meteorology

28 Aug, 2026

I don’t think the Universe is necessarily two people having a little chitchat. The Universe, tragically, cannot chitchat. It can sing, it can vibrate, it can thrum, but it needs clay jars—like panpipes or wind chimes—to make a sound. The Universe doesn’t have a nervous system either, so it needs a clay jar to remember how it feels, and then to articulate how it feels.

So if I ever, in the span of all time, ever wanted to get a message to you, or maybe if I only just needed to remind myself of something¹, to get a piece of information from one place to another, I’d have to get born and born and born again—a carrier pigeon, a cat, a woman, a man—trying to remember a sentence long enough to someday eventually utter it. But they always take your phone away in the ketamine clinic. And that’s how it feels: disembodied and an amnesiac, because the human body is a hard drive, and the memories are written directly on the body.

“Of course I’ve read The Egg,” I finally said to a friend—this was in early April, and I’d been suffering a long bout of mourning² and struggling to fully move through it, and I was in my friend’s kitchen, and he’d been mentioning “The Egg” to absolutely everyone for about a week by then, “have you ever read Andy Weir’s ‘The Egg’?”—“but time is an illusion and everything is happening simultaneously,” I continued, “so I think it’s probably even simpler than that.” I shrugged helplessly. “A singular animating force,” I concluded—an answer to a question that had been asked only tacitly—and he and I stared at each other, and then we both started grinning, because that’s the whole gag, isn’t it?

Much more recently, a friend was lamenting that she was disqualified from converting to a specific religion because she could not force herself to believe in one supreme being. I’m not going to look over the chat transcript and word-for-word it, but I was confused: “But you believe in a universe, because we live in a universe and we’re all in it,” I ventured. So she was back in the game, I reasoned, able to submit her application to any faith tradition she wanted.

No, she insisted, the issue was that she could not believe in a supreme universal ruler. Well, me neither. “The idea of a ruler is kind of a colonizer construct, no?” I suggested to her. “What about a creator? The universe is self-creating.”

I paused, thinking to myself about how we think of rulership and authorship as the two genders, sometimes conflated as one: a creative director, the “myth of the auteur,” the laborer, the producer, the creator, the ruler of all.

Now I was thinking about the human body as a foreign country³. I remembered the first time someone had visited my 3DS Animal Crossing village. He’d emptied out his pockets on my lawn—“all the fruit!” he’d typed, leaving his offerings where he stood—and then he set about clear-cutting and deforesting, shaking down my trees for all they were worth, making my little village barren for days to come, ruining me for other guests, as if this were an even trade somehow. This was right at the start of the game, when everyone first bought Animal Crossing and would stay up all night visiting one another. I remember feeling surprised and altogether discouraged. What is this? I felt like I should not literally have to say “hey, just to be clear, don’t take every single fruit, because it takes a few days to grow back” anytime a guest waltzed through my open gates. But I hadn’t explicitly said this at the outset, had I?, so it was my fault that my village was razed. And hadn’t it been my guest’s own hard labor: shaking down every tree, stuffing his little pockets⁴.

Maybe the one reaping and enjoying the benefits of all the trees might be called Eden’s ruler—even though he didn’t make anything, doesn’t actually own anything except whatever he can shake down and carry. The apple in my pocket wasn’t there before, and now it’s there: something out of nothing. That makes me the creator of the apple.

My friend wasn’t sure she could force herself to believe in a single ruler or a single creator. Well, that seemed fine. I volunteered my idea of things: “I do think I believe in moods, crosswinds, weather,” I told her. Now I was thinking about neopagans calling the corners, calling in the angels or elements, as if magic were a meteorological phenomenon; I thought about the tetramorph, the animals illuminating the four corners of any single page. “What do you think about the concept of pleroma,” I asked her, “the fullness of everything all added up together?”

She said she wasn’t sure. That seemed like a good place to start: uncertainty. I suggested this was all bubble-bath philosophy, a relaxing existential thought experiment for the tub later.

Recently I’d eaten a lot of what had purported to be sourdough. I texted my best friend the next day: I’d been up all night the night before, and I was sick as hell. She came over and fed the dog for me while I slept it off.

The next morning she texted to ask how I was feeling. I answered honestly: “I feel like every bone in my body was broken overnight,” I told her. Anyway, I continued, I was thinking we might consider canceling our day’s outings in favor of watching TV. Then I rolled over in bed and bought a month of BritBox.

She asked me if I needed to go to the doctor. “No,” I replied, “I know what this is.” I’d been ill within an hour of eating fake sourdough. Since then I’d been ingesting every type of antihistamine—cetirizine, loratadine, famotidine, even a budesonide nasal spray—along with quercetin, hoping to induce autoinflammatory calm.

She came over and we sat together on the couch watching a BBC show. I got under a blanket. We watched all ten episodes; I slept through one of them.

“Do you want to pause?” she asked my sleeping body at one point.

“No,” I murmured from a well of unconsciousness, waving her off. I missed the entirety of just that one episode; I think I wasn’t meant to see it at all.

