Well, I’m still not entirely sure of these but it’s not looking like tons of progess will be made, so I’m going to serialize them. These are three eulogies. They bear no purposeful resemblence to any person, real or fictional.

I was drinking a designer root beer the other day that ties its product to wellbeing and a generally sunny outlook. I looked under the bottlecap and found some text. This was a statement that, according to the small print, was “swiped from actual fortune cookies.” I’m not sure what kind of authenticity this is supposed to imply.

The bottlecap/cookie said “You will be successful in your work.”

While kind of trite sounding in a cookie fortune, it actually seemed to make sense in the context presented to me. Any person willing to spend $1.75 on a soft drink is probably already on top. I’m guessing that in the wider view of things, I’ll probably come out above average.

In Killing Yourself to Live Chuck Klosterman makes exactly one comment about architecture, but it’s kind of interesting. He says this:

“…I have no interest whatsoever in looking at any of the tourist attractions in [Washington D.C.]. I guess I don’t understand what such things are supposed to teach us. For example… the Washington Monument is big, and I suppose it could be classified as impressive or noble… but what is the 550-foot masonry structure supposed to tell me? What is it supposed to make me understand? Am I supposed to spacifically think about George Washington? Because I didn’t. Am I supposed to be reminded that I am in the nation’s capital? Because I already knew that. Am I supposed to feel patriotic? Because I don’t understand how an inanimate object has any relationship to how I feel about living in my country… what does the Washington Monument speak to? Man’s potential to master concrete? Man’s desire to overcome gravity? I really don’t get it. It’s just . . . tall.”

The first crisis I thought of here was one of representation– how are images from a dead past supposed to speak to someone who derives all symbolic meaning from rock music lyrics? And in any case, what was so Egyptian about GW in the first place? D.C. is already an anomoly, an “American” monument designed by a Frenchman in a strict reimagined Roman classicism. The obleisk is, to Klosterman, kind of like the background to that awful Will Smith Song “wild wild west”– a sample of a cover of a standard for a movie that was a paraphrase of a television show.

But if anything, this is liberating. The obelisk, so ruthlessly torn from context, is now a kind of primal form. Yes, it is tall. Yes, it is white. Yes, it has two red lights on top of it. Ultimately the Washington Monument is a symbol of itself, instantly recognisable and a powerful organiser of space.

In fact, the true crisis here is not one of symbolic meaning but the purpose of monuments themselves. Klosterman believes that a monument has to be didactic in order to be useful– in another part of the book he says

“[A friend] always wants me to visit him in Arizona so that he can show me the Grand Canyon, but I know I’ll never go. . . I have no desire to see the physical manifestation of erosion. The Grand Canyon is just an attractive accident; it has no inherent meaning. I’d be far more impressed if a collection of civil engineers used dynamite and laser beams to construct a perfect replication of the Grand Canyon on a one-to-one scale; that would show mankind’s potential to master nature. . . would speak to man’s desire to overcome 5 million years of adversity.”

“Inherent meaning” to Klosterman is thus tied to a specific implied history that is not subject to debate. This may very well be true. But inherent meaning is very difficult to fabricate; a monument like the one described is really just a monument to itself. No convential monument, save perhaps ancient battlefields and great works of civil engineering, have any inherent meaning. What Klosterman is actually talking about is the failure of monuments to specifially direct an understanding of their form.

I think this is misguided. In its early history any monument will serve its purpose, but successful monuments always act as a conduit for the healing processes of history– they are supposed to aid in understanding and reevaluation. Thus any good monument will hasten its own obselesence. And the real afterlife of a monument is not only to remind people of its namesake, but to act as an urban fragment, a magnet for the production of new memory. The Washington Monument is only nominally about our first president; it’s also about people’s trips to the mall, senators jogging by, and views from the top. The point where it becomes mute is the point at which it is reborn.

I’m calling for a general ceasing of self-awareness. From here on out, we’re going to stop navel gazing and everyone is going to find something, latch on to it, and follow it to the end without pausing to be critical of the path. When we talk about our progress, there will be no snickering or admittance of how trite or hackneyed our actions have been, only agreement or disagreement. Apologies will only be said to other people, and only for things we are truly sorry for. Nothing will be implied.

The problem with kicking the ass of postmodernism is that one is not allowed to be aware that they are doing it. This makes it hard to gloat.

It remains difficult to figure out which side is having more fun.

