Because Clouds Aren’t Clouds

You’re no dummy. You’re a writer, and although stupid people can write, well, now, there’s no way I can actually finish that sentence, can I? So, suffice it to say, you yourself ain’t no dimwit, but are far from being the dimmest light in the socket.

The concept I’m about to share with you has huge ramifications for all of us, most especially the dreamers, poets, and giddy-hearts among us.

Yes, I’m talking to you. 

As you know, I’ve seen people with advanced meteorological degrees on TV, so I’m quite qualified to make the following bold statement. Believe me, I’ve studied this:

Clouds are not clouds. Trick o’ the eye? A mere phantasm that we all see? 

No. Just not clouds

I was sitting in my faded plastic Adirondack chair sipping tea in the spacious backyard of my recently moved-into house on New Jersey’s Chemical Coast. An airliner had just flown over, as we’re on the flight path for Newark. And a trainload of oil tank cars had just rumbled past, as we’re on the rail line between an oil tank farm and a refinery. It was, for the moment, relatively quiet. Of course I could hear the murmur of the New Jersey Turnpike a couple of miles away, but, hey,  who doesn’t, right?

And there was this cloud, just a’scootin’ across the sky all by itself. Nifty little guy at first glance.

At second glance, however, I noticed something I’d seen but never thought about before, a two-plus-two-equals-WTF? kind of moment. Something was up with that cloud.

Here on the coast the clouds often move west-to-east on what seems to be a never-ending wind conveyor that blows from the Pennsylvania mountain ranges out over the wild Atlantic. This little guy was riding the waves.

But the leading and trailing edges were boiling and roiling like a pot on a stove, and I realized the cloud was not a cloud at all, but just the condition of the wind up there at that moment. The moving cold air mixed with the warm local air to create a dew point right there. As the cold air moved west, the dew point traveled with it. 

I wasn’t watching a cloud move overhead. I was watching a moving atmospheric condition.

So, was that a cloud, or was it just a temporary dew point? 

You know I’m talking about because when you’re landing in the airliner and you see clouds below you and then the plane descends through them you never see the clouds, just thick fog, and like all of a sudden you’re underneath the clouds. and you’re like where did the clouds go?

From where I’m sitting at my desk right now on this rainy New Jersey day, the sky is pale gray – nothing but cl… moisture moving from the highest icy altitudes through warm air in such a great mass that it obscures my view of the sky.

Time. It’s always time, isn’t it? 

What is an ocean wave, really? It’s a temporary rise in the ocean’s surface caused by the passage of an energy wave from far out in the depths, itself created by tidal and tectonic movement and by the wind.

And you know that’s true because the empty plastic Pepsi bottle some idiot tossed out there rises and falls with the wave but doesn’t come in to the beach. Why? Because the water’s not traveling in a wave, it’s the energy traveling through the water that causes the uppity-down movement we call waves. That surfer’s riding on the edge of an energy wave, transmitted through the water, not the water itself.

My wife rolls her eyes when I explain this. Look at that chair, she says. It’s just a temporary arrangement of resin molecules, isn’t it? It’s gonna melt, or decay, after 10,000 years, isn’t it? Whatsamatta wit’ you?

Because it’s all time. 

For this second, that’s a wave, that’s a cloud, and that’s a chair, isn’t it. It LOOKS like a cloud, and that’s what we’ll call it. 

What does all of this mean for us writers, we giddy-hearted poets? 

When those guys with the super loud motorcycles rumble past my recently-moved-into New Jersey house, making so much noise that granma’s self-portrait on the kitchen wall trembles and threatens to fall and crash onto my cherished Love Is porcelain collection, I remind myself that this can only happen here.

Here. Nowhere else in the known universe, NOWHERE, is there that sound, that cloud, that wave. NOWHERE else. 

The entire universe has arranged and coiled and unsprung itself to the point where that guy’s motorcycle threatens my porcelain figurines with granma’s self-portrait, and that cloud looks like a cloud, and that Pepsi bottle rises towards the stars, and the surfer’s thinking “cowabunga.”

Only in that second, and only here. 

Wow. Mind blown, right?

And I lean too far back in the Adirondack chair and the back leg breaks off and I tumble over backward, spilling my cup of tea.

And the second is gone.

Stupid chair.