“It’s mono,” I was explaining to her as I poured myself a cup of orange juice. I’d had tonsillitis for what felt like most of 2007. I’d felt so ill; I’d kept going to work, a leaden bag of achy bricks, taking multiple courses of antibiotics. In retrospect, it had been old-timey glandular fever. I’d gotten sick again in 2020. My body had been wracked with teeth-chattering chills. Every morning I’d wake up with a sweaty head. I was terrified of how sick I felt. “I thought I was dying of cancer,” I muttered to my best friend. I touched my neck tenderly now, where it was sore.

Well! It turns out, once you’ve had mono you’ve unlocked the experience permanently, and now your body can go back and reexperience it anytime it likes. For me, environmental factors like smoke and mold and wheat can send me right back into the physical memory of wanting to die at work⁵.

I wondered aloud if it were only the wheat; I suspected it wasn’t. For a couple weeks by then, my legs had been trying hard to buckle, the left patella frequently slipping out of place. “Oh shcrap⁶,” I’d muttered, barely catching myself before dropping to the floor.

“Does this happen often?” my best friend had asked me, alarmed.

I’d attempted to explain subluxation—a very minor dislocation⁷, commonly observed in connective tissue dysfunction—as I shook my leg like a cartoon character with ants in his pants, trying to wiggle my kneecap back in place again. Maybe it was all the wildfire smoke, I’d reasoned at the time. There’s some sort of mast cell interaction that causes all the fibers to slacken, I don’t know.

After a few days of antihistamines I basically felt okay again, but I’d been rattled by the entire experience—some sort of reminder that life is fragile, that I’m not as tough as I think I am, that I’m perilously easy to take out.

“I’m really over him,” my friend was whispering.

I nodded sadly. I agreed I was no longer vulnerable to his charms, either. Disenchanted. We were both feeling disenchanted.

It wasn’t only that, though. When he was around my mood would turn foul. I didn’t even have to see him to somehow know he was present; I could sense my own mood shifting, like a rosebush wilting, or a sea creature snapping shut or puffing up or whatever.

“I wonder what it is about him?” she said, frowning worriedly.

“Ohh,” I said unhappily, “it’s probably something to do with me. I’m reacting to something I remember.” I ventured a few guesses. She nodded, pensive.

“In astrology,” I continued, “and I don’t really understand this, this is not actually my field of study,” I warned. “I don’t understand the… geometric shapes, all the trines and conjunctions or the supposed interplay between them. But sometimes when the planetary bodies are rotating,” I continued, “and they shift into new houses, in certain houses the planets are considered… I forget the exact language for this. They rotate out of their dignity. I feel myself shifting out of my dignity when he’s around.”

She looked bewildered.

“Or a devil’s claw. Do you remember those?” She shook her head no, perhaps even more bewildered than before. “So you’d be running through the, uh, the farmer’s field—”

“I never did that,” she said. “Only cotton fields.”

“Yes, these were cotton fields,” I said. “There’s this—a devil’s claw is a type of seed pod, with two arms curling up like this, reaching up out of the soil.” I drew the shapes in the air, diagramming the pod in front of me. “And when you were running through the dirt, the two arms would catch your ankle and wrap around it, like a little snare. You wouldn’t see it, but you’d feel it catch. And part of the horror was right there in the name—devil’s claw—and you’d think, oh, god! It’s got me! It’s dragging me down to hell!.” I was cringing at the memory, a child screaming and shaking one leg, trying to get a dried plant off her foot. “And so when I’m being yanked out of my dignity and back down to earth, I think to myself, oh god! It’s got me!”

Finished with my analogy, I pressed my lips together. I was describing the ego to her, how the wounded ego works.

Worried about spreading mono, I’d asked the kiddo for a favor—making it clear that the favor was a one-off due to extenuating circumstances, and not a regular thing—but I needed her assistance blowing out the candles on my cake.

She was hopping out of her chair before I’d finished asking, happy to oblige. I thanked her.

Too nauseated to eat, I didn’t have a slice of cake, and I still haven’t. It might be time to toss the cake, actually.

Days passed, and I finally told my best friend about my birthday. I’d like to have a nice one again someday. I’d like to feel healthy and not nauseated. I’d like to eat cake. Last year for my birthday I’d had my gallbladder taken out. I shook my head. My best friend laughed.

“When I woke up that morning, I thought, wow, I am mean as a snake.” I was describing my birthday now. “I kept it hidden from your kids, I think. But at one point I told the dog to shut up. That’s not a very nice thing to say to a human or dog, not even if the dog can’t understand English.” I sighed, feeling defeated. I was kidding myself if I thought the dog didn’t understand.

My best friend regarded me with a soft-eyed compassion and nodded. “I hope we didn’t make it worse,” she said suddenly.

“Oh, no. No, no, no,” I said. “No, I felt better after my birthday, and even better after a little nap.” I thought about it. “I think God wanted me to think about how much I’d like to feel like a priority.” Someone else had gotten sick, so my birthday had been a rush job, cut short, since one of us was headed to the hospital and it wasn’t me. “And to be clear, I did feel like a priority the day before. Thank you for staying in and watching television with me. Ten episodes! I loved it.”

