Dispatch from the Emotional Flatlands.
"You need to wear your f-----g mask. My mother is 87, asshole, and you could kill her," Guy A says to Guy B as I enter the grocery store.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have stopped and watched this exchange, stunned, saddened, but like everyone else now, I barely raise my head.
I now live in the emotional flatlands. COVID, the CA fires (now the masks have dual functions), an insane president who will throw a tantrum if he loses the election like the baby he is, all the giant pickup trucks circulating in support of him with their Qanon freak flags flying, too many people in the backcountry, where I always went to get away, and now they're out there too but it's too hot to leave the house anyway, even if you head to 10,000 feet elevation, it's still f-ing hot per the pending planetary death...
When you live in the emotional flatlands, nothing bothers you anymore.
I notice how stylish the masks have gotten. I am not even sure why, but this only further irritates me. I catch myself wondering if I should move on from the standard pleated sky blue surgical mask.
"Look at that one," I think to myself. "She has a giant lotus over her mouth, and that guy has tiger teeth. She's a what, a crocodile?" I am not Googling "stylish yet effective masks" when I get home. I am NOT.
Only one things is getting me through, giving me the tiniest of boosts everyday and no it's not liter bottles of Pinot Grigo. It's watermelon. It's my heroin and I have to have it including driving around at 1:00 a.m. looking for a 24-hour grocery store (no luck), so I buy some awful watermelon candy (?) at the 7-11 on the way home.
In the midst of so much insanity, inanity...there is still watermelon. Cool, crisp watermelon that for a second transports me to the memory of what used to be a simple and pure summer day. Call it my meditation, my tiny little escape. I sit on the floor of my smoke filled house and crunch it, the sweetness, the WATER, the dogs on either side of me joining in, relishing the moment (and the watermelon) as much as I. For a few minutes there is no smoke, there are no fires, there is no pandemic, our post office isn't getting gutted, our President isn't Donald Trump. It's me and the dogs hanging out on the living room floor on a hot summer day, listening to Loggins and Messina...Summer Breeze...Sometimes I cry.
I want one of the big seeded ones even if it takes a crane to get it up the stairs and into the refrigerator but oh, wait a minute! Of course, of f-ing course (!!!), the CA Gods of electricity just announced "rolling black-outs" so by the time I get home, like the witch at the end of the Wizard of Oz, everything in my refrigerator may be melting, melting...
Thinking about this, standing over the cardboard bin of beautiful watermelons, I blurt, "God dnmn it. The electricity could be out by the time I get this baby home." Aside from one guy, all my fellow flatlanders ignore me. "Well, then just eat the whole damn thing," the guy says, annoyed, lumbering off with his. I don't even bother to look up to make eye contact (because this is all it is now and anyway, what's the point?).
Once outside the store, I waddle back to my car carrying my 400 pound watermelon (at least this is how it feels because the air is filled with gritty smoke--of course! After all, it's summer in California!). It hurts to inhale, even with a mask on. Gently lowering my big ass melon into the passenger seat, I quickly get in the driver's side and slam the car door. Off comes the mask. Jesus! It's so hot. I look up and see the woman parked in front of me also rushing to get into her car and like me, she tears her mask off once she's in. She's left something in her cart. What is that? A wallet? I hop out and rap on her window. Yeah, she left her wallet in the cart. She gets out, grabs it, and gets the hell back in her car. I head back to mine when I hear a voice behind me. I turn around.
"Oh yeah," she says lowering the window. "Thanks."
"Yeah, no worries," is all I can muster as I hurl myself back into my car. This is all any of us can muster now that we're living in the emotional flatlands.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I would have stopped and watched this exchange, stunned, saddened, but like everyone else now, I barely raise my head.
I now live in the emotional flatlands. COVID, the CA fires (now the masks have dual functions), an insane president who will throw a tantrum if he loses the election like the baby he is, all the giant pickup trucks circulating in support of him with their Qanon freak flags flying, too many people in the backcountry, where I always went to get away, and now they're out there too but it's too hot to leave the house anyway, even if you head to 10,000 feet elevation, it's still f-ing hot per the pending planetary death...
When you live in the emotional flatlands, nothing bothers you anymore.
I notice how stylish the masks have gotten. I am not even sure why, but this only further irritates me. I catch myself wondering if I should move on from the standard pleated sky blue surgical mask.
"Look at that one," I think to myself. "She has a giant lotus over her mouth, and that guy has tiger teeth. She's a what, a crocodile?" I am not Googling "stylish yet effective masks" when I get home. I am NOT.
Only one things is getting me through, giving me the tiniest of boosts everyday and no it's not liter bottles of Pinot Grigo. It's watermelon. It's my heroin and I have to have it including driving around at 1:00 a.m. looking for a 24-hour grocery store (no luck), so I buy some awful watermelon candy (?) at the 7-11 on the way home.
