We were recently trapped beneath a weather system known as anticyclonic gloom. A month earlier a 'thunderstorm asthma event' had occurred leading to hospitalisations and even some fatalities. Ambulance services were stretched responding to asthma attacks and everyone was talking about it. It was the first I'd ever heard of an asthma storm. A second asthma event was predicted, we were warned. I lay awake that night around 3am, humid, wild wind, drama, a rattling fly-wire frame and I felt that I too began to wheeze. Was it psychosomatic? A panic attack? Our son was out and about in that weather and he has been a cause of anxiety for me of late, a constant background of worry. But I discounted all these things and took the symptoms to be real. What was the wind carrying I wondered? Later, it may have been here on Steemit, I found an article referring to the event which speculated that strange ingredients had been added to the howling wind for reasons uncertain. The article suggested some sinister possibilities.
If no-one theorises about conspiracies how will we ever uncover them? There are so many conspiracies, that much is certain, and by their very nature they pose a threat and need to be exposed. I think it was Karl Popper who proposed that all theories, no matter how outlandish, how marginal, might yet still have their day. I must have read that in Kuhn versus Popper, a great book. Anyway it is a matter of credulity I suppose, credulity versus the comfort of the paradigm we are given. When the easy answers proffered by the news outlets start to seem like crazy answers what to do? Russian election hacking, wild claims about Assange, Asthma storms, anticyclonic gloom...
Over Christmas, I think it was on Boxing day, a muggy cloudy richness accumulated over our skies and perhaps in our hearts. I was out walking through the city. I visited the art gallery and generally wandered around surveying the state of things, headphones, Gurdjieff - De Hartmann. Around mid afternoon I went to the Pavilion, a public space in the gardens opposite the gallery. The Pavilion is erected in spring for the arts festival and is dismantled again early autumn. This year it is constructed from bamboo and rope. It has a gold tube in the centre, a half metre high, a type of orgone accumulator or something that points up through the hole in the middle of the roof. The Pavilion is a type of sacred place and as usual some arty sensitive types were gathered there. I ordered a coffee, they even remembered me from the last time. As I sat there reading and enjoying the coffee the atmosphere grew until the heavens finally opened, the deluge, and we all smiled at each other. Some kids ran about in the rain with excitement and abandon, so pure, getting sopping wet. More people arrived seeking shelter, a little community formed. We huddled in the pavilion witnessing nature, silently watching the downpour.
Last week at work they said that a similar deluge would be upon us later in the afternoon. I went to the bureau's website and scanned the radar animation for details. The animation loops through six frames taken six minutes apart so that the loop covers about 30 minutes. I zoomed out to the 512km radius series and watched as mysteriously emergent bubblings grew and faded across the state. Heavier rain is indicated by increasing the reds and attenuating the blues so that if it is a real downpour the loop is more suggestive of fiery explosions and advancing infernos. Everything is sped up in the loop, the compressed timescale out of kilter with the speed of weather, and it can all look a bit like war, a human storm, Syria. I imagine geopolitical conspiracies. But today there weren't too many of these ephemeral bursts and they were short lived. It didn't look like it was going to be a problem around the city.
Looking at the images though I noticed a most curious thing. A line of precipitation, an incredibly straight line, stretched from the mainland across Bass strait to Tasmania. This line of precipitation flashed on and off as the radar animation looped so that one would calculate that the rain had a periodicity of 10 minutes or so. A line of rain gradually deepening then fading every 10 minutes, an incredibly straight line a couple of hundred kilometres long, not moving eastwards as it should have been, resisting the wind. I called a couple of my work friends over to show them and we started joking about it all. Conspiracies. One of them had never heard of ChemTrails so we had a look at a few photos of those. We had been talking movies earlier so I brought up Koyaanisqatsi and we watched the trailer on YouTube. The relevant Hopi Indian prophecy from the movie:
Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.
Later in the afternoon, three hours or more, I returned to the radar loop. The strange line was still there, it hadn't moved, still flashing on and off, a beacon, a warning.
Radar Image from Australian Bureau Of Meteorology
Epilogue
A few days ago I returned to view the loop to check in on that line. It was still there! Surely not I thought. Investigating further I discovered that the image is a composite image so the line must be an artefact of the way that the radar images are stitched together. It seems so obvious now. One of my work colleagues had suggested that on the day but I took no notice of him. Never-mind. I will keep searching for conspiracies to report, real conspiracies. I am all for the citizen journalist movement and have not lost faith in the mission!
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