AQI 123 at Moment of Publication
Please accept my apologies if this image explodes your phone. I shall reimburse you from my deep Substack newsletter coffers. I worry about explosions because the image is loooong, made by taking my mobile talking machine and moving it ever-so-slowly along the ever-so-beautiful coastline in San Diego a few weeks back, which seems to me to mean that there are many digital stuffs in this image, many units of emulation of rock or water or people with phones outside the frame that I judge for being on phones even though I caught them in the act by using my phone.
And now it is going to become a thing that will hang in A Prominent Home Location via a service that takes photos and prints them ever-so-nicely on canvas and then stretches that canvas and then mails it to you in exchange for a reasonable sum whatever reasonable means. I am excited about this because during the next preposterous destruction of the Air Quality Index due to Unprecedented Natural Events, I will be able to look at this emulation of outside and remember a clear day.
This is going into a dark place, one thinks to oneself. But wait! This newsletter always does a little twisteroo, the thank you campaign (bi)weekly trademark, so fear no apocalyptic environmental scenario, amirite? Or do. Regardless, pictures need to be hung and walls need to be adorned and one foot falls in front of the other every day for the next many years, 19.2 after my retirement age of 67 says the social security administration’s lifespan calculator. This is something one needs to know during Financial Planning Sessions, which sometimes occur during wildfires and pandemics. Because one needs to determine the funds available for extravagant image-to-canvas transfers, because Life Goes On.
Waiting for that trademark twisteroo to kick in. Usually it happens around now. Confident that the reframing is just around the corner, he continues to write, one foot, or finger, or idea, in front of the other. I adore the image and I adore what it means and I adore the room in which it will hang. That can be true even while other things are true. There is a way in which both truths tether us to now. If there is any good to come of all this hazy air it is that I am not lost in decorating the walls but I am also not lost in wondering when it will be safe for my dad to take a walk. The circumstances inside and outside, light and dark, air conditioning and smoke, exert countervailing pressure and that pressure pins us to this moment, to these contradictions, to the ways in which we are just a tiny little film holding all of these intersecting stories in place, and being held in place by the same.
What Is On YOUR Wall, then, Friend?
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