Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the Heat

It's muggy here in Tennessee. You walk across the asphalt, and it shimmers, and you think you need a snorkel to breathe. It was hot in Dallas yesterday, too -- 97 degrees, and it had been that way all week.

Now there are these murders, which we've seen with our own eyes. And now there are these reactions to these murders. It makes me think of cloth, fabric, shrouds.

America right now is a dark, heavy blanket, and we are all crowded underneath, looking anxiously at each other, sweating, just trying to breathe. All this air we are breathing is filled with the breath of other people. It's like we're pulling for oxygen.

We are re-discovering a truth that is never lost completely, but is occasionally widely forgotten. The social cloth, like Penelope's burial shroud, is constantly woven and unwoven. At some moments we find ourselves wrapped too tightly together, and at other moments we grasp and clutch towards each other, coming away only with fists of threads and torn fabric. Feels today like we're all wrapped up too tight in a tangle. I've got other people's torn and bleeding bodies all up in my business.

The thing about weather is that you gotta live with it. We gotta live with these murders, we gotta live with the heat. We're gonna have to sweat. I keep thinking of Radio Raheem and Sal's Pizzeria in Do the Right Thing, and how on that hot day they didn't make it to sundown. Something had to be set on fire, as if we could out-hot the heat.

The best I can think right now is that we're just gonna have to sweat. This heavy summer heat's gonna pass. July's going to find its way to August. Right now, there's some cool air that's gathered in some place up in the Yukon that is untouched by all of this. I'm just holding in my mind's eye to a mountaintop far away from all this stuff, in some place where murder hasn't even happened, and where justice is just a word spoken to rocks who aren't interested in understanding.


I wonder what Tina thinks of the Yukon.

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