In the midst of so much insanity, inanity...there is still watermelon. Cool, crisp watermelon that for a second transports me to the memory of what used to be a simple and pure summer day. Call it my meditation, my tiny little escape. I sit on the floor of my smoke filled house and crunch it, the sweetness, the WATER, the dogs on either side of me joining in, relishing the moment (and the watermelon) as much as I. For a few minutes there is no smoke, there are no fires, there is no pandemic, our post office isn't getting gutted, our President isn't Donald Trump. It's me and the dogs hanging out on the living room floor on a hot summer day, listening to Loggins and Messina...Summer Breeze...Sometimes I cry.
I want one of the big seeded ones even if it takes a crane to get it up the stairs and into the refrigerator but oh, wait a minute! Of course, of f-ing course (!!!), the CA Gods of electricity just announced "rolling black-outs" so by the time I get home, like the witch at the end of the Wizard of Oz, everything in my refrigerator may be melting, melting...
Thinking about this, standing over the cardboard bin of beautiful watermelons, I blurt, "God dnmn it. The electricity could be out by the time I get this baby home." Aside from one guy, all my fellow flatlanders ignore me. "Well, then just eat the whole damn thing," the guy says, annoyed, lumbering off with his. I don't even bother to look up to make eye contact (because this is all it is now and anyway, what's the point?).
Once outside the store, I waddle back to my car carrying my 400 pound watermelon (at least this is how it feels because the air is filled with gritty smoke--of course! After all, it's summer in California!). It hurts to inhale, even with a mask on. Gently lowering my big ass melon into the passenger seat, I quickly get in the driver's side and slam the car door. Off comes the mask. Jesus! It's so hot. I look up and see the woman parked in front of me also rushing to get into her car and like me, she tears her mask off once she's in. She's left something in her cart. What is that? A wallet? I hop out and rap on her window. Yeah, she left her wallet in the cart. She gets out, grabs it, and gets the hell back in her car. I head back to mine when I hear a voice behind me. I turn around.
"Oh yeah," she says lowering the window. "Thanks."
"Yeah, no worries," is all I can muster as I hurl myself back into my car. This is all any of us can muster now that we're living in the emotional flatlands.
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message 1:
by
P.L.
(new)
Aug 19, 2020 08:40AM
Hi Virginia--I'm seeing parallels between our trajectories and thought I'd wave. I'm also a California biologist, have done some field microbiology (deep ocean stuff and also following petroleum disasters) and now writing ecofiction. My main SM jam is twitter and I plan to give you a follow.
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Hey P.L., nice to meet you in this time of ecological and political collapse. If you are in California, you are probably sitting in thick smoke like me as well. (Why do we live here again? Can someone remind me?). "Wear your mask" now has dual meanings. How handy that we were wearing them anyway for a PANDEMIC. Sigh. FYI, there is disagreement among Eco-fiction writers on what eco-fiction is. I reject fantasy and science fiction as being eco-fiction. Here is my definition:
https://virginiaarthurauthor.com/what...
Great to meet you and keep me posted, and thank you! Looking forward to checking out your books! VA
That's an intriguing definition. :) It's great to meet you, too. Using a secondary world allowed me to remove a small degree of the guilt implicit in any discussion of anthropogenic climate change. In other words, Earth-bound climate fiction struck me as something that would be too damned depressing to write (or read, I can't!) but the need for greater communications is dire. The need to get off fossil fuels completely, is absolute in my opinion.
I do hope you take a look at my title, not because I'm trying to find readers, :) , and I don't expect you to necessarily, but because I think science fiction and fantasy serve a fantastic niche in communicating "real Earth science." I cover 4.5 billion years of Earth history in it, including for example the formation of the first complex cell, to get at themes of cooperation and competition, and I describe Earth atmospheric chemistry in as much detail as I can possibly squeeze in. Most of this is drawn from my years in research as a planetary scientist at Caltech, where I worked on the Porter Ranch leak and the 2010 BP spill among other projects.
I was in a book club for many years and the one rule was "no science fiction." LOL. I guess some people just don't like it. That's OK--but it is genuinely nice to meet you as well! Please stay safe during these fires. I'm in Ventura County and the air quality is bad but we are not ablaze at the moment.
I guess I would say to go back and read my page about the definition. It is not that I do not "like" science fiction or fantasy. It is that the earth deserves her own genre and it is my feeling, eco-fiction should be that genre. I am not aware of a single science fiction/fantasy story that does not include some element of nature, if for no other reason that we live on a planet/ecosystem. But to decide to call it "eco-fiction" because of this, is too broad a brush, and frankly. a bit lazy in my opinion. Maybe go back and read my page, example. That you are a scientist already gives you a leg up (microbe up?) on writing real earth eco-fiction. Only one of many lists but my frustration is science fiction and fantasy are mixed in with this when I wish they were not. Again, they are already their own genre and they ALL involve the earth, ecological elements but in my mind, they are not eco-fiction. Thank you.
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...
