When Space Fights Back

I've always been fascinated by the ability of weather to affect mood. As a child, a heavy snowfall was a time for rejoicing, for it usually meant a day off from school (assuming it was over a foot deep--damn those competent Northeast snowplows!). For my friend back in Buffalo, however, it was an endless grey expanse of depression. Ironically, she moved to Portland, OR, a place with suspiciously similar precipitation patterns (rain arrives in Portland the way snow arrives in Buffalo: 10,000 dumptruck loads at a time). Her reason? To be near the coastline, the gentle Pacific Northwest sea breezes and mist-strewn summer sun. Another friend, this one from Phoenix, found a supreme feeling of safety in that state's rare rainfall (as it "kept the burglars away").

You've already read of my extreme distaste for Boulder's overbearing sunlight, but that's nothing compared to my distrust of wind. What else reminds us of our painful fragility than the manic rappings of otherworldly beings on the door of our world-as-it-seems? We believe we've conquered space, have thrust our human phallus succesfully into the face of circumstance, have conquered vast swaths of the cold unknown, but we haven't conquered shit. Earthly wind is but a squadron of the weakling nuisance scouts (like zerglings, to you Starcraft fans) sent to our obscure solar-ghetto by the Grand SpaceWind Army, which has wind-weapons we'd be terrified to consider: galaxy-smashing blusters, nebula-crushing tornadoes, universe-flattening dark matter hurricanes-- watch your fucking back.

A semi-relevant quote from K-Punk's thesis Flatline Constructs:

I remember once looking out onto an empty square, watching huge scraps of paper whirling angrily round and round, chasing one another as if each had sworn to kill the others; and I couldn’t feel the wind at all since I was standing in the lee of a house... As I watched, I was filled with an ominous foreboding. What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? Could there not be a similar unseeable, unfathomable ‘wind’ blowing us from place to place and determining our actions, whilst we, in our simplicity, believe we are driven by free will? What if the life within us were nothing more than some mysterious whirlwind?

Windless days we walk around self-assured and free, but when the Safeway bags start kicking up and the dust of uncovered construction sites invade our eyes, we are reminded by the Universe's most gentle of breeziest that we are laughably, painfully insignificant.

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