Last, next.

15: Two Rivers
16: Shenandoah (Birch)

Last, next.

14: MN Blue
15: Two Rivers

Last, next.

State Fair time soon. Moving on to the Blue Ribbon (#14) even though I’m only 2/3 through the Two Rivers (#13).

(Feb 2021: This is the beginning of my tracking Field Notes as I used them. I originally entered these into Day One. Full series here.)

I’ve been curious why, when people here on the coast say they are travelling to Portland, that they are going “up to Portland.”

Because I am over-educated and under-employed, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this curious figure of speech. On a map, Portland is very clearly southeast of Clatsop County. Like it or not, speakers of English speak of north as up, and south down. So why not say “down to Portland”? Also, when approaching Portland from over the coastal range, you are descending a long slope. This too draws on a different but related notion of down.

Having read way far more Mircea Eliade than was strictly good for me, I couldn’t help but recall Eliade’s observation that many ancient societies regarded their holiests sites as being closer to heaven than profane places, even when they were not situated on literal peaks. The temple mount in Jerusalem, Mt Zion, Baghdad, etc etc. Eden was in the east, which is why for the bulk of history, east was up, and maps were often drawn with the east at the top. We still pay homage to this old custom when we speak of orienting ourselves, and orientation. Orient = east.

So, do residents of Clatsop County look upon Portland as their cultural capital? (After all, even today, Britons regularly speak of going up to London, even though almost the entire country is north of London.)

No. (Or, if they do, that’s not why they say up.) The answer is much simpler, and the geography of my home region kept me from seeing it. 

People on the coast say up because, living at the mouth of the Columbia, Portland is upriver from them. The Columbia is the only American river worth mentioning that empties into the Pacific (indeed, it is one of only a handful of rivers in the world that empties into the Pacific). The shipping trade that passes in and out keeps this town alive. I knew how important the Columbia is to this region, and it’s not surprising that the major geographical and political features of a region will affect how people speak of their local environments… So why didn’t I think of that?

Well, I grew up on the Mississippi. Downriver is south – down. Upriver is north – up. And my hometown of Minneapolis turned its back on the river that birthed it years ago: the city’s skyline now looks out over the lakes, away from the river.

Also, a continent, seen simplistically, is a domed rock that slopes down to the sea. But this would not have been a useful metaphor for someone like me, living so far from any ocean.

The place that made us, even if we no longer live there, even if it no longer exists, will continue to shape our worldview, and influence which metaphors we live by, as we struggle every day to understand our surroundings.

If we grow up in a region where all rivers flow south, then we may come to think of that local feature as a universal law, and we will be blind to very real rivers that do not conform to this “law.” A benign mistake, surely. But if we equate up with good and up with north, we will necessarily and unconsciously equate good with north. This is why syllogisms can sometimes be more trouble than they’re worth.

And it reminds us always to ask ourselves why we think what we think, and in what ways our models of the world both bring order to and distort our apprehension of the very world we hope to understand.

What time is it, really? Our laptops, checking in with the atomic clock, updated their times automagically. So when I looked at the bedside clock, it should have been an hour later than the computers.

But they were the same. Had the bedside clock synchronized itself, too? Apparently. What a world.

By the end of the day, we will have set our clocks back twice: once for daylight saving time, and once for passing from Mountain to Pacific. Won’t shorten the miles, however.

As we leave the urban sprawls behind us in the east, the sky is once again a fact rather than an implication. 

I have been delighted and relieved to see Venus as the morning star most mornings this week. And at night, there are more than about sixteen stars visible. Actual constellations, rather than broad asterisms. I have been able to keep track of the Moon’s phase without the use of a widget on my computer.

I may even be able to get my telescope out after six long years, dust it off, and look again at the icecaps on Mars, at Jupiter’s moons, at Saturn’s ears…

My bring-along book for this trip has been the majestic Names on the Land, by George R. Stewart. I won’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of this man, but there have been several aspects of our world that he was directly or indirectly responsible for.

In 1941, he wrote a novel more or less from the point of view of a massive storm quite similar to the historic storm of a few weeks ago, sweeping in from the Pacific and raging across North America. In this novel, called Storm, a meteorologist is tracking the storm and in a moment of whimsy begins to refer to it as Maria (pronounced Mahr-ya). Soon after the book was published, the Weather Service introduced the convention of naming hurricanes not by the longitude & latitude at which they were first observed, but by a woman’s name.

