Greetings from the funk 💩🕺

A mood matched by dust blotting out the mountains of Tucson.

Pancake Brain is a (free) weekend newsletter by award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca. Please like, subscribe, and share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.

Last week, on a road trip that began with the Grand Canyon, I was crushed like a bug by billions of years of stone. Meditating on the perimeter for three days left with me with the mind-altering effects of a psychedelic trip, though the epiphany arrived in delay. On the way to Las Vegas, with the castles of natural law in the rear view mirror, it occurred to me that I was (still) wasting an awful lot of time being a piece of shit.

There is an infinite, unconditional love that I can find every time that I meditate, or wake before sunrise for a walk in the mountains, or finally remember to take one good deep breath. The interconnected energy of all being can be found alive and well while spending time at peace in nature. Of course the only problem is work, interpersonal conflict, poverty, fascism and war, to say nothing of the fact that all of a sudden all celebrities are skinny.

Back in Tucson after my road trip, I have been too busy to make it out to the mountains but one morning. I hit snooze on my 5:00 a.m. alarm too many days in a row, and then the weather turned. On Friday, a dust storm rode in on a heatwave, swirled around Saturday morning with sporadic, thrashing winds, and blotted out the sky through Sunday evening. I can usually see the mountains from my desk, but you wouldn’t know that if you sat staring out the window today with the horizon dusted out into a damning glow of gray.

Record hot temperatures this early in the year have us raising our eyebrows here in Tucson, wondering if we’ll even be able to live here if it gets any hotter. The opacity of the fate of our species on this planet seemed to match those awful clouds taking out the horizon. $6.00 gas in LA looked insane on last week’s road trip, until I got back and saw $4.60 at the local Circle K. I found something for $4.20, and filled up my tank, hacking up some strange dust, trying not to get it in my eyes.

The mountains are still there behind the clouds, I know it. The infinite, unconditional love must be behind of all this confusion and fear. Swirling like the dust swallowing up the horizon, the conditions of chaos conceal our connection to the vertical dimension of pure being. Eternal truth leaving sandcastles of billions of years of history, and then you’re trying not to eat dirt at the gas station so you can weave around Trump bumper stickers in traffic.

Talking to my brother this afternoon, we caught up after a few weeks of phone tag. I vented about something that was bothering me, told him about the weirdness of the weather, and then remembered about the road trip. “By the way the Grand Canyon is wild,” I said casually. “I remember being there,” he said, “Seriously, billions of years of rock. Standing there you have to realize you are just a speck of shit on the sands of time.” I laughed, having remembered again, ‘Totally, I almost forgot.”

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