“I loved it! I can’t stop thinking about it!” my best friend exclaimed. The show had been “The Other Bennet Sister,” the BBC series based on the Jane Austen fanfic novel about youngest sister Mary Bennet, who escapes her mother’s and sisters’ surveillance and rewrites herself in London.

For the first few episodes I’d looked at my best friend questioningly each time the credits had rolled—“I have time for one more,” she kept telling me—but at some point she got the remote away from me and hid it, just so she could pop ahead to the next episode without my little furtive questioning looks, and definitely so that I could not pause the episodes to talk to her. This was how she’d rushed us through five solid hours of television programming.

“Well, I went to look at the restaurant’s website, to see if they explicitly claim what they’re selling is sourdough. And they do,” I told my best friend, sighing, “but also, there’s an actual stalk of wheat in the restaurant’s logo.”

My best friend leaned across the kitchen counter toward me. “I went in there once,” she whispered to me conspiratorially, “and asked about their gluten-free options. The employee got really tense. She asked me, how gluten-free. Like, how serious is it. I told her it was pretty serious. She said don’t do it! We cross-contaminate everything!” My best friend stood back, nodding meaningfully.

I rolled my eyes. “They’re gonna get sued out of existence,” I muttered.

I was able to recognize, with the clarity of hindsight, that it was also PMDD. Wildfire smoke, wheat, PMDD. “Perfect weather conditions,” I told my best friend.

“So it’s hormones!” she exclaimed.

“Which is just another type of weather,” I said, blinking, “28 days, the tides.” I moaned and shuddered, still achy. “I looked up the, uh, celestial weather terms”—I was trying to not say astrology in front of her children—“and the terms are dignity and exaltation. In a certain house, a planetary body will be in its exaltation. And then the opposite of its dignity⁸ is its ‘fall’ ⁹. It’s in its fall.” I sighed. I do not wish to be in my fall. I tell my best friend, often, about my childhood memory of slapping the Gulf of Mexico with a stick. (“It really seemed to be working,” I mumbled.)

“I remember during my first job,” I continued, “one night I was raging to Sharkey about how my position played exclusively to my weaknesses and seemingly none of my strengths. It felt like it had been constructed that way.” I was in my fall. “So astrological weather is the idea of something kind of coming at you from the wrong angle.” Maybe you have to pivot so it strikes you at the right one, I don’t know.

I thought about a little boat being tossed around by trade winds, trying to adjust course. I propped my face on one hand. “Have you been following the Lindsay Clancy trial,” I asked her suddenly, changing the subject.

Her eyes flashed wide. “Yes,” she hissed at me.

A couple nights later I was fighting with some cables under my desk. My rolling filing cabinet suddenly shifted and, as it did, one of its upper drawers slammed shut on my finger.

I stood, wincing, silent. “Fffffff,” I whispered, holding excruciating physical pain inside of me like trapped breath.

Then I remembered I was completely alone, with nobody around to hear me. I suddenly wasn’t sure who I was supposedly benefiting by suppressing an exclamation of pain. And, seeing as restraint is a finite resource, I’ve been trying hard to not waste it on pointless, performative bullshit. And I’m so sick, I’m so sick of being hurt and then acting like I’m not in pain. I’m so sick of holding pain inside me and just boiling from the inside out.

In other words, I thought it all the way through.

With that, I screamed “Fucker!” and then I firmly kicked the side of the rolling cabinet, because I hate this piece-of-shit rolling filing cabinet, and I dream of the day I can afford a nice one with locking casters, and I hate that I can’t just wheel this one out to the curb, I hate needing it. It has my fullest enmity. I imagined myself pushing it off the rooftop of a tall building and watching it shatter on the ground below.

I’m not sure what a devout Buddhist would say about this complete failure of mind-over-matter—a failure to “observe the feeling and watch it pass”—but I did feel better afterward. There was something about the rolling filing cabinet, silent and undamaged and imperious, that I found reassuring. I sat down on the side of the bed, examining my finger joints¹⁰.

I thought about how glad I was that no one was around to witness me experiencing physical pain, or to witness my expression of it, which would become the issue—not the pain itself, but any expression of it. Because aren’t there always people surveilling one another, who love to catch you expressing pain, because that’s their evidence you’re the bad guy and they’re the good guy. (Easy to look like ‘the’ good guy, isn’t it, when you’re never in any pain!)

So you go your whole life repressing any expressions of pain, any outpourings of grief, because there will always be people wanting to criminalize any declaration of anger, any howl of physical pain, any pronouncement of any ‘ugly’ ‘monstrous’ emotion at all.

Then I grimly thought about how physical pain isn’t an emotion? It’s a physiological response? Then I thought about the Lindsay Clancy case: how the degree of her psychological pain was what was literally on trial (rather than the real issue, which is, the scene was so poorly investigated, there’s nothing materially connecting anyone to any murders). Then I idly thought about biometric sensors in our cars that will be able to read and determine how angry we are, effectively taking our keys away.