I recently went to the Willy Ronis show at the Hotel de Ville in Paris. He’s a photojournalist that had been working in that city since the 1930’s until just a few years ago. I entered the packed exhibit with a cynical attitude– in a city that is essentially a museum of itself, what could be more popular than photographs of the real thing? It seemed that everyone in there was 50 or 60 years old, desperately searching for images to recollect the city life that they knew.

In reality, however, what was proven to me was slightly different. Since the photographs presented a continuous history of the last 70 years, what was emphasized was more the continuity and similarity of urban life. It was difficult at times to tell the difference between 1950 and 1980. And the early color work he did immediately postwar has the effect of recontextualizing the late 40’s as today, without really straining.

So maybe the quai d’Austurlitz and Bercy are not quite so dirty and industrial. Belleville is more sterile and less rustic, and Les Halles is a hellish supermall instead of graceful ironwork markets. What was suggested in these photographs was not that urban life has been fragmented, but that it was always so– moments of real life always exist in pockets; that’s why they’re so intimate and immediate. The true enemy of this life is not modernity or ubiquity, it’s ennui and fear– as long as people are out, interested in their city and actively claiming pieces of it, photo opportunities will abound.

After I spend three or four hours picking up my siblings from the airport, it is time to leave. I pack a backpack with book, music, camera, shorts, jeans, swimsuit, three shirts, two pair socks, sandals, and shoes. We get in the car at about 3 pm– I cleverly avoid driving– and we’re off. The ride is the same as it ever was: ks10 to eudora than through the small town, dumping into hilly beanfields and the back of lawrence, with the municipal airport and concrete tourist teepees. Then onto the turnpike and the speed limit ratchets up to 70. We stop halfway and stretch, at a turnout where the restrooms and picnic areas are tiny semicircular bunkers built into a tall hill. Then a dollar toll and we’re out, on abilene’s lazy grid, and to the house.

When we arrive we unpack into the diamond motel (kate jon + I have the honeymoon suite, which was apparently flash-frozen in 1977 and only thawed for our arrival). Then mexican food with the early arrivals, followed by catching up. We end the night easily at 1:45 on my grandfather’s hanging yellow and white spring chairs, talking politics and philosophy and eating out of a bucket of cheese balls the size of my head while swigging beer (bruce and joey had stolen about half of our stash that night. I’m still sore).

The next morning involves a headache. My treatment involves skipping my shower and drinking a gigantic styrofoam cup of coke that kate has picked up from the gas station across the street. Jon and I get sucked into a terrible movie about pro skateboarding and barely roll into the house early enough to get some fairly nasty Subway sandwiches for lunch. Then it’s time for wiffleball at John’s, so we all pile into cars and head over. For some reason I can actually bat this year, and double and triple at my first two at-bats, although I lose a bit of toenail and get a gigantic splinter running the bases in bare feet. My fielding is still terrible.

When we all get hot enough we move to John’s new pool, which kind of blows me away- there are no straight lines at all in the entire plan, and he’s done it all by himself with his family, including inch-tiling the entire bowl. Score one for John. He, as usual, takes it all quietly, although maybe a little less so than when he built the gazebo or the fireplace or his Greene and Greene arts & crafts staircase. Oh, and he never makes drawings.

The chicken dinner sits poorly this year. I’m worried about sparklerettes, which has by now become mandatory, thanks to Kate. In the absense of sparklers this year we’re planning another skit, this one based around female wrestling. Jack’s name is Jackie O’Nasty. Enough said. Bruce, tanked since noon, is scripted to win, wearing a tiny girl’s bikini that is actually worse on him than complete nudity.

I’ve shotgunned a few beers to get to the point where crossdressing in front of my entire extended family is acceptable. We do this in the shed, drinking Bruce’s stash, white cans of Old Style. That is an awesome name for a beer. After the festivities I’m informed that there are three cans of Old Style left, and Jon Sam and I partake, in the pool shed with the door closed. It is at this time that we discover Bruce’s bottle of Southern Comfort. The SoCo tastes like bubble gum and the pepsi chaser is doing nothing. At some point, we either invite Bruce in or he sniffs us out, and he fixes everything by changing the chaser to a half-drank can of, guess what, Old Style. Within an hour half of my extended family is in the shed. We are loud and drunk and happy. The night ends for me when I leave to vomit– I had known this as almost a certainity since my first shot of SoCo. I run into a few walls behind the house and puke so hard I fall into the gravel alley, nearly falling on Carolina, who is peeing in the bushes. We laugh.

