Heat day

When I run into people “in real life” who read this (colleagues, people in my extended network), after the slightly awkward bit where I internally blush a little at having my side-project praised, the question/comment that often comes up is a sort of incredulity that I manage to find the time to write so much every week. How, the question goes, do I make a hobby of cranking out 2000 or so words for every Monday morning, and another couple hundred every Friday.

The answer I’ve been giving in response to that question is that I do it because it’s important to me, and because writing the essays you read here is a personal project and challenge. Not only that, but it contributes to something I want to do one day soon – try to write (and sell, which is pretty non-trivial, as far as parenthetical asides go) a non-academic book. I write these essays because there are things I want to say, because I want to re-explore my voice in non-academic writing, and because I want to prove to myself that there’s a more general public out there with an interest in some of the things I have to say, and some of the ways I can explain things that are, as the title goes, not so obvious.

That’s the motivation that goes into cranking out an essay every week. I try to write them well, and I try to make sure I feel more-or-less proud of each Monday essay I post. So far, I’ve been able to manage that.

I normally keep the more personal stuff for Friday posts, but the heat wave we’ve been going through in most of Europe this past week has been changing my rhythm a bit. South Holland, a coastal and normally temperate/rainy part of the Netherlands, has just come out of several days of code orange heat warnings, with a day of code red thrown in for good measure. It has not been pleasant. I don’t believe in carrying out business-as-usual while the world burns, but even if I did, my body and brain aren’t having it. My focus is shot and my temper is short. In these heat warning days, almost everything in life has managed to feel more difficult than it normally does.

This is something that feels very important to say, and to be unflinching about. You may not know me, aside from what you read in these texts. Importantly, that doesn’t matter. It isn’t a personal matter that record-breaking heat (or frankly, whatever other fresh disaster the world has available – but weather, at least, is one that can’t be escaped by avoiding the news) has hurt my focus and mood. It is, of course, a political matter, a structural matter, and a matter of concern.

Despite the few hundred words you're reading here, there is no essay today. There is no essay today because life can't always just keep chugging along when circumstances are untenable. Not only that, but the urge to just keep producing, just keep working, and just act like everything is normal instead of acknowledging what is going wrong is one of the instincts that's profoundly unhelpful in the global polycrisis we currently occupy. There is no essay today because I am human and write each of these from start to finish without the intervention of text-generators (and with barely even a spellchecker). I find it important to acknowledge this, in the face of a media environment constantly flooded with "content." There is no essay today, because it has been catastrophically hot, and I have been unable to write.