we are each other's heaters

so lets keep each other warm

Vija Celmins, Heater (1964)

We’ve got this detached office in the backyard. It’s like a shed that feels like a sauna because of the wood paneling. Is it called paneling?

There are so many words that all basically just mean ‘wall’. Recently I learned the outside of a house is called ‘siding’ when Lauren kept talking about what color we’d paint the siding in our new home (soft launch btw: we finally closed on a home).

“What is siding?” I finally asked.

“The outside of the house everywhere except the ‘trim.’”

Whoever’s in charge of houses sure did a good job rebranding every little part of them so they could charge more for them. No wonder houses are so expensive - you’re not paying for walls, you’re paying for SIDING and TRIM like you’re in a fuckin dr. suess book.

but anyways

I’m in a shed with wood panels that feels like a sauna except for one key detail: it’s cold as shit, especially in the hour of fourAM when I go back there.

Today, at 4:11am, it was a whopping 14 degrees.

I dread going back here to start the day. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it, making the ten foot walk. It haunts and taunts me. I won’t make it. I’ll crumble.

Now, at 507am, it’s skyrocketed to, I don’t know, 40? 45 degrees maybe? Actually I have a meat thermometer inside let me go check.

Ok it’s officially 15.6 degrees outside. I stood out and waited to see what it’d be until it got down that low.

Watching it drop, smoke from my breath emerging only from my phone’s flashlight like the phone was a dragon, breathing heavy, watching this red balloon of a thermometer, down to 15.3, then 15.6. Cold.

I stuck it into the dirt then, only a few inches, and it spiked up to 34.1, more than double, more than freezing. Warm.

Inside now, in my cold sauna, it’s hot as hell - 55.9 and rising, all because of this little wall heater, good and strong, that you turn on with this dial on the top of it, nestled underneath its ‘heat panel’ which I’m sure has its own fancy name.

Every morning I spin it up to the MAX - that’s the number, it goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 MAX (like a dial that goes to 11).

It took about an hour today to get this warm, and soon it’ll probably get too warm and I’ll turn it down to a 2 or 1 because I’m walking on this treadmill and I’m getting sweaty and soon I’ll have to take my sweatshirt off and then I’m just in my sweaty undershirt like an idiot animal guy walking and writing and making trips back and forth between here and the house which is actually the thing I wanted to talk to you about:

the thing i wanted to talk to you about

I’ve noticed that once I’m warm, I don’t mind the trips between here and the house. I barely feel them. Maybe that’s the coffee in me or the big thoughts or just the body heat - who knows (the scientists have no idea don’t even ask them) - but regardless my body is cooked up enough with energy that I sort of enjoy being out there, like when I standing out there earlier watching the meat thermometer. It felt fine. Good even, like a cold plunge at a bath house which I’m quite good at, by the way, lasting a full 4 minutes in the freezing water last time I went with Lauren, much to her dismay.

She watched me from across the long room of Sauna House making big motions with her hands of “get out of there” but I didn’t, instead doing one of those tongue to the side, eyes to the other side moves that the kids do. Then I got out and my whole body shivered for a good five minutes as I sat next to her and we discussed the trim and the siding and the other words for walls.

But wait I keep getting distracted.

it’s a metaphor

The thing I wanted to say is this: it’s a metaphor, this whole cold room that gets warm thing, for a creative life.

Lemme see if I can make this make sense.

Going out to share your work into the world, into nature, it can feel very cold. Indifferent, as Werner Herzog might say, to you and your magic and heart and warmth, dead to it, uncaring.

Unless you’ve got the warm place, the cozy home that your body remembers and knows you’ll soon return to.

Then, the cold stops being cold. It feels fine. Good even.

So the question becomes: what’s the warm cozy sauna of a creative life?

I’m not sure but also I am: it’s people. Other people. Community. Camaraderie.

We are each other’s heaters.

Otherwise I’ll run out into the cold and try to warm myself real fast with the things that look like love but aren’t - the online markers of connection - that, it should be said, aren’t fake, exactly, because they do mean something, but maybe only if and when you’re warm already, good inside, whole. When you’re good whether or not they exist.

Because the cold is a fear and the warmth is the truth we can return to, I think, I hope, I believe, even and especially when it’s freezing.

It was warm in the womb, then we came out and it got cold, so we cried and the people who made us were there, bundling us up and keeping us safe until we could go out into the cold again, no jacket needed, no i’m not cold mom i told you, i’m fine, except i’m not. I’m freezing, sometimes, until i feel safe enough to say so, because what else is love if not the ability to say we need it? And in that honesty, because of it, the walls come down and we’re warm again, cozy, safe, if only for a little while.