Covered in gold and kicking through the bellyache

[sovay]

There is an absolutely spectacular sunset going on beyond the kitchen window, sheets of flaming violet and hot pink neon-glowing through the barely-leafed branches of the trees, and I am reminding myself that the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatau in 1883 which produced such red skies at night for months after the blast involved something like a dozen times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb and enough atmospheric ash and dust that it dropped temperatures worldwide and threw off weather patterns for the rest of the decade and so it is unlikely that this evening's sunset in Boston has anything to do with this morning's bomb in Nangarhar when we're not even talking kilotons of TNT, but this is the way my brain works. It isn't a distraction when it does real harm. The current music is a track I just picked up and have been listening to for the last hour. The lyrics are barely a snapshot and the chorus gives the effect of an anthem while feeling at the same time utterly arbitrary, as though these lines are simply where we were when the groundswell of guitars and synth kicked in. It falls apart as suddenly and unnervingly as it opened gently. Its "ordinary sunset" is always going to look like the one that caught my attention as I went to heat up some more water and contemplate dinner and found myself thinking about the nineteenth century instead. I guess it makes a change from the twentieth. I want to be able to think about now and not feel it sleeted through with echoes: wars, fires, lies. It is the wrong time of year to be haunted. These are not ghosts I want to let in.

Comments

[radiantfracture]

Beautiful and harrowing.

[lilysea]

Covered in gold and kicking through the bellyache

That's lovely! ^_^