I’ve been having some unwelcome negative emotions over the past few weeks of political turmoil. It could be a function of long Covid or some variant of season affective disorder. I got introduced to an even worse environmental trigger.
Wildfires burning both in state and across the west gave us low cloud cover. You could barely see the next road let alone the mountains. The whole day felt like dusk. A long dim suffocating presence that felt like it would resist nightfall. It was smoky perma-dusk day where neither horizon nor blue sky could be seen.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
William Gibson Neuromancer
Probably his most famous piece of prose, this introduction manages to evoke something beyond the literal color and into an expansive image of otherworldly nothing.
He apparently “imagined an ancient TV … that grey/ haze as the tube warmed to a channel that was ‘active’, but sending no programming” which was “the black and-white video-static of my childhood in mind, sodium-silvery and almost painful”
The pain of a sky blocked out by smoke from wildfires even at high noon is unsettling and uncanny. It’s hard to feel right when what you see is so destructive.
We are safe inside the house with air purifiers in every room. The Conway HEPA filter went from one crisis to the next as a pandemic purchase that works on pollution too. The custom software that Alex uses to manage our smart home is showing perfect interior quality as the purifiers run day and night. Outside the AQI score was 118 “unhealthy for sensitive individuals.”
We’ve got a few more hours to sunset but a thunderstorm might be moving in.