Ice cream brings people together. It is often the perfect detail to finalize a great or awful day. I believe it is one of the few comfort foods your mother is not responsible of making, unless you happen to have a chef, instead of a tv dinner homemaker for a mother.
Compulsive gluttons, on one of those bad days, find the cure to their issues with a spoon, a pint of their favorite flavor, and occasionally, horrible television. But if one goes for ice cream accompanied, chances are you are having a nice day. We sought shelter in the famous establishment, the Creole Creamery, known for their homemade ice cream because of the gloomy weather outside. Gloomy is an understatement. It was raining Pterodactyls and Hitchcock birds. Still with an optimistic outlook, we intended to take our ruined outdoor fun, indoors. Little did we know...
Personally susceptible to the weather, a clear and sunny day, the kind of day designed for your narcissistic self, and not for the other 6 billion, became hell on earth, in a span of i don't know, because we were having such a good time. Thunder craved the merry attention and piercing, thick raindrops, orchestrated by sadistic clouds that were not able to show off their tenacity for over a week, spoiled everyones parade. I can usually dodge every droplet when it rains, but I met my match.
The typical viscous orange and purple haze of New Orleans, was distorted to a dark and most terrifying orange-grey, to not call grey black. There were hints of life, but little movement in the sky, incomprehensible because of the gay blue weather of hours prior.
New Orleans sky usually veils everything beyond the tallest building in the CBD, and it's no NYC. The lack of stars at times makes one thing that space is a lie, that galaxies are absent, and that everything revolves around the New Orleans dirty bubble that is it's biosphere. For hours, darkness shrouded everything, no perception of it's beginning or end. Fainting electricity, as though it were all solar powered, dwindling, straining one last time to absorb the last ray of sunlight that went unnoticed in this setting. All gone. Most difficult to dream big or look up when you have to face Chernobyl skies. Will we all look down in the future? Chins wont be up because layers and layers above were ripped, as though eon's old evolving canvases were suddenly dumped by us, the artists? Remodeled by destruction?
Combine a storm with a seemingly perfect day, power outage, darkness, delicious ice cream melting, petulant children screaming for ice cream in a bratty cacophony and yes, you got yourself a small apocalypse. I am not sure if the ice cream melted on its own, or if the children's screech, turned imps in the shadows, produced enough energy to melt it. They were determined to have ice cream, or soup, it did not matter.
At this point, I concluded that the persistent pleas and flooding tears of children would make every single bill in congress pass, as long as there is some sort of reward for their manipulative, but most persuasive efforts. Possibly the most effective diplomatic method. Rally all the children, tell them you are going for a walk, add a popsicle to one hand, tie a balloon to the other one. Ask them to cry or repeat a phrase they do not understand, and you got yourself the most powerful lobbyist without a salary. Millions of Gorbachev's.
My train of thought constantly derails.
We only notice things when they are too good bad, or ugly to be true
This post gorges on description, as if replicating the perceptual intake of the ice cream buckets at Creole Creamery. I especially like how your prose works to fuse—like those hybrid flavors—weather imagery, human behavior, and your own writerly subjectivity. You are right: this is a small apocalypse, and yet, as you hint, one that is indicative of larger, looming questions: "Will we all look down in the future?" One assumes you are not referring to a utopia of ice cream here. Your final aphorism begs for critical inquiry: "We only notice things when they are too good bad, or ugly to be true"... If so, does this not also mean that whatever is 'true' is inherently unnoticeable—and therefore not worth pursuing? And what would it be like to commit oneself to the 'noticeable' rather than the 'true'? Is an apocalypse that which interrupts 'truth' as we know it, or that which reveals to us the real that never needed to be deemed 'true' in the first place?
ReplyDelete"Is an apocalypse that which interrupts 'truth' as we know it, or that which reveals to us the real that never needed to be deemed 'true' in the first place?"
ReplyDeleteDigesting this question, I automatically thought about instances when an intimate friend does something completely out of character, unimaginable. Say, for instance, you’ve grown extremely comfortable with an individual, a firm grasp around his or her personality. You’ll find yourself in casual conversation saying something along these lines about said friend: “Yeah, well the day X does that, the world is going to end!” Clearly, this type of thinking reveals that you have created a fixed image in your head of how your friend should act according to your perceptions; you’ve ultimately created a truth. Suddenly, something terrible happens: X does something unexpected and out of character. And while you knew that X had the potential to commit this unexpected act, you’re nonetheless thrown for a loop, reconstruction of X’s image, the “truth,” suddenly necessary in order to put one’s mind at ease.
Simply taking this example, an apocalypse then proves to be a fusion of both a disruptive and revealing force regarding “truth” and “realness.” In this situation, X’s action—the apocalypse—not only interrupts the “truth” that has been developed regarding him or her, but also serves as a reminder of the ever present potential of a disruptive force, the “real that never needed to be deemed ‘true’ in the first place.”
This is a nice reflection on an everyday apocalypticism, Michael, with plenty of real world examples to chew on. I had not thought about this usage, but you are absolutely right to signal it as a little apocalyptic deployment.
ReplyDeleteLet's think more about this expression "thrown for a loop." It occurs to me that this is another minor apocalyptic idiom, too, but I am not sure where it comes from.
After skimming through some sketchy origins of this phrase online, I finally thought of a more reliable source for information: the library. A great idea. I know.
ReplyDeleteThe American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms: knock for a loop
Also, throw for a loop; knock down or over with a feather; knock sideways. Overcome with surprise or astonishment, as in The news of his death knocked me for a loop, or Being fired without any warning threw me for a loop, or Jane was knocked sideways when she found out she won. The first two of these hyperbolic colloquial usages, dating from the first half of the 1900s, allude to the comic-strip image of a person pushed hard enough to roll over in the shape of a loop. The third hyperbolic term, often put as You could have knocked me down with a feather, intimating that something so light as a feather could knock one down, dates from the early 1800s; the fourth was first recorded in 1925.
Basically, these “apocalyptic” idioms imply a shift. Foundations are only as stable as one perceives them; the solidity of “solid grounds” should be called into question. However, I’m hesitant to wholly disprove of the idea of a foundation because they allow organization and reflection to occur, and without them, apocalypses would lose that necessary traction, the traction needed to “throw us for a loop.”