Chapter 1 

It is a city square dominated by two buildings. A drama is played out. A young woman wants her lover but he is too busy; he has only money and sees her as a vascular exercise. She has caught up with him in her car. She gives him tax forms and credit cards, bills from the furniture store. He laughs and drives away, sad later, but that afternoon gleeful and happy.

It is the exact moment the flatulent businessman crosses the bridge for the third time in the day. He cusses. He drives an old, souless car with boxes piled in the back, his products to sell in the city.

The people haphazardly throw things onto the highway as if protesting the lack of permanency.

Oh clear the way for a man who knows everything. He has a notepad and looks like he has some revengeful tale up his sleeve. It is a pissant parade that carries the future on its back. There is an old man in an old hotel watching a puppet show.

Games that treat us like children no longer delight us.

Games that cannot compete with the traffic of the daily meanderings.

A young man is a memory of wild and riotous times had in empty, venerable buildings surrounded by poisoned air.

"Oh? Time move forward please. It is a block of stone pushed by the dead until it is upon us too. We see it approach and then, later, our shoulders are on the block and we are fastened to it with those who we have despised."

Oh city to re-moralize the writer! The blessings of streets that permit a mind to wheel and deal with itself in the overcast of Sunday afternoons! The smell of bitter grass while reading 11th century poets! Looking for the wonderful modern agora's where truth is spoken or, at least, the lies are laughed at. Berkeley is a pyramid that flips itself from head to base with a furtive grin.

David Eide
January 24, 2014