#23 / Let's Talk About The Weather
Hey y’all,
Does it feel like nothing in the world is going according to plan right now?
Last week I promised that in my next email I would have pictures from our trip to Starved Rock State Park. It’s about 90 minutes outside Chicago, and thus it’s a popular attraction for people from the city who want to see cool-looking eroded sandstone cliffs and cave formations. Ashley and I both took vacation time this week, and with such a rare opportunity, we thought it would be ideal to hit the trails on a weekday, in order to minimize our exposure to other humans, which is the primary consideration when doing anything nowadays.
We originally decided to go on Monday, but when the weather forecast called for thunderstorms, we put the outing off for Tuesday. As it turned out, what the weather served up on Monday was not mere thunderstorms but a vicious kill-storm of immense proportions. This kind of weather phenomenon actually has a name—a derecho, also dubbed an “inland hurricane”—and consists of an unbroken line of storms stretching for many miles that moves rapidly and sticks together over long distances.
It formed in South Dakota, hit Omaha during mid-morning and was rolling through Chicago by mid-afternoon. I checked later and it powered on through Indiana and Ohio and was still going in all its glory, a red-edged sickle on the weather map spanning nearly half the height of the U.S.
When the storm arrived here, we had just gotten home from the bird sanctuary, a visit we had to cut short. Actually, it arrived about two minutes before we got home, and we dashed from our detached garage, across the car pad, and through the back door; if we hadn’t had an umbrella, we’d have been drenched within five seconds. Otherwise, and luckily, it passed with no real effect for us: a few hours later it was sunny and calm. (Just a couple miles north of us, a tornado spun out over the Rogers Park neighborhood.)
The next day, Tuesday, the weather was still amazing—placid and cool and perfect for sitting outside on a deck. So that’s what we did pretty much all day, figuring that Starved Rock would still be there for us tomorrow.
Turning to Google that evening for excursion-planning info, we discovered what in hindsight seemed obvious: the storm, with its 80-mph wind gusts, had inflicted plenty of damage to the trails, and the power was still out at the park’s lodge. It wasn’t 100% that it would be closed Wednesday, but we couldn’t very well drive 90 minutes on the off chance it wouldn’t be, and lose our opportunity to at least do some other outing.
This felt more devastating in the moment than we expected. I couldn’t have told you what experiencing a pandemic means until recently, and I never thought it would be a thing I would come to know, but here we are, and one thing I can say is that a pandemic means cancelled plans upon cancelled plans upon cancelled plans. The reason Ashley had taken the week off to begin with was that this was to be the week of the Maha Music Festival, which for us has become a beloved family tradition, and which obviously was no longer happening in 2020.
Add that to all the other missed bar mitzvahs and weddings and funerals and birthdays and vacations and retreats and conferences and sporting events and you’re working on quite a void, to be filled with… Tiger King and virtual concerts and a whole lot of unstated grief. I remember reading and sharing that article several months (years?) ago that was like, “hey, that thing you’re feeling with the guilt and sadness and anger right now is a thing you’re familiar with, and it’s called grief,” and I remember the catharsis I felt and the sense of being seen.
I didn’t know then that the grief was going to keep happening, and keep happening. And I know that it is happening, that it’s ongoing, a rolling societal grief-bubble, but the strange thing is that I don’t feel it most of the time: not the sadness nor the anger nor the guilt. When I started these emails in March, I was writing about the pandemic pretty much every week, even though I knew that pandemic-talk was everywhere already. I couldn’t help it. Eventually I stopped writing about it, and then talking about it, and then thinking about it. It’s like the weather now; it’s not that interesting. Except when it is.
The grief is still here. And I know that we’re in a marathon, but I don’t know whether we’re at the end, or in the middle, or still at the start. (Well, okay, we’re not at the end.) And, yes, I have some anger about the fact that we are supposed to be farther along in the race than we are now. Yet even that, I try to ignore, and I shouldn’t, because many people do not have the fortune to do so, and it turns out that I can’t ignore it, anyway. Which also makes me angry.
Instead of going to Starved Rock, we went to a local forest preserve, crafted from the defunct riverside estate of some 19th-century captain of industry, and to the Morton Arboretum (if you’re from Nebraska, yes, it’s those Mortons), which I could also call “local” but is in fact one of the most massive public gardens and outdoor museums in the world. (You thought you weren’t going to get any pictures, I bet!)
So we made the best of it. Hope you are, too.
Reading
Jamelle Bouie — Black Like Kamala
I love this short piece for many reasons, one of which is that Bouie acknowledges the racist “controversy” about Harris’s Black identity without giving it credence. Instead, he uses it as a jumping off point for an actually-important historical and cultural discussion.
My main point is this: Black American identity within the United States emerges from the interaction between structures of oppression — slavery, the slave trade and race hierarchy — and the needs and goals of those enmeshed within them. Slavery bound African captives together into a group; the desire to assert their personhood — to build community, to find respite, to resist — was cause to adopt a common identity. In turn, that common identity gave those individuals and their descendants a foundation from which to challenge the structures that bound them together in the first place. Race hierarchy and racism set in motion a process of group formation and social action, the aim of which was to transcend and overcome racial domination, and racial categorization itself.
Andy Ward — Yes, The Empire Blew Up Another Planet, But Do You Really Need to Attack the Death Star?
Look, I’m not saying it’s not strange that a space station at the forefront of technology routinely has issues with something as simple as CCTV. Still, I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent reason for all of this, and I, for one, have confidence that allowing the Empire to investigate themselves is the best way to get to the bottom of this.
Mood
Oasis — “Don’t Look Back in Anger“
I happened to listen to this earlier in the week, before I wrote the above, and it seems appropriate. I’d make a show of pontificating about the lyrics, but I’ve just learned that Noel Gallagher claims to have no idea what a lot of his lyrics mean, due to being extremely high on drugs quite often, and he cites this song specifically. But of course, the song does mean something: after a terrorist attack in Manchester in 2017, a crowd observing a moment of silence for the victims began singing it spontaneously. It’s about looking forward instead of backward. It’s a damn good song, and anger, while more useful than it’s given credit for, is indeed a poor lens on the past.
Don’t Look Back In Anger - Remastered - song by Oasis | Spotify
Oasis · Song · 1995
If you received this email from a friend, you can sign up here.
Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron