Growing Up North Of San Francisco, I

The Desire To Go Home That Is A Desire To Be Whole, To Know Where You Are, To Be The Point Of Intersection Of All The Lines Drawn Through All The Stars, To Be The Constellation-maker And The Center Of The World, That Center Called Love. To Awaken From Sleep, To Rest From Awakening, To Tame The Animal, To Let The Soul Go Wild, To Shelter In Darkness And Blaze With Light, To Cease To Speak And Be Perfectly Understood.

Solitude In The City Is About The Lack Of Other People Or Rather Their Distance Beyond A Door Or Wall, But In Remote Places It Isn’t An Absence But The Presence Of Something Else, A Kind Of Humming Silence In Which Solitude Seems As Natural To Your Species As To Any Other, Words Strange Rocks You May Or May Not Turn Over.

Las Vegas Suggests That The Thirst For Places, For Cities And Gardens And Wilderness, Is Unslaked, That People Will Still Seek Out The Experience Of Wandering About In The Open Air To Examine The Architecture, The Spectacles, And The Stuff For Sale, Will Still Hanker After Surprises And Strangers. That The City As A Whole Is One Of The Most Pedestrian-unfriendly Places In The World Suggests Something Of The Problems To Be Faced, But That Its Attraction Is A Pedestrian Oasis Suggests The Possibility Of Recovering The Spaces In Which Walking Is Viable.

When I Think About, Say, 1995, Or Whever The Last Moment Was Before Most Of Us Were On The Internet And Had Mobile Phones, It Seems Like A Hundred Years Ago. ... Time Passed In Fairly Large Units, Or At Least Not In Milliseconds And Constant Updates. A Few Hours Wasn't Such A Long Time To Go Between Moments Of Contact With Your Work, Your People Or Your Trivia.

When Someone Doesn't Show Up, The People Who Wait Sometimes Tell Stories About What Might Have Happened And Come To Half Believe The Desertion, The Abduction, The Accident. Worry Is A Way To Pretend That You Have Knowledge Or Control Over What You Don't--and It Surprises Me, Even In Myself, How Much We Prefer Ugly Scenarios To The Pure Unknown. Perhaps Fantasy Is What You Fill Up Maps With Rather Than Saying That They Too Contain The Unknown.