Stewart was a native Californian and wrote many books of history in which the vast, the geologic, the global, is examined by focussing in on one small facet of the world. He wrote a study of US Hwy 40; of the final skirmish of the battle of Gettysburg; and many studies of various aspects of the westward migrations to Oregon and California throughout the 19th century. He also the definitive book on the Donner party’s plight, called Ordeal By Hunger.

His main concentration, however, was on names, both place names and given names.

Names on the Land has long been among my very short list of favorite books, and it has been of special interest this fall as we drove around the Hudson river valley in September, and now on this long drive into the West.

We watched, for example, as towns ending in -ville blossomed then gave away to -burg and -burgh as we drove through eastern Pennsylvania. The German settlers after the Revolutionary War were simply mad for -ville, and tacked it onto practically every town they settled in the last decades of the 18th century. Indeed, the new country was nuts for all things French, since they had played such a critical role in supporting the Colonies.

Another name that got tacked onto seemingly every county and town during those decades was that of General Washington. So, a town with a name that might otherwise sound a bit clunky and unimaginative, such as “Washingtonville,” very clearly reminds us of a time when our new country was bananas for our French allies, and swept up in a giddy adulation for a national hero the likes of which has hardly been matched since.

We also marvelled to read that a single summer’s expedition of several Frenchmen looking to discover the mythic river Missipi gave us the following names: Wisconsin, Peoria, Des Moines, Missouri, Osage, Omaha, Kansas, Iowa, Wabash, and Arkansas. No other expedition has had such a high success rate. Lewis & Clark, for instance, named everything in sight, of course, but the lag between their journey and the later migrations allowed nearly every one of their names to have faded. On the other hand, De Soto had travelled far more extensively than practically any other explorer of any age, but he apparently didn’t bother to name so much as a single creek or sandbar (or the Mississippi, although he was certainly the first European to see it and attest to its existence).

Those Frenchmen themselves left their own names (or others paid them the honor) all over my home region: Jolliet, Hennepin, Marquette. And another explorer, de la Salle, named the entire Mississippi watershed to honor the Sun-King with a single line in a letter home: Louisiane.

The French expedition indeed discovered the river, and sailed down from roughy what is now Stillwater to somewhere south of St Louis, but they failed to nail down a definitive name. In fact, it consistently bore three names among the seven explorers: the illiterate boatmen persisted in referring to it in the Indian style; Marquette called it “Conception” for the Immaculate Conception; and Jolliet called it “Buade” after one of his patrons back home in France. How “Mississippi” stuck and prevailed over not just the other two (admittedly shitty) candidates, but over the literally dozens of other names it bore, is a tale for another time.

Tonight, we are in Boise, Idaho. The name “Idaho” was almost the name for an earlier state. Other candidates for that territory were Yampa, Nemara, San Juan, Lula, Arapahoe, Weapollao, Tahosa; the “non-barbarian” candidates were Lafayette, Columbus, Franklin. The finalists, however, were Idahoe [sic] and Colorado. The latter won. But “Idaho,” without the final e, became a pet project of a California senator named Gwin, who thought it was an awful pretty name. He started shilling for it as the next few territories lined up for statehood and rechristening, including the Arizona territory, and it finally stuck on the western portion of the Montana territory. In reading the congressional record as the senators bickered about the relative merits of “Idaho” and “Montana” as names, you are reminded that the one thing Congress has consistently excelled at is whipping itself up into a furious and laughably righteous lather.

It is curious, too, that it took so long to name a state after Washington, given how consistently ape-shit Americans of all political persuasions have been for him over the years. That story, too, is for another time.

To dinner, and thence bed.

Twelve hours on the road, ten hours driving. The headwinds dropped, the land levelled out, and we maintained much higher speeds for longer stretches. Today was much more like our old roadtrips, and giving ourselves an early evening yesterday was a big part of today’s success.

More massive windmill farms. More pickups driven by cowboy hats. More mountains. Then no mountains. The Rockies tack north and west up the continent, so after our first brush with them, they disappeared again for most the afternoon and evening. Southern Wyoming is flat but gently rolling, with vast panoramas opening out at the most surprising moments. We were usually around 6000 feet above sea level, and we crossed the continental divide twice (or maybe we crossed two of the continental divides once each, I don’t know for sure).