I wake up the next morning around 9and I actually feel okay. I’m dizzy, my arm is scratched up, there’s a big bruise on my ass, I’m sunburned and it hurts when I laugh, but I feel pretty good. I add all of this up in my head and realize that I’m still drunk. Quick shower and off to the rockets.

The actual launchings on Sunday morning were kind of boring, with the exception of the motor mount on grandpa’s winged beast breaking loose and a G size rocket engine doing spirals into the hay. It didn’t get too close to anyone so we thought it was funny. I’m still a little drunk, sitting next to Carolina and talking about the future, drinking coffee and stretching my neck. Maybe it’s just that I lost my sunglasses, but that morning colors are more vivid, people are more present, and sounds are delicious. Everything is aces. I’m mumbling silly existential bromides when suddenly I can feel it coming. The alcohol is leaving my system and is leaving behind tiny screaming vacuums in my brain and stomach. At this point a third cousin (they never seem to belong) sets off fireworks (don’t they know this is for rockets, not kiddie stuff) that make high-pitched screaming noises for 30 seconds straight. It hits me right below the solar plexus, and I don’t recover until I’m back at home, in bed, on my stomach, with the coverlet over my head and the windows shuttered.

I’m attempting to get psyched for a big project, so I’m going to prattle a bit.

“Do you want to go to a movie?”

“I dunno, mom.”

“I don’t think there’s anything good out. Have you heard anything?”

“Well, this is unlikely, but the New York Times really likes that new Batman movie.”

“Oh, yeah I heard that,”

“But I take everything I hear from them with a grain of salt.”

“I don’t think there’s anything good on… I might see that Mr. and Mrs. Smith movie… that’s probably really bad but I could see it.”

“Yeah… probably not art… but anyway… whatever you think.”

I’m not sure when I became terrified of influencing my mother. Nevertheless, I am now unable to make a statement without qualifying it into neutrality. I am unable to state a preference without an addendum, and dissenting information instantly is buried under ellipses and mumbles.

It has something to do with impressionability. My mother genuflects regularly to the Cult of Youth and Buzz, while I am off reading a b-list Fowles book whilst listening to T-Rex and perhaps flipping channels between AMC and USA. I wear a lot of grey undershirts like they were meant to be on the outside. Not that I’m immune– I wear overpriced suede slip-on active lifestyle footwear and check pitchfork media about twice a day, even though it’s only updated five times a week. I like art. All of which makes me a source to my mother. In the scene of high-class suburban Kansas City, while the rest of the town is willfully ignorant (perhaps returning the favor) about what happens in New York and LA, my mother works on scoring a new pair of Campers or knowing the words to the new Shins song so she can sing along in her Volvo– maybe a step and a half behind 50 year olds in Soho, but running as fast as she can.

Now, I love my mother. I wouldn’t change a thing. But I am easily mortified, and my definite aversion to seeming like I give a shit whether people like my shoes or my sound (I do, I do) makes it difficult to have a conversation that references fashion, art, literature, music, or pop culture. I tend to bend the conversation towards the weather, politics, and the squirrels in the back yard. Kansas politics is arcane and depressing, and it has been sunny for a week straight, so there has been a lot of rodent-oriented discussion. Or, I can talk about architecture. Most of my prattle about buildings dissapears into some merciful hole in the air, usually without comment.

My secret plan is to make her think I’m dull, without becoming dull.

Yeah, six month hiatus… can’t say there’s much of an excuse either.

I’m visiting my parents right now. They’re unbelievably enthusiastic about my being here. It’s kind of infantilizing in a way; eating dinner with them every night, going to movies, feeling embarassed. My girlfriend and I went to a downtown gallery opening and I found myself walking 10 steps behind them, pretending I was on my own.

In any case I went to a jazz festival last night. With my parents. I have only a passing knowledge of contemporary jazz, and my parents are even less interested. Given my inability to have a normal conversation with my parents about anything but the weather and maybe politics, this was the perfect chance for my mind to wander. These two ideas arose:

1. The possibility of creating a new patriotoism around the fact that our country invented blues, bluegrass, jazz, rock, and rap music. And still is the foremost world power at all of them. No, really, this is amazing. I can’t say my ancestors had anything to do with it, but the strange mix of freedom and opression in this country has managed to create most of the great pop music in the western world. Maybe I’m just being Amerocentric, but most European and Asian pop music sounds manneristic and self-conscious. In a bad way, like they’re playing by someone else’s rules.

