The Week: There is No Rain, So All That's Left is Sweat

Tuesday, 7/9/24

It is the time of year where river rocks grow a skin of brown snot algae, distorting their appearance. Basking in anonymity, the rocks are reminiscent of shapeless Jim Henson muppets, lazing along the river bottom. Crayfish scuttle backwards through the strands, disappearing into crevices. I sit on a large, dry rock and watch blobs of algae freely flow with the cadence of octopi, sending a tentacle of goo forthward like a blind person’s white cane.

I, however, have been covered in sweat all day, which is why I have come to the river and its slippery bottom. To meditate on sweat is to acknowledge its various forms. The geophysics of the body creates differing experiences of sweat. The dampening of the hair on the head, each hair a blockade for flow. The pooling at the lower back where the long planks of the back taper. The misting on the fields of our arms from just standing inside the dome of high dew points. The streams that flow down the riverbeds of our legs and sides of our faces. The cliffs of our lips where sweat pools and then drips like in a cave. The wetness of pits, tits, and ass.

Most are repulsed by sweat. Stifled, suffocated, rendered weary. Others are unbothered, working long hours in heat, getting the things done, it’s part of the job. Keep a beverage handy. And from that crowd, some of us luxuriate in it. Today, I moved from sweaty task to sweaty task, sometimes stopping to use my finger to trace a path through the sweat on my arm--always amazed by our porousness, our production.

I pulled only one fossil from the river. Only is enough.

Wednesday, 7/10/24

I have been watching more movies. I am not much of a TV-watcher. We watched a movie where time was multi-dimensional. It could be climbed and hurdled. It can be manipulated like a pile of dust or a book being pushed off a shelf. We watched Interstellar where I cried at worlds and vastness and smallness, and of course at time. And of course at a character who ages significantly throughout the movie. On her death bed, she looked like an elderly version of my own mother.

Thursday, 7/11/24

The mental image of my very elderly mother stayed with me.

So I talked to my plants, telling the green beans how well they’re doing. Telling the huge, rogue sunflower how beautiful it is. Telling the growing cucamelons Welcome! Telling the squash plants, overcome with pests, that I’m sorry.

The day had been much cooler than previous days. Instead of sweat on the fields of my arms, goosebumps sometimes appeared.

I read an article by Roxane Gay (writer, culture commentator) about TikTok. The majority of the article lists different versions of living a life, whether it’s tending to cow feet or using a monotone voice to narrate a very mundane and capitalistic morning routine. She talks about the addictive nature yet the addiction sometimes gives way to tedium. A TikTok rabbit hole can lead a relatively intelligent person to wondering what “blue sweatpants girl” is and from there, the “Tyla Dance”, and from there something else repetitive, copied, and staged. The creation of trends, performances, and narratives is its own kind of myth-making. The supposed to and this is how and what is acceptable are myths. The more you pay attention to humans, the more predictable and absurd they are. But absurd compared to what? To say that something is absurd is to have yet another myth in mind. This is a world that tells itself stories, whether they’re about Gaia or Yaweh or lipstick or Tarot. We have the story of Margaret Mead explaining that a 15,000-year-old healed femur is the oldest evidence of civilization. But what about the storytelling of 40,000-year-old cave art? How is the visual rendering of events or memories not civilized?

Friday, 7/12/24

It took willpower not to touch, not to continue standing there as if I were in a field of sun-touched flowers. Barbara K. Spraul’s oil paintings at the State College Festival of the Arts had me mesmerized. She paints with a palette knife which allows for a dappled texture, the field of bold yellows and reds reaching for my fingers. The sky, impossible blue. These flowerscapes seem dream-evoked but real places do appear that way, don’t they?

