It wasn’t always the case that you could breeze into Sugar Magnolia, the confectionary and stationery shop in downtown Blacksburg, for an ice cream cone and find among their eight or ten regular rotation flavors one called “Michigan Pot Hole.” The store opened in the summer of 2018, just as I was preparing to move to SW Virginia and begin a faculty directorship position at Virginia Tech. My daughter, Is., and I did visit Sugar Magnolia during a housing lookabout trip that summer; Sweet Magnolia’s locally renowned flavor, “you have got to try it,” was something citrusy, and the rest of the big bucket choices included the greatest hits: Butter Pecan, Chocolate, Mint Chip, and a few more. A year or two later, I was surprised to see Pot Hole first appear. Being a Michigander from day one, I ordered a scoop, no hesitation. I was genuinely curious about how one state’s notoriously unreliable and heavily trafficked asphalt shifts out to become a jokey-har-har ice cream flavor, and then how that ice cream flavor circulates into coolers 500 miles away. Fudge ribbons stand in for tar; cookie chunks stand in for #89 limestone pea gravel, and road surfaces become delicious, playful, a treat. Make that two scoops in a cup with a spoon, please. I asked what was up with the name of this new flavor, and someone from behind the counter explained that it was supplied by a new vendor, ranking its way into the default lineup because it was popular elsewhere, apparently. In a marketing meeting somewhere: “name ice creams playfully and to commandeer attention.”

Michigan’s saga with potholes may not be unique among northern U.S. states. Road materials don’t last forever in Wisconsin or Minnesota or Upstate New York, either. I’m no materials engineer, but it doesn’t take a specialist to recognize that heavy traffic and erratic freeze-thaw cycles speed up the deterioration of roads. Surfaces don’t last. Things fall apart. Drivers and, increasingly, politicians pay the price, as the direct experience of tires-touching-asphalt makes this into a problem whose reminders are loud, jarring, and oftentimes damaging to vehicles. Expecting better from those responsible for roads and being serially disappointed ascends to the status of myth; Michigan becomes known for pot holes. Big Gretch runs on “fix the damn roads already” and gets elected. An EMU student goes viral in 2018 for eating Lucky Charms from a pothole in West Bloomfield, just a few bumpy counties over from Battle Creek and the Kelloggs headquarters. Eventually we have Michigan Pot Hole ice cream. In SW Virginia. But what sort of shift-out is this, a transformation from a materially improved, engineered roadway into a foodstuff? I didn’t foresee this question calling to mind that moment at the end of JimBruno JohnsonLatour’s 1988 ‘door-closer’ essay, where he returns us to “a Columbus freeway” (309), to stage one more example of the shift-out engineers facilitate, first from personal safety concerns, then “words and extended arm to steel,” such that the risk is mitigated, machined into a built environment with reduced risks for humans riding in the back seat of a car. In the case of Michigan Pot Hole ice cream, the multiple shift-outs and shifts-back accrue, a criss-crossing if tiresome saga. Failing asphalt into ice cream returns the road to the human; it has a full circle going round and round quality, a hint of irony, and the road resurfacing contractors (with their teams of engineers) who completed the terms of hire a decade ago, have moved on. Sweet nourishment. Without implying too forcefully negligence or dereliction, we roll ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk wide-eyed across their aftermath.

An assortment of related, namable decay conditions could pair with this scenario: scheduled or planned obsolescence, overuse as accelerant, climatological flux intensifying the stark shifts between freezing and thawing. Here, friend, have some ice cream. Yet, why do any of us expect the roads to last longer? Or to be in better condition than they are? To follow this a step farther recalls enshittification, or long game strategy (or con) that first rolls out a new social media platform with a strong skew toward favorable user experiences and then gradually, over many years at the black-boxed mix board, dials down the substantive interactions, visibility of likely-interesting posts, and dials up the tolls, ads, noisier ratios to meaningful content, more ads, pay-to-play fees, verified checkmarks, and so on. No matter how mightily we want the good to last, rarely does it endure. Repair dreams as for-profit screws tighten. Tragedy of the commons with the sheep bleating incessantly about who in the hay mawed all of the grass. And paving over desire paths with asphalt faster to crumble than the by-now-long-gone contractors promised ka-thunk. Of course it’s not just road surfaces, but so much of the built environment: houses and cars, strip malls and bridges, parking garages, decks, chicken coops. No exemption for familiar workplaces, for writing programs, English Departments, humanities and social sciences divisions, public higher education, or, for all I know, the entire education sector, pre-K to specialized surgeons, public, private, etc. Holding back on cynical or accelerationist grand conclusions, this moment broadly feels abuzz in wait-and-see, instead an exercise in inventing more ice cream flavors: Professorial Salted Caramel Teardrops, Slow-melting WPA Brickle, Austeritycello, Limitless Course Cappuccino, Dulce AI Leche (vegan), Peanut Shared Butter Governance, Faded Ink Faintly Contractual Anise, Successive Terms Chairberry, Sweet Clotted Budget Models, GTA Moonlighting Oreo. Make that two scoops in a cup with a spoon, please.