2. Most of the people there weren’t actually hearing the music. Jazz is so prevalent, especially in its “lite” variety, that the basic tropes of improvisation have been internalized by most americans. When I actually bothered to think about what was being played, I was impressed by how good some of the stuff was, who it reminded me of. But if I stopped paying attention, it might as well have been coming out of an elevator. They might as well have put up a big sign that said “imagine soothing jazz music coming from here.”

And boy do I hate the word jazz. Jazz. Most labels for music are a bit goofy. Blues. Rock and Roll. Hip Hop. Crunk. But jazz is the worst. Jazz. You have to enunciate until you spit the “j” and the tail rolls out on infinite sustain: JHazzzzzzzzzzzz. ugh.

“Sneaking out” was a phrase his mother used to describe suspicious activity in the dark. Despite its origin, this phrase now defined the loose and shifting realm of stolen night time to Marcus. Sneaking was a fair description of the adrenaline and silence of car-pushing, door-closing, and stair-climbing. And the rest of the night was definitely Out. Sneaking out was done so often now that it had become his primary life, with school and day being a hazily remembered back side spent in anticipation, writing letters, obeying rules and napping.

It’s getting dark now, slight orange and red to the west spreading over to the east and becoming deep blue-violet. The highway is a line bisecting this, I-35 going north northeast, bowing slightly, pulled by the city’s gravity. The highway is an extruded no-man’s land, lofted above everyday life, deadly. He went to New York one time on a band trip and found the whole city occupied. Not even an alleyway to escape the dense crush of eyes and ears and feet covering every square inch with gum and trash and spit and view. He found the most interesting spots the cracks between boarded up windows, the sliver of dark just visible beyond the curve of the subway tunnel, the areas no-one can see, spaces that live alone with themselves, the rest of the city a floodlit exterior, occupied and known.

Marcus likes the shoulder of the highway, gravel and weeds untouched like the moon, likes to stop, wants to stop, but the minute he loses his velocity his power is gone and the other cars can see him, strobelit, naked. Velocity is the frontier of the highway, the texture of the road elongated by speed into a barrier that nothing can cross, a million cars a million isolated pockets of air drifting in space.

They used to go out at three or four on K-10, and pick an offramp, seldom used and isolated, turn left and drive down a country road, perpendicular and away from this extruded civilized frontier, into nothing farmland. They would turn out the lights and drift slowly through clouds of insects with the windows open, no longer a vehicle but part of the landscape now, a moving component counterweighting the delicate trees and fences, ditches and grass that stretched out for miles, rolling beneath the wheels. Everything was the same color, a graphite that reflected like pewter and fell away to infinity. A firefly would strike the windshield and leave a green fluorescent smear that would slowly fade to shining grey. At some point you would have to stop, because the only way back is the way you came, retracing your exact path, being pulled back home as if by a string, by gravity. But the stops were the best part of the trip, the infinite point of rest at the apex of the pendulum’s swing, spent in the backseat.

In the dark, all space is negative, the void filled at points by headlights and billboards and rhythmic yellow and black lines, the occasional green roadsign fluorescing into existence in the corner. One is supposed to pay attention to billboards, but more interesting is the space below and around, scaffolding and eaves, with shadows of every imaginable shape. Marcus has a friend that explores this interstitial space, finds clearings and vistas and overhangs and long winding stairways, with inches of dust and soot and spraypaint everywhere. Spraypaint is dust thrown out of a can with glue to stick it to a wall. Some warehouse somewhere is filled with barrels filled with color.

One of these places is dead center of three monolithic silver office towers, a fountain and steps and a few sickly plants, up a few feet, like an altar for necktied sacrifices. It’s busy enough during the day but in the middle of the night it’s alive by itself- the water is still on and light music still plays from hidden grilles, music just for crickets and empty cigarette packaging. Marcus likes spaces like this, like the highway, better at night, with yellow and blue sodium lighting that vibrates only barely, adding waver and strobe to everything, and a hum that is always just inside of your ear, to the back and right.

The car is moving in a river of positive space created by the road and light, a puddled space that spreads to enclose all available road, sidewalks and parking lots and garages, the asphalt and the blueyellow overhead light symbiotic. From overhead you don’t see the light directly, only the rounded grids of illumination, the darkest areas complete voids. One never sees people or even cars moving in the lit asphalt lots, everything is arrested by light, frozen and static, watched. As a child Marcus used to think of vision being like beams of seeing coming out from his eyes, grabbing objects and making him aware to them. But it’s the opposite—his eyes are passive receivers of the controlling beams thrown by hooded towers.

