While Edward McPherson does not fully explain his original intent, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View ends up being a work of mixed creative nonfiction modes (personal essay, immersion, travel, speculative CNF), reportage, and warning, all built on the motif of gaining elevation to see beyond our everyday ken—an ambition that comes at a price.
Wind itself can drive you crazy. Sometimes there is a hysteria to it, a shrill tirade that goes on for days, relentless, unappeasable. Sometimes it is angry, as though Zeus sucked in his breath to roar at us. Invisible and unpredictable, wind can stroke us with a lover’s tenderness in the morning and topple our home that afternoon.
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
Having lived in the United States for a few years, I have either struggled to understand democracy in practice or struggled to keep up with it.
Scrolling through social media, I am reminded that today marks the fifth anniversary of the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria. And suddenly, I realize that the heaviness I felt upon waking is not only fatigue. It is anxiety, not the kind that anticipates the future, but the kind induced by the knowledge of a past that refuses to stay past.
It is the most underrated virtue in this culture....
My friend is a little witchy, a little woowoo. She gets “feelings” before something happens.... Does precognition exist?
Slang is those half-hidden words, code intended only for certain circles, or what our parents used to call “the in-crowd.” “Six-seven!” seems unique in that it has nothing to hide. Past slang involving numbers—the one-to-ten scale of physical attractiveness, the “Five-0” reference to police, the “4:20” signifier for a daily dose of cannabis—all had immediate or even urgent significance. “Six-seven,” by contrast, just sits in its own hollow existence.
I fall for these every time. Did we really have to commodify spontaneous joy?
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.