I recently rediscovered this little bit of prose while digging though some old notebooks and writings.
There’s a party over there and crickets over here there’s a party going on across the street and there are crickets over here. There is music coming out of the party over there and there are crickets over here. The only interesting thing is that the crickets are chirping in exact triplets to the music coming from the party over there. That’s it. Life is grand.
As a stand alone it’s cute enough and I think the intent to point out the synchronicity of the moment is well intact, but on second reading I felt there was more information imbedded in this little trifle than just the poetics. Namely that it was approximately 75 degree at 2:00am on July 29, 2007 somewhere near Lake of the Isles, in Minneapolis, MN.
How do I know this? Because those crickets where chirping in exact triplets, 3 against 2, to a song pumping out of a condo across the street, specifically, Justin Timberlake’s Summer Love, a top 40 hit during the summer of 2007. Given that “Summer Love” is 95 bpm, and the crickets where going 3 chirps to 2 quarter notes, that means they were chirping 142.5 times per minute. Depending on which equation you use, the geographic region, the type of cricket and the season, one may get varying results. I went with Dolbear’s Law
According to this, it was approximately 75 degrees on or around my stoop in uptown, just off of Lake of the Isles. For the sake of curiosity and validation I checked the weather record of the temperature for the day which says the min-max temperature for the day was 60-89. 2:00am, July 29th, 2007, on the stoop, listening to the neighbors blast “Summer Love” in the 75 degree night air? It could’ve happened.