Knitting and Herding Bubbles

An episode in my new tender and tentative endeavor to write …

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday (4 days ago by the time this gets “published”) knitting a scarf. Despite using a technique to make the project lie flat, it still curled up till it was just a long tube. I read in my proudly purchased knitting book about steam-blocking, but the methods were different depending on whether the material was synthetic or natural. I didn’t know what this yarn was made from, since I had thrown away (or “stored” in a scary shoebox) the labels, but I guessed it was more fake than real since I never paid much for any of my yarn. So I went for the “lay-a-wet-towel-on-top-and-dry-iron-it-until-it-steams” method. And discovered 3 things.

           1.     It was real wool. I knew this because it smelled like the sheep barns at the state fair. Wet wool and sheep manure (droppings?) seem like a synonymous smell to me ~ not exactly unpleasant though. It smelled like a world I would gladly exchange for this one – a world, that is, where I envision myself living on acres of raw earth, living (is there a word that evokes a sense of living where every sense is absorbing life to a thrilling degree ... that differs from being merely alive in the medical sense?) … coming alive to life in direct proportion to my cultivation of earth, animals, and offspring. From a detached, journalistic perspective, I realize that this longing for a creative, self-made, natural life also flourishes in direct proportion to the number of moments I spend withering in a concrete, soulless chain-driven city-world. (I choose the word “chain” not only because it serves the purpose of sounding melodramatic, but also to describe the unnatural overtaking of chain restaurants, apartment complexes, theme parks, hospitals, and craft stores.)

     

      2.   (I had to go back and re-read this to remember that I had started listing some minutiae of day-to-day revelations.) The steam and weight of the iron had not only flattened the scarf, but also muted the design I had so laboriously created, using a chopstick as a makeshift cable needle. Discouraging much?

      3.     I have no idea what the third thing was going to be. When I start writing, the writing takes over and it’s all I can do to keep up with it, trying my best to herd coherent bubbles of thought onto the train of … well, point in case. Or case in point. Just in case.

What does “case” even mean??