Locations were always paired by a journey, ends of a string. Home to diner, diner to her place, out of the car hidden across the street and through the door to her bed, making the smallest of noises as moving parts unstuck and stuck again. But it was the string that kept memory, the journey the shape of the car’s interior stretched across fifty miles, tiny orange buttons red dials and the white headlights turning into glowing threads that follow every curve and bump in the road. And everything else charcoal. The car was an aging BMW near to death, with round headlights that were identifiable from two blocks away, as he waited on the corner in a chilled sweatshirt.

The highway splits away to the left and he follows, pulled by the dive into a deep crevice unnaturally vertical, dynamited. The road curves and gives way to another notch and this time he goes right, perhaps north, now cut loose of the infinite grid of Cartesian reality. It is dark here, streetlightless, and he turns the stereo off to better hear the car as it displaces the air, creating eddies and winds. Suddenly, it becomes a street with houses and shops and delicate curbs coded with parking information. Detail is revealed in the lightest of grey shading, the neighborhood the lightest of pencil tracings on black paper.

He stops here, pulls into a diagonal striped space, a notch for his car. This is the point of rest before swinging back. He stops because you always stop. He gets out, feeling the cut of the wind unaugmented by grille or glass. The transfer is from a cocoon of warmth and quiet white noise to one of cold and almost silence, with a faint whistle.

The street goes like this: window-sidewalk-curb-parking-asphalt-parking-curb-sidewalk-door. The street is a room open at the top, traveling for miles in each direction. He starts to walk in the direction he has been traveling, as if pushed by his car’s former velocity. The chill is felt on his cheeks and eyes and ears. The road is so deserted he begins peopling it with memories, friends and people from school, remembering previous drives and how they ended. The memory is a piece of steel that keeps his spine stiff, gently humming at the back of his skull, pushing his head rigidly forward. The memory is numb.

Holy shit it is cold, his coat feels like saran wrap, and thought is impossible. He gets back in the car but does not turn it on. He and the car are the same color as everything else. His coat and the car are thin carapaces that mimic the street and sky, layers in an infinite cocoon, of which he is a homogenous core. He pushes gently and turns and the car shakes alive, producing color and sound. Heat and light and movement, all related in an intangible way.

Marcus grasps the lever and maneuvers the car to face back home. He has a good idea where he is and the journey is a glowing string in front of him, a channel of vistas revealed in gentle curve. Now, with a destination, expedience takes hold and the whole route makes itself known at once, a clear shape in his mind.

Someday these trips will make sense; they’ll have a purpose and a place and everything will work together, he’ll be like an arrow in flight, fired at a high trajectory but uncertain in its target.

Back onto the highway, like a rail this time, why do people even need to be here, you just need to keep the wheel steady and the pedal down. The lights sweep the inside of his car rhythmically, his car motionless with waves of light cascading.

There will be a home, a center that is his, dents that are his, scratches created by his hand. The door will make a noise that is his and he will know this. This is a city that is big but not intimidating, cold in the winter and hot in the summer, dry when he wants it and with huge broadleaf trees reaching towards windows.

When he was a kid the places he was driven were isolated pockets of concrete-plastic newness in a sea of farmland. Then one day he climbed a hill and saw felled trees for a mile in every direction, curved streets and cul-de-sacs already etched in the ground. The huge grids of farmland fragmented and preserved in pockets, recreated as a backdrop for picture windows, only visible from a single angle, like a diorama.

There is some adult place out there with the same raw excitement as the spaces beyond his childhood back fence, and he will find it, show it to his children, a mediated frontier that is not alone but alive, created somehow by occupation. And all around them the grids of asphalt containing these pockets, waiting.

He crests a hill and passes a low rock wall and then he is home, through the big door for the car and then a smaller one, into the ticking woodframed home quiet. Marcus doesn’t want to stop, everything has ended so quickly and he still has some potential energy to spend, his mind racing to compensate for his still body.

There is a schism between the life he likes and the life available, a schism of quality. There is nothing of that childhood space, that stolen time, in any job or home he knows, but it has to be out there, there is something real waiting in the just beyond his view, and it’s only a matter of time before he finds it. He can see his life from a satellite, the regular grids with a twisting path among them, and it’s amazing how much is flattened, how most of what matters is an invisible texture from this scale.

