Gray

You need only browse Lowes’ or Home Depot’s paint samples to confirm gray is a poetic color: autumn fog, twilight mauve, hazy stratus, mountain smoke. Each outlet lists about 200 variations of gray.

Yet, gray is despised. Ask a random group of acquaintances to associate the gray with the five senses, and they’ll offer acerbic, pain-filled responses: “Dismal dark day,” “Groan,” “Smells like dead mice,” “Tastes like stale oatmeal,” “Feels like somebody’s grave.”

Some unfortunates claim the grayness of dreary winter days causes seasonal affective disorder and indebtedness. Easy enough to prove: do an internet search on SAD images. You’ll immediately hunger for sunshine and mental-health trips to Fiji, Aruba, and Curacao. Hope you have deep pockets.

Yet, for all its drab monotony, gray has other powers. Peer into impenetrable fog. Don’t you begin to imagine camouflaged soldiers lying in wait a hundred feet distant, their only concern being whether their exhalations betray their presence? Gray has that kind of control. But not red; the red of a blazing sunrise could never be that subtle. Red would scream, "You in the house, surrender now!” Gray wouldn’t even utter words of warning on the wind. Gray is cunning and artful—more than an indistinct color wavering between black and white, more than the color of dead ashes or featureless overcast skies.

Probe gray with your clairvoyant eye, the insight that allows you to detect what no dog can scent and no heat-seeking night creature can perceive. Morph your senses into a fine mesh that measures and evaluates gray’s many nuanced hues.

Run your tongue over gray’s myriad entries on the periodic table of color. Fire up your high school Bunsen burner and assay the variations of gray in the burning flame of antimony, bismuth, cadmium, lead, nickel, or silver. Treasure the science of gray.

You ask, “How could knowledge of gray help anyone? A quick life-and-death example: a few years ago in Mexico, six would-be thieves stole a truck containing hospital radiation equipment, exposing themselves to deadly cobalt-60. Poor devils: they never heard of Gray Units, designated by the scientific symbol Gy. Exposure to five-plus Gy of radiation at one time usually causes death in fourteen days. Crime against gray doesn’t pay.

Fancy a brush with the artistic? Plumb the gray scale’s use in the photographic and computer world, where the artistic manipulation of bits creates pixels that can be black, white, or innumerable monochromatic shades. For captivating examples of gray scale, dithering, and line art, google “images for monochromatic animals.” Enlighten your friends with optical esoterica from the gray-related world: some humans and mammals are monochromats and see only in a gray scale. You may want to buy a cage; the cuddliest of the monochromats are nocturnal lizards, snakes, raccoons, rabbits, rats and mice, and guinea pigs.

Gray surmounts the limits of meteorology, art, or the natural world to pervade our daily lives. In every industry and store, gray market distributors sell equipment or products without being authorized by manufacturers. Potential danger lurks within every visit to a new website. Has a gray-hat—that person being only a non-malicious cracker, and we hope not a hacker—done something to exploit the site’s security weaknesses?

Sweaty-palmed now? Is computer evil gestating within your graymail? Graymail makes up 75-80% of your email inbox: the newsletters, deals, and updates for which you clicked, “Yes, send me all your junk.” Maybe you should select Unsubscribe more often.

DMR Business Statistics reports that 50% of Americans check their email while in bed. No wonder our fertility rates are dropping. Are you and your offspring spending so much time emailing you are becoming Gray-A people, humans whose sexual orientation or sexual habits now flounder between asexual and sexual? Talk about Shades of Grey.

 In the future, you’d better watch your front and back. Gray goo is what your life will become after self-replicating robots or nano-machines use your life-form for fuel. Will you taste like chicken? You may thank author K. Eric Drexler for that gray-goo compellation.

 “Wait,” you say, “I live on a higher intellectual plane.” Good. You may enjoy gray literature—perhaps a product of your gray matter—science or tech writing for outside normal publishing outputs such as peer-reviewed journals. In your world, gray is associated with wisdom, knowledge, stability, and intelligence. In your gray-head world, the gray of your hair is classic and enduring, like granite.

So, it’s all a gray area. Maybe the answer lies among the paint chips, in appreciation of colors like coastal dusk, secret passage, cosmic rays, and lunar eclipse. We can all try to be brave and release our inner poets.

The End

© Richard Schram, 2018