On Dustin Guy Defa’s "Bad Fever"

Be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade

The Latin root for “inchoate” is “incohātus”, meaning “begun, unfinished”. It’s an “in process” word. In-between. I am by no means conversant with the Bible in its entirety, but one line floats into my head with regularity. Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” You could replace “faith” with “longing”. It seems sometimes, that other people get to live IN the “things hoped for”. (This is obviously not true, but it SEEMS so.) If you are a perennial outsider, “the substance of things hoped for” is a taunt, a mockery. All of life is “inchoate”, begun, unfinished. Longing blankets over you like thick fog.