It’s unlikely we’ll have another day tomorrow like today, but if we do, we could be in extreme eastern Oregon tomorrow night. We have options. As I keep saying: as long as we don’t arrive more tired than when we drove away last week; just as tired is fine.

Tomorrow morning: breakfast in Little America at a sprawling and deliciously kitchy travel center, where we’ll buy some goofy postcards.

As we drove north to pick up I-80 outside Cheyenne today, we finally returned to a familiar roadbed after many days on I-70 (which we had only driven on once before, and then only much farther east). But we couldn’t quite remember how familiar I-80 was. So we began counting it up, and eventually ran up a tally of most of our long roadtrips.

This is what we could remember:

1997

• Minneapolis to PDX via 35, 80 & 84; PDX to MPLS via 90 & 94.

1998

• MPLS to NYC via 90/80, down from upstate NY.

1999

• Scotland: counter-clockwise, starting and ending in Glasgow.

2000

• Feb: MPLS to PDX (but we may have flown, not driven).
• Aug: MPLS to Charlottesville, VA.
• Sep: MPLS to Winnepeg.

2003

• June & August: MPLS to Salt Lake City and back, twice.
• Sep: MPLS to Santa Fe, NM

2004

• Jan: Santa Fe to Phoenix, to LA, to San Francisco, then back to Santa Fe.
• March: Santa Fe to MPLS and back.
• May: Santa Fe to Naples, FL.
• June: Naples to MPLS, then MPLS to SLC.
• Aug: SLC to MPLS.
• Sep: MPLS to Upstate NY & NYC.

Those roadtrips in the 18 months between June 2003 and September 2004 totalled just under 19,000 miles. That’s an average of 1,000 miles per month . . . And this is the sixth time we’ve driven on I-80 between Cheyenne & Salt Lake City.

We are in Salina, Kansas, hoping to make it somewhere near Denver. After a few days on the road, we have better on-the-ground numbers of our daily progress, what we do, what we can do. And, with great sadness, we have decided the California leg of our journey will have to go. After Salt Lake City, we’ll bank north onto I-84 and head straight for Warrenton. (But we comfort ourselves in knowing that the Bay Area is a long weekend away now, rather than a costly transcontinental flight.)

Pictures tonight.

Hello from a Starbucks in Independence, Missouri. We are making both better and worse time today than yesterday. Better because the roads are smoother, straighter, flatter. We also topped up Hestur’s tires because they’d been looking low. It’s much more reponsive now, and we can maintain higher speeds. Worse because there is a high wind cutting across the highway, and with less to break it, we’re weaving around a bit.

And because we are really quite tired. Every now and again, as we drive along, we get a flash of the “big picture,” and we remember that 2010 was really kinda rough. And then with the push to get packed up . . . Well, let’s just say we fall dead asleep at night and have to stop every two hours or so during the day.

Well, we’re done with our mochas: it’s time to hit the road again.

Well, we made it. Cambridge, Ohio. Our first really full day of driving. Too much of it after dark, however, so we’re planning an early departure tomorrow so we can pack it in not long after dark tomorrow evening. We want to make it as far into Illinois as we can; St Louis would be ideal.

Pictures? Amusing anecdotes? Are you kidding? Maybe tomorrow.

We only made it as far as eastern Pennsylvania Saturday night, and we decided to stay two nights and really rest up. We really needed it. The truck needed a little repacking, and we needed lots of naps.

The Martin Guitar factory is just up the road in Nazareth, so we’re going to go up there to snoop around for a while before hitting the road around lunchtime. There are guided tours every day, too. They allow photography, so expect a few pictures.

We’re aiming for eastern Ohio for tonight.

We made it: we got on the road with a van packed literally to the roof.

Did we say we’d hit the road by 10?

Well, we did.

10 PM.

It is three in the morning. We are in Bethlehem, PA, at a Comfort Inn (there was no room at the manger).

That bad joke is about all I have energy for. We plan on sleeping in, so look for more lively accounts of recent events (and more bad jokes, no doubt) tomorrow.

A week from this evening, we hope to be in a hotel somewhere in Ohio, our first day’s drive behind us. We’re aiming straight for St Louis on I-78 & I-70 to follow (if only for a while) portions of the original Oregon Trail.

(missing picture)

Rather than banking north on the west side of Missouri, we will continue straight for Denver. Only then will we head north, picking up I-80 to take us through Wyoming and on down past Salt Lake City.