I have been watching a large, taller-than-I sunflower grow in my cucumber/watermelon/cantaloupe garden. Some small creature planted it without my knowing. We watch as the sunflower’s not-yet-bloomed face follows the sun. In the morning, it faces Brush Mountain and in the evening when I water, it faces our catalpa tree. Although gorgeous when their dark faces bloom with a mane of yellow, my favorite stage of their growth is when the dark face is covered covered with the yellow petals as if stuck in the game of peek-a-boo. The green sepals surround the yellow face in a spiky, textural clutch. Everything lives and grows and blooms and sits in its own time. Who knows where I will be or what I will be doing in the chronos/Kairos of my life when this sunflower starts to play peek-a-boo. Maybe at my work desk, wishing I were elsewhere. Maybe driving past central-Pennsylvania landscapes at 80 miles-per-hour. Maybe in my kitchen, roasting this-or-that vegetable. The likelihood of me being there in the garden as it happens is slim. Especially in this heat.

Saturday, 7/16/24

Needing new glasses, my dad couldn’t read the menu at The Knickerbocker so he ordered an Impossible Burger because that is what Brian ordered. As he ate his burger, agreeing that it was delicious, not knowing that it wasn’t beef, not knowing that 120 miles away, there was an attempted assassination on former president, current clown Donald Trump. I nursed a migraine, Brian ate his entire burger, and my mom are a salad with fries on it. We had a choice between a loud room and a quiet room and my dad chose the loud room where every conversation we had was followed by a “What?!” A young woman behind my dad kept staring at me. I felt nauseated and everything was loud. We told my father what he had eaten and he was impressed.

It wasn’t until we were back at the house and walking across the driveway that Brian exclaimed the news that Trump had been grazed by a bullet while at a rally. I had barely any emotions about it. It was more like an interesting fact like the oldest piece of chewing gum is 9,000 years old. Of course there was an assassination attempt. Just weeks ago, I was discussing with a colleague about how shocked I was that an assassination attempt hadn’t happened yet. Mind you, this discussion was not about wanting for the man to be murdered but more an observation of the hatred humans can carry and what they are capable of doing with that hatred in a country where there isn’t enough gun control.

We sat on the patio the rest of the evening. Brian built us a fire and lit the tiki torches. Our faces were aglow with the flames, our eyes reflected the love language of lightning bugs. My father’s face, however, was aglow by his phone, reading memes and hot-takes because memes and hot-takes are how some form their thoughts these days.

Sunday, 7/17/24

No rain. I have been taking stock of the yard through my bare feet. Over the weeks, the grass has been communicating in rasps and hard consonants. The garden gets a daily drenching; however, the others (the winterberry, serviceberry, redbud, tulip poplar, coral honeysuckle, blueberry bushes, button bush, etc., etc.) have been hunger artists. It takes 40 minutes to carry water to all of them in our ~1.5 acres. Someone (likely racoon) has been knocking over the bird bath. We put pails and buckets of water out. I watched a wasp climb down into the dog’s outdoor water dish. Thirst is the name of everything right now. If I were to paint the landscape, the brush would be dry.

Monday, 7/18/24

I set four different alarms today. One to alert me to stop reading and do some chores around the house. Another to alert me to leave the house to run errands. Another to alert me that the movie will start at the theater in 30 minutes. Another to remind me to get ready to have a meeting with a colleague.

Lately, I have been living a very timeless life. This is a preference. I have curated/created (they sound the same, no?) a life that doesn’t demand much from me, so I live in Kairos. To hell with the clocks. Let us tell time by the flowers and how they face the sun. Let us tell time by the orbweaver’s hunger. Her hunger stopped me as I was heading to do errands. Her dark, supple body against the drab white siding of my house kept me captivated, served as a reminder that these things are happening in their own time. However, I have become so accustomed to living this way that I will sometimes end up late even when I’m looking at the clock. I did do the errands and I did see the movie.

Movies are powerful and a lot of us feel changed after seeing them. How we manifest that change is relative. For me, I often hope that the outside is different when I leave the theater. Maybe it’s suddenly dark outside and for whatever reason, it’s magical. Or maybe it’s storming outside although it was sunny and bright when you arrived. I was disappointed that there was no change. I walked into the theater under a bright, dry-oven sky. You will likely correctly assume the rest.