I'm Adalimone and this is The Slowdown.

As so many of us work to persist on the hedonic treadmill, to find more pleasure, to find

some sort of happiness, it sometimes feels like we are acting out of

desperation. Maybe this will fix me. Maybe this. What about microdosing or microdermabrasion?

Maybe something micro will fix the micro me in this macro world. I am guilty of all of this.

I want to be made better. I want the world to be made better. I want a quick fix or even just a fix.

A slow fix would do just fine. What I am learning to do, however, is lean into pleasure a little

when it comes to savor it. I think it might be working too. At least I hope it is.

I remember once when I was 15 and unsure of whom to ask for things. God, goddesses, the universe,

the ocean. I remember I climb out onto my rooftop and stare at the clouds and then turn to watch

people down below. I loved that rooftop because I was in the sky and in the world at the same time.

I could watch his tourist walk into various shops and I could hear the chef named Curtis down

below singing his country songs as loud as he could. I was both in the world and not in the world

and at 15, that's exactly what I needed. I remember finding that song, Your Song by Elton John

with the second verse that started. I sat on the rooftop and kicked off the moss. Well, a few of

these verses, well, they got me quite gross. And I felt like those lyrics were made just for me,

someone sitting on a rooftop all up in her own feelings. I think about that rooftop a lot

because it was where I learned my version of prayer. I would ask the clouds and the sky for a good life.

I'd ask the clouds and the sky to be okay. Today's poem is that kind of prayer, a prayer for pleasure

for the brief moment of relief to be made whole again. In this poem's repetition, we hear the

desperation, but also the song. Prayer beginning with a line by Chakowski by Pablo Pignetto Stillman.

Throw me into a cloud, O Lord, with those awkward hands of yours that mean yet are of it all, O Lord,

...