I’m excited about the next bit, which will take us on the only stretch of I-80 we’ve never been on: Salt Lake City to San Francisco. As well as allowing us to complete our first full traverse of a bi-coastal interstate highway (10 and 90 are the only others), this route will also take us across a remarkable geologic phenomenon in Nevada called the Basin & Range. It is so called because the particular manner in which Navada is ripping apart causes the crust to break up into long strips which then tip and topple, forming row after row of basins divided by long ranges. They resemble the crests of a windswept sand dune, but on a completely different scale. Geology repeats itself, because, as I understand it (i.e. barely at all), what’s happening right now in Nevada happened in New Jersey perhaps a quarter of a billion years ago: Africa and North America pulled apart, leaving the newly formed Appalachians on one side, and the newly formed Atlas Mountains on the other. Geology repeats itself.

Anyway.

We will spend a few wine-soaked days in the Bay Area, and finally sprint north on I-5 for Portland and our final destination of Warrenton. No strategy survives the battlefield, so while the route is almost certainly going to look more or less exactly like this . . .

(missing picture)

. . . it’s anyone’s guess how long exactly the trip will take.

(A loaded Econoline × no cruise control × our exhaustion level) ÷ (the pure adrenaline rush of being on the road × the excitement of starting our new life) = X

Ten days, maybe?

Meet Hestur, our main transport for the upcoming emigration:

It’s a 1999 Ford E150 Econoline. We’re the second owners. The original owner bought it to continue moonlighting his plumbing business even though he had already more or less retired. It is in excellent shape because he hardly drove it, and treated it very well.

More pix will follow, clearly displaying the space in the back and the shelves and cubbies for plumbers' gear. Fab!

I’m referring to Hestur as “it” – but “he” and “she” are equally acceptible. Such is the malleability of inanimate objects: we project onto them whatever strange archetypes that haunt the darker corners of our psyches, like shadows on the back of a cavewall.

“Hestur” is Icelandic for horse, and as I understand it, the word is masculine and can refer to stallions specifically. So he would be appropriate in this case. But of course, all vessels seem to be female so, along with the homonym “Hester,” she would work just as well. And since our Hestur is a lovely shade of red, the allusion to Hester Prynn’s notorious letter isn’t completely out of line. (But not having read the book for maybe 25 years, I can’t recall: she ain’t a twit like Emma Bovary, is she? I hope not.)

This dark morning, the rain lashes my front windows and Monstrance is on for at least the fourth time in the last twenty-four hours.

So it goes.

The Internet and all the channels on Blogovision are overrun with Vonnegut tributes and redundant notifications, so I will add my voice to the cacophony only to point toward this, by Lance Mannion. And to say, Exactly so: ruined. My life was ruined when I was about thirteen, when my eighth grade English teacher assigned Cat’s Cradle. Game over. I wanted to be a writer.

More than that, though, I wanted to stay awake and pay attention. There was something about Cat’s Cradle that made me realize I was constantly in danger of missing the big picture. It was the first of many books, and he was the first of many writers, to leave me with that sick yet elated feeling. Ursula K Le Guin, Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury, Annie Dillard, Pynchon. It’s like the old joke about the difference between a virgin and a lightbulb: you can unscrew a lightbulb. You can’t unread stuff like that.

But you can fall back asleep. If I may be so bold as to suggest that art has a message (a claim I would not want to be asked to defend), that message is perhaps: Pay attention! Stay awake! They’re out there, waiting for you to fall asleep, and then they’re going to take over everything else! Keep your lamps trimmed and burning!

And for Vonnegut, like all satirists, the best defense is a good offense. Good artists shock, great artists startle. After all, we can grow numb to shocks, and fall back asleep. What we need are good and frequent startlings. Wake up.

For quite a few reasons (which I won’t bore you with), 2006 was the worst year of my life, and it ended badly. I am heartily glad it’s over, even if a year is an arbitrary demarcation. All that was bad about 2006 fell within the human universe, and such demarcations, tho arbitrary, are also within the human universe. I am therefore confident that the latter will have a real effect upon the former.

I am thankful for the good things that happened during the calendar year of 2006, even tho I could count them on one maimed hand. I am taking seriously the notion of the “new year’s resolution,” never having done so before, and one of my resolutions is to step to the side of polarities. Black-and-white, for example, is a polarity; but to introduce “shades of grey” simply defines a new polarity of “black/white” v. “greys.” Instead, I resolve to look for a meaningful third space.

