TheWheel II (Ennui)
SGH ©2019 June1
(BTW, The Wheel I, published a few days ago,
was found, far from where we were searching
Now it’s SOLIDLY welded back where it is supposed to be.)
Round and round it goes; where it stops nobody knows. I’m talking ennui.https://youtu.be/cquvA_IpEsA <SEE VIDEO
www.real-world-physics-problems.com/gyroscope-physics.html
Wheels will spin forever, as I understand it, unless there is some sort of resistance. They will respond to any little nudge with some counter nudge.
Nudge them too often and they will slow down faster. Have a look/listen to the video above, and the link to www.real-world-physics-problems.com
I sleep to get away from the round and round stuff.
What makes me so tired? — I’m not even interested in trying to break out of this!
Summers of the past have been like this. A pile of limp cards resting on a sticky coffee table’s old wood. The wood and the cards tend to stick together with humidity. The yellowed cards are so worn out.
My mother and I have played these cards to death doing solitaire (doing solitary?) , back in the 40’s and 50’s while waiting for the humidity to give us a break. Longing for sundown when the heat lessens. Age, iced tea, peanut butter, and sweat — that’s what made them yellow.
That was eastern Pennsylvania back then.
No cards just now. I’m in cool, sunny Washington State waiting for something to begin.
Will I move to initiate something?
Probably not. The stillness is addicting. Stillness reminds me of rest. But I know in my head that I am not resting. My head is writing words on the computer monitor.
Ennui? That’s a wildly elegant word to call this stuff.
More like sloth! Or depression!
Or murky water under an oil spill — the top is a rainbow—
and underneath is something very old and smells un-cheerfully familiar.
What we need here is a torrent of hard rain to displace the fetid pool. Or a blazing fire to consume the rainbow and wash the sky with ashes and soot.
I find myself suspecting that the malady and the solution to the malady are very much like the business of climate change.
How?
The business as usual on the face of the planet tends to find a satisfactory routine and rhythm. The more the same things stay the more comfortable. We get addicted to the status quo.
(I’ll skip over, for now, my personal frenzy about how devilishly fast the internet changes and how political uprising disturbs the peace. Maybe another time.)
But let’s think about the weather. It gets bogged down and stinky with sameness. A “temperature inversion”, for instance, is a reversal of the normal behavior of temperature in the troposphere (the region of the atmosphere nearest the Earth’s surface), in which a layer of cool air at the surface is overlain by a layer of warmer air. (Under normal conditions air temperature usually decreases with height. See link for scientific discussion of this.)
So “used air” gets trapped along with all the junk it has accumulated and can’t get out from under the warm air. Hopefully such a convection doesn’t last long enough to smother anything. But it does affect the living things that are breathing it in and out. Long enough to make things sick.
Happy is the face of the earth when something disturbs the masses described above! The face of the earth has longed for a good washing, and its inhabitants are now able to breathe fresh air after the cover of warm air is blown, or floated away.
My mother used to say, after a big thunderstorm, that she could smell the ozone.
(We lived near enough to Marcus Hook PA that we would the dump with its burning tires trapped against our neighborhood. A good thunderstorm was usually the reprieve. I think Marcus Hook does not smell like that anymore with today’s better approach to recycling old rubber tires.)
“In order to protect Chester from further harm, the environmental activists of Chester such as Zulene Mayfield and Dr. Horace Strand have made serious strides. It is because of these activists that the proposal by Kimberly-Clark to burn almost three million tires annually was put to an end, and that an infectious medical waste incineration facility, Thermal Pure Systems, was shut down. Strides have been made by Chester citizens to protect their home…” source: http://udreview.com/environmental-injustice-delaware-county/
So back to the wheel! Interesting that tires came up while meditating about wheels.
The sort of trap that happens to me (and I suspect I am not alone) when I get into this circular pattern is not friendly, useful, or comfortable.
That is why I sleep, I think. Sleeping is a fairly primal escape route. For older folks it is a relief. We don’t have as lively a recovery system as do little babies who cry it out and wake up with happy faces.
The sun is out on the patio.
Why am I lying here in bed with my laptop talking about all this? Why don’t I at least go look at the checklist on my desk and get busy?
©SGH 2019 June
