Blue became my favorite color several years ago. Blue sky, blue ocean, my wife’s eyes. Dark navy cotton. Blueberries when you rinse them. The way blue can seem so finely suspended inside ice.
Blue became emotional to me only recently. Growing up, our town had two public beaches, the public high school had a sailing team and the mascot was “the blue wave,” but if you asked me my favorite color, I was red. My favorite sweatshirt was red. My favorite teacher wore red Converse sneakers. And now I can’t stand it. It’s too hot, too belligerent. I’ve purged all my red clothes. This essay was inspired two nights ago while cooking, when I felt again an impulse to throw away my treasured collection of cookware from Le Creuset, all because the color is spotted brick.
A few years ago, I was parked on the Pacific Coast Highway, changing out of my wetsuit, I had on a red baseball hat and a man asked angrily if I was a Trump supporter. (The cap was from a skateboard shop in Sonoma, California.) I don’t think I’ve bought a single red thing since.
To me blue feels new and old at the same time. I find it almost medicinal to look at. Blue is stillness. Blue is the song “So What.” Blue is the assigned color of sorrow, though I think it’s miscast; sorrow to me is brown carpet. Plus, everyone looks good in blue. Whales look good in blue. Who doesn’t like lakes or denim?
Blue is the color of my favorite times of day: the edge of night and the early, early morning. I remember learning how nightclubs sometimes use blue lightbulbs in their restrooms to discourage drug use, to make it harder for a person to find their veins.
Blue links to a temptation I feel sometimes to stop time. A new favorite haircut: I want my hair to stop growing. A new set of clothes: they’re all I want to wear. I have a lifelong tendency to latch onto a single thought, or a single feeling or experience, and wish it endless. Maybe because as a kid, it really freaked me out to picture my mind stopping. I was terrified of death. And maybe I still am but in some new, adult way, and a switch to preferring blue is somehow a result. Blue is recurring. Blue doesn’t burn out. Blue is the color of pools.
In tomorrow’s supplement for supporters
Recommendations for sauces and condiments to get obsessed about
Seventeen works of fiction from 2022, and thoughts on books to give as gifts
What it’s like to be a food critic who tastes color, and more
What the what
“Meditations in an Emergency,” published Saturdays by writer Rosecrans Baldwin, is a weekly mini-essay about something he finds beautiful, with a longer piece once a month for paying subscribers, written in the wilderness.
Also for paying subscribers: a Sunday supplement, three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the author most recently of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award, now available in paperback from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
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