Also, I simply have a thing against the number six, and I’m glad to see it go.

In an attempt to slow down in my reading of ATD, I have been trying to distract myself in some way. But why should I want to try to slow down at all? Well, it is entirely possible that I was not in my right mind when I made the decision, but just before the blessed holiday season, I came to the conclusion that I needed to slow down on my reading of that vast tome because, well… Because as I approached the eponymously named Part 4, I felt as if I were engaged in a car chase from some hit action show in the 1970s, in which the laws of physics are ignored with blithe condescension. I was catching air over gentle rises in the street; bullets fired from extremely close range either glanced harmlessly off the bumper or missed altogether. It was like a syndicated rerun flying dream without the commercial breaks; it was awesome.

But once I actually hit Part 4, the car began to disintegrate entirely. The hubcaps zinged off onto the sidewalk; the trunk popped open and ejected its contents all over the road; the glove compartment gaped open suddenly, spitting countless scraps of paper out into the cab to flutter about, while the outdated maps flapped open to paste themselves to the windshield; the doors flew off; the tires shredded themselves on nothing, and tire rims began scraping and throwing sparks in dangerous directions…

It was perhaps time to slow down.

I have since been distracting my magpie mind with any number of dazzling distractions, chief among them Bleak House, which I had not read before. In fact, apart from Great Expectations in school maybe twenty-three years ago, I had never read any Dickens before. I’ve been really impressed. All I’ve read by the way of prose for the last eighteen months has been Proust and Pynchon, with some interludes for The Ginger Man and the White Whale. And I have in fact been a relative stranger to fiction for many years. My relish for Dickens may be nothing much more than of the “Is this a regular cracker or is this a Ritz?" variety. Ne’ertheless, I am relishing it all the same.

Other shiny things? A small Penguin sampler of John Ruskin, another fella I’d read not one word of before, but he’s been taking the top of my head right off. The book itself is slim and ridiculously overpriced, and you’ve probably seen them near the checkout of your local indie bookstore (the megaplexes tend to bury them deep in some counterintuitive section, like self-help or cooking; how these tumorous megastores stay in business boggles my poor naïve mind…) The erstwhile typographer in me was slain at the sight of them and has shown great restraint in not succumbing to their sirensong more than twice.

Also, I have a stack of Dostoevsky standing by for later in the year (some, like Crumbs-n-Puns & The Bros Kay, will be rereads after several decades; others, like the Idiot, for the first time). David Copperfield, Tom Jones, and The Red and the Black. Oh, and a collection of Guy Davenport’s writings (So far, I group him in the same polymathic camp as Louis Zukofsky and Paul Metcalf). I’ve also been hearing a compelling buzz abt Richard Powers, so I picked up his first book, the one about the farmers; also McCarthy’s Suttree. I have this habit of reading the first page of a book in the store; if it stays with me for a few days, it goes on my list (it’s a very long list). Suttree has been on that list for a while.

Here’s a thought I just had. To collate and then read all of Pynchon’s works chronologically.

It would go something like this:

1. GR flashbacks of Katje’s ancestor, Franz van der Groov, on Mauritius (1750s)
2. M&D (1761–69, 1786)
3. ATD and then the flashback sections of V interleaved, leading up to the prewar sections of GR (1893–1944)
4. the bulk of GR (1944–1945)
5. the rest of V (1951–52)
6. L49 (±1965)
7. the middle of Vineland (±1969)
8. (Inherent Vice (1971))
9. the L.A. coda to GR (±1973)
10. the beginning and end of Vineland (1984)
11. (Bleeding Edge (2001))

[Note, 5 July 2020: I have inserted Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, neither of which had been published when I first wrote this post.]

I highly recommend this review. It is spoilerish, if that’s a concern as you read through Against The Day yourself. This is exactly how it feels to trawl and drift through the book:

There is no narrator quite like Pynchon. The other evening I was up late with this book and it hit me, there in the deep quiet after everyone had gone to bed, that he’s really most like an all-night DJ, spinning his favorites, talking about them, riffing on this and that and not really caring too hard who’s listening. But like the best of those DJs, sometimes what comes out is so beautiful that your heart just jumps right into your throat.

We have been Netflixing Monty Python’s Flying Circus over the last few weeks, and it has been a fascinating experience to come into contact once again with something so formative for me. Apropos of my earlier comments about the two forms of comedy, I have been paying special attention to the things I am laughing at. It tends to be one of these: satire, slapstick, absurdism, music, or archeology.

