Fever Dreams

Many years ago, in art class, I learned about mixing different colors to get the one you want. How complimentary colors mix together to make brown and that black is what happens when all colors get together. The one color we couldn't make was white, because white is essentially no color.

This hurt my brain at the time, because humans obviously figured out a way to make white paint and white crayons out of this no color. Then I learned that what we think of as white doesn't exist in the natural world. If you run around the woods with a piece of copy paper and compare, the white flowers are really more yellow or blue and the white butterflies really aren't.

Since this topic hurts my brain, I keep it (and other koan-like thoughts) stashed away for times when I get a little too smug about my ability to solve puzzles.

My fevered brain decided it was a topic worth dreaming about and so my latest round of napping had me visiting various artists' studios throughout time and asking how white paint and white crayons were made. I know artists used to have a rough time creating paint. They managed it somehow, but they wouldn't tell me.

In dream-land, these old artists' studios were making me cold, so I decided to fly to the center of the sun to watch how things were created. And also to warm up (though in real-life I was wrapped up as a five-layer burrito involving two sets of flannel pjs). I watched matter melt and explode and saw all sorts of colors, but the white was more yellow-y than the white of a crayon. I was also sadly disappointed about how cold the middle of the sun was, but that might have been the fever interjecting some commentary.

At that point, I decided to come back to earth and be one of those generic white butterflies you see bopping around all summer. It was lovely to flit around in the hot, hot sunshine and see the world from butterfly eyes. As the sun set, I started to get cold again, but felt I had my answer.

I woke up still wrapped as a fiver-layer burrito, shivering, and not really able to articulate the answer to my white crayon question, but that's how fever dreams go sometimes.

An Erinku:
In times
of too-hotness
I break out
ice-cream medicine