Autumn. At some point in the dead of night the clocks lurched backward and the time on the phone display once more aligns with accepted reality. It's not cold enough to light the fire but cool enough to fog your bedroom windows on occasion and prompt that seasonal wardrobe edit. I love that my boiled wool and floor-length skirts come out like floppy seal skins, am relieved that I still fit into last year's shit and lament the dick-width holes in my most comfortable gardening cardigan.
In autumn and sometimes in spring, Otago Harbour becomes a docking port for the visible breath of the Pacific Ocean. Usually the north-easterly is enthusiastic enough to bank it up in Blueskin Bay and push it over the top of Mt Cargill, making it look like some sort of comet-impact tsunami that can apparently terrify the dim-witted and/or uninitiated. But occasionally the prevailing flow takes a more democratic tack and gently brooms this fleecy white suspension into the narrowest waterways, settling it patiently about the knees of the enclosing hills, usually without forewarning; you will just look out of the window and see everything has been reduced to low-resolution monotone.
I was driving back over the hill to Port with a friend the other evening when we came upon it this time. There had been no clue in the air over Dunedin. Not too sure of the altitude- 400m, maybe?
I was driving back over the hill to Port with a friend the other evening when we came upon it this time. There had been no clue in the air over Dunedin. Not too sure of the altitude- 400m, maybe?
Pacific brume is thoroughly enigmatic. Sometimes I will know it's dropped anchor in the morning when I put my bare feet down on the rug by the bed and can feel that vague signature clamminess on the surface of the pile. But it's an oddly dry mist at this time of year, at least around our house; dew point is a dirty wizard, purveying a fine-grained, introverted sort of miasma that is like a visiting stranger, never really settling on the road and allowing you walk around inside it, experiencing its wonders without undue involvement or obligation. And then, it is gone. I have seen an air soup disappear entirely in the time it took to read half a page of paperback.
Standing on the saddle overlooking all this mysterious confluence reminded me that I don't understand flat-earthers' attachment to their retarded geographic assertions. At all. Twelve thousand bloody kilometres of unchecked ocean sprawls beyond this particular horizon, even when it is obscured. It doesn't change just because you can't see it today. Its vast energy is so palpably curved and utterly centrifugal that you can sense it humming in a huge blue arc inside your head when you close your eyes on sights like this. The waves declare it, over and over and over.
Standing on the saddle overlooking all this mysterious confluence reminded me that I don't understand flat-earthers' attachment to their retarded geographic assertions. At all. Twelve thousand bloody kilometres of unchecked ocean sprawls beyond this particular horizon, even when it is obscured. It doesn't change just because you can't see it today. Its vast energy is so palpably curved and utterly centrifugal that you can sense it humming in a huge blue arc inside your head when you close your eyes on sights like this. The waves declare it, over and over and over.
Perceptive types have long observed that stupid people are too stupid to ever grasp just how stupid they really are, and that the only meaningful measure of intelligence is the ability to at least dimly understand this fundamental deficit. They are 100% correct. Considering this mist, I know that I am personally still quite stupid for someone who's had four decades of literacy at their fingertips, and am grateful for this insight. At least I've attained enough perspective to realise geophysicists know more about geophysics than I do, and that gaps in my understanding are exactly that- personal shortfalls, not constitutive revelations.
It might be fashionable to practise empathy for people who are... forgive my fucked-out euphemism generator... differently-orientated; I mean, what is it really like to be a sexagenarian school-leaver or jejune pro basketball person who thinks they know better than 1000 consensual geophysicists strapped together? Sounds sort of... panicky. But at this point in our planetary proceedings I just can't be bothered to feel bad for these massively conceited garbage people and their ignorant contrarian bullshit. The earth is a beautiful, continuous curve.
Round, you fucking idiots. Round.
It might be fashionable to practise empathy for people who are... forgive my fucked-out euphemism generator... differently-orientated; I mean, what is it really like to be a sexagenarian school-leaver or jejune pro basketball person who thinks they know better than 1000 consensual geophysicists strapped together? Sounds sort of... panicky. But at this point in our planetary proceedings I just can't be bothered to feel bad for these massively conceited garbage people and their ignorant contrarian bullshit. The earth is a beautiful, continuous curve.
Round, you fucking idiots. Round.
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