supposed to be writing (#23)
... and also stretching more
think of your body as a rubber band stretched to its limit. pull your spine from its settled place between your hips and you are laffy taffy, nostalgic and the color of chewed gum, reaching further than you thought. abruptly you snap. tension between your eyebrows, the front of your hips where they attach to legs ready to run but stuck to the ground or the perch of the office chair. tension connects your jaw (clamped) to your shoulders (hiked) and your stomach (in knots). this is an opposite tension to a high wire, slack until drawn between its two end points. you are wound tightly, a bobbin of nerves and hairspray.
the texture added, though, is a reflective glare on the subway floor, a strobe light flaring to mark the passage from tunnel to tunnel. a newspaper blows sideways, going uptown, and the dogs resist the pull of the lead to slow down and smell the strange earth. are the collective coos over a flirtatious pug the sign of something galactic? like will there / is there always something to cut through the tense air, the humid promise of the darkening sky and a comforting morning chill, the steadiness of a thickening pot of polenta. your experiences are a crossword, or a sudoku filled out in pencil; the missteps go unnoticed until they no longer matter, because you have figured the rest out.
sometimes, the sweetness is hidden, green tufts of alliums peeking through a plastic fence, an open window on a rainy night, mandarin, saffron and immortelle, apple sliced thinly on a circular plate. the sweetness is relative, and this is a trance, and sometimes, you realize your friends are the honey; they remind you that what’s good is good, and what’s not can be mended.
– feed me
three different ways to brew coffee; farmers market tomatoes and soon to be “so many leeks we’ll be calling plumbers”; tom yum soup and pad see ew, delivered; overpriced juice; bodega burgers and cel-ray soda; why is the 2nd bag of takis never as good as the first; a punch-card cortado; greek supermarket olives; toast.
craving: who remembers the horseradish-tomato salad ? the pillowy-est apple cake you ever did see & the reason david has two giant jugs of kraken spiced rum. more farmers markets.
– read me
bedside stack: we are what we eat, alice waters; token black girl: a memoir, danielle prescod; salt fat acid heat, samin nosrat; the hour of the star, clarice lispector; manazuru, hiromi kawakami
Good morning, Anne. An arresting but somehow pleasant depiction of the spine being removed. Once its place between the hips is "settled," it seems more natural to move it around a little.
Talk of laffy taffy snapp(y)ing and high wires calls to mind a recent conversation I had at work about the micron-scale dynamics of slurry preparation as part of the battery manufacturing process. Even slurries have internal structure. Strands of polymer and carbon several hundreds of times thinner than a human hair wrapping their way around particles that are merely ten times thinner, all while being agitated furiously or not so furiously. The key is to stretch the strands and flail them about with much energy, without whipping so aggressively that they break into pieces.
Some terrifically cool pictures in Figures 2, 3, 5, and 6, visible in the right hand Figures tab here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ente.202100367
The lithium is moving in and out of that, whenever the phone or car is charging or discharging.
But the method for control of this microscale behavior is, effectively, identical to the mixing settings on a household stand mixer.
Apropos, consider this famous poem by a fluid dynamicist, describing the essential insight of the field:
"Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity."
Also, you can be sure that laffy taffy manufacturers and wire manufacturers pay a great deal of attention to stress-strain behavior: https://www.linearmotiontips.com/mechanical-properties-of-materials-stress-and-strain/