would my students.
* * * * * *
Because it's the start of term, and because I am who I am, I have a toothache, broken glasses, and bloodwork that needs to be filled (after I accidentally put the last order through the wash.) Oh, and I'm supposed to find someone who has a home blood pressure cuff, which, my doctor assured me during our video call, is not that unusual.
Quick poll (I can't do polls): do you own a blood pressure cuff and how many blood pressure cuffs are owned in your immediate circle, however you define it?
{rf}
