Chapter 1 

Beyond everything else the city was a place to find that compelling thing that no one could find for you. Not family, not peers, not professors, not pets. No one could discover what was compelling for a young person's spirit but a stay in a place where no expectations came leaping from its face. I went in wanting to be a novelist but came out with a new vector. I went in wanting fame and fortune and came out clean of the troubling vanity.

There was a fall, I remember it clearly. There was a darkness swept by some alien wind. And all I knew up to that time vanished in a manner of speaking. The music, the politics, the readings, the antics of youth all disintegrated in a manner of speaking. That's when you swim to save yourself or are carried out to the eternal sea without a sound. The established ways, including publishing, lost their credibility at that point. What I had believed in youth seemed absurd. So Berkeley was a crossing of a kind buoth personal and literary.

A man can find some solace in that darkness. "Here is the anti-meaning to drive all the crap out!" It is war-like but for the speeches and collusions that take place. It took one out of the natural course of things but made even conversation problematical.

And all those who thought they knew appeared in my dreams and tried to stop me. The mechanical things be they cars or elections passed right by me with hardly a sound.

David Eide
January 24, 2014