My thoughts have been scattershot lately. Ribbons of this. Shreds of confetti of that. I wish I had more of coherence, of weighty substance to write, but that’s not where I am at. So here’s this. This is what I’ve been thinking about lately:
1. Swell sharks—Cephaloscyllium ventriosum—live along the Californian coast. They are called swell sharks because they can bend their bodies into U-shapes, and, with their cadual fins in their mouths, can swell up to twice their regular body size. This wedges them into hard-to-reach places, intimidates predators, and makes them harder to bite.
We released our two swell sharks into the ocean a month ago. Small, babyish things that have only ever known enclosures. We released all of our marine animals into the ocean because with camp shut down, we could no longer care for them.
The tank now sits empty and quiet in the middle of the mural-splashed room.
2. The Three Gorges Dam spans the Yangtze River in China. Finished in 2015, the dam has 32 main turbines and is constructed of enough steel to build 63 Eiffel Towers. The estimated cost of the dam was $22.5 billion, which was recovered in full by 2013 due to the dam’s productivity. So the dam paid for itself before it was ever finished.
NASA calculated that the Three Gorges Dam would increase the length of Earth’s day by .06 microseconds and also slightly alter the shape of the Earth in its entirety. It seems insignificant—what can anyone do in .06 microseconds and who cares if the Earth is a wee bit more round?—but that’s not my point. My point is that we shifted time, we changed a planet. My point is that things we took for stable, concrete facts changed by our own actions, and that maybe everything around us is mutable. Maybe everything is just an idea, susceptible to prying minds, pushing fingers. Maybe things don’t have to be this way.
3. I have a note saved in my phone from a month or so ago, wondering if elephant seals ever get lonely. This is less a fact and more a commentary on my own maudlin sensibilities.
4. Coined by Achille Mbembe, necropolitics is the use of social and political power to dictate who dies and how. It is both action and inaction. People in power exposing others to death and doing nothing about it from their glass castles.
Perhaps the existential question I return to the most is about the innate goodness of humans. I watched the protests in Ohio and Michigan of angry white workers demanding that businesses reopen and then I read the Twitter threads from New York City EMTs saying how everyday is 9/11 and I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore.
5. I often think about the physics of a water droplet on a car window (“often” meaning when I’m sitting passenger seat and it’s raining and my head is everywhere else but inside the car). The formula for the direction a droplet would travel once dislodged looks something like:
I have no idea what any of that means, but the formula itself possesses a sophisticated, precise beauty. That happens a lot these days—I notice something, ask questions, and don’t know the answers. Sometimes I don’t even understand the answers when I find them out. There is so much I don’t know, and that is good, great even, and I think it’s OK to not know and just wonder, and to describe cows on hilltops using only similes, and there are so many ways to exist in this world, and no one knows the best way to be, so just do it all anyway.
6. Ice plant—Carpobrotus edulis—was brought to California in the early 1900s to stabilize sand dunes. Like a lot of invasives, it crowded out native species, creating monospecific zones. It’s bad for the ecosystem, but with its yellow and purple flowers, its tender succulent leaves that turn orange and red like deciduous foliage, it’s beautiful. So many things that are bad for you have beautiful faces. So many things that start out as a good idea end in colorful wreckage.
7. Shizuka Yokomizo has a collection of photographs taken through a window. She left notes on people’s doorsteps, asking if they’d be OK with being photographed through their own window at a specific time, and, if they consented, she came back and took a picture. Preserved in that photograph is a single moment, but also so much more. People let you see more of them if you ask, if you are willing to take the time to look deeply. People want to be seen.
I think most people in our lives are like those in Yokomizo’s photographs. Fleeting glimpses. Small moments. There are so many people we will only touch the veneer of. But then there are others whose lives we walk into like a house and there we stay, we reside, with comfort and love and the feeling of home. Those are the people to cling to the hardest. Remember that.
People in Parks 