By archeology, I mean rediscovering the source of some verbal signature or other that I had long since internalized. (“So that’s where I got it!”)

By music I mean when the previous three elements (“satire, slapstick, absurdism”) are harmonized. A perfect example of this is a moment in the Killer Joke sketch, when there is newsreel footage of Chamberlain holding up a piece of paper; the voice-over is talking about how this new Killer Joke is the culmination of “Europe’s pre-war joke.” Peace in our time, indeed. What a joke.

The moment passes quickly in the Killer Joke sketch, and it’s one that lesser comedians would have set as the cornerstone for the whole sketch. But if you’re composing a polyphonic work, no single voice can be principal for long. The “pre-war joke” is a deft harmony between satire and absurdism, helping to balance these with the slapstick of, say, the German soldiers laughing to death and falling out of the trees.

Well, it is finished. After a 12-hour marathon yesterday, I completed the last volume of Á la recherche du temp perdu. I’m still a bit dazzled at the moment, not to mention more than a little exhausted. It may be some time before I can post anything resembling a debrief or final essay. For the moment, I will say that it was extremely rewarding, and that it is a profound work on every level — in its exquisite details, its discursive meanderings, its macrocosmic themes and ideas — which has changed, permanently, how I engage the world and myself.

Now, what’s next. Do you have to ask?

Okay, so Pynchon’s newest is now listed at Amazon as having 1120 pages, rather than the 992 as previously reported.

I finished MD. It was magnificent. Once Mason & Dixon begin the work of drawing the Line, the story takes several staggering turns, involving (among many other things) various nested fictions, not unlike The Saragossa Manuscript. There has only been a handful of books that, when I finish them, I have a nearly uncontrollable urge to start over again from the beginning. A Room of One’s Own was one; Fitzgerald’s Odyssey another; Walden of course; Moby-Dick. And now Mason & Dixon.

But instead, I have gone back to In Search of Lost Time. The main problem that I was having was, it turns out, with the translation of Sodom & Gomorrah. You will not be surprised if I tell you I have quite a bit of patience for shall we say thick prose, but S&G was turgid, convoluted, plodding… So I skimmed through the synopsis at the end, and moved on to Parts 5 and 6, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, bound together in one volume. And it is the Proust I remember from Guermantes and especially from Young Girls.

I’m sure I can be done with the last one thousand pages of Proust not too long after Against the Day is released. And it’s only 1120 pages long: how hard can it be?

We are staying home today, and we will not turn on the radio, the tv, or the ringers on our phones. It was a crime against humanity, not against some culturally contingent economic theory. Security derives from universal liberty. I am free only so long as everyone else enjoys the same freedom. I live in a country of drooling morons who have forgotten this. (Liberty is expensive, and is often not worth the trouble: people don’t seem to value it. Let’s take it all away and see if anyone misses it. Frogs in a pot of water, the heat rising very slowly.) The only moral or social code I would want to see imposed on all humanity would be the one that allows me to pursue my own quiet life and grants all others the same liberty. Do what you will, but harm none; the rest is bureaucracy. (I know, I know: I am caught in one intractable contradiction after another.)

I wake enraged, and retire in despair. I didn’t know the state of queasy disappointment could be compounded so, and sustained: weeks have turned to months, months stretching to years. Criminals, liars, fools. I bite my tongue; I can think of nothing to say but invective. If I do speak, it will be with a blade unsheathed, burning cold, indifferent to whom it may cut. I can only save myself if others wish to drown.

The casual brutality with which we handle each other: how did we fall into such habits? how deep does our fear run, and what exactly are we all so afraid of? There is, after all, no deity to fear, and the natural universe is lifeless, insensate, wholly incapable of malice. There is only us.

Are we really so pathetic that we are scared of ourselves? Perhaps. I know that my own fear of humans runs deep; there is very little difference between my subway companions and the unstable berserker in repose in the corner over there. Their differences are a matter of degree, not kind. New York didn’t teach me that: the Minneapolis highways did; the playground; the backyard.

I cannot measure how deeply I have been betrayed. I didn’t need help learning how not to trust but I have now learned that lesson again, again, again. Trust, like attention, is precious currency, not to be paid out lightly.

This new day is crisp, blue; leaves once green are now sage and dry in the breeze.