https://www.patreon.com/posts/36099988
(This is from a walk a couple of days ago.)
I forgot to tell you about this! A week ago, I was having skype cocktails with two friends. I was sitting next to the picture windows that open out onto the little woodland behind the house, but the trees still weren’t very leafy, so I could see the big radio tower a quarter mile away — or rather, I could see the red lights along its length, blinking.
Darkness and then rain, and then thunder and lightning. I was watching idly as my friends and I talked. And then a sudden straight fat bar of blinding purple-white light shot from the top of the tower, as it was struck by lightning, and then pitch blackness — except for a river of golden light that poured from the tower. It splashed like water, like throwing out the contents of a half-full pail.
It happened twice more that I saw: the bar of cold light, the river of warm. The next day (the day I went for this walk, and saw this lovely decayed tree), I walked over to the tower to make a guess at how big the cascades of sparks were. Maybe twenty feet long. There were no signs the tower had been struck.
There are times when I wish I were a poet instead of a writer of prose, but I am sure this will make it into a story someday.
The news: I have a new story out! My longest Patreon members will member when I performed the deck experiment, last July I think it was — sitting and documenting everything I could see. Because everything a writer does or imagines has the potential to become art (which is true for other artists, as well), this experiment developed into “An Attempt at Exhausting my Deck,” a very short story for Us In Flux from the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. Us in Flux is a wonderful experiment: weekly stories and discussions about resilience, community, and connection. This coming Monday, we’ll be doing a live discussion between me, Joey Eschrich, and environmentalist and writer Jessie Rack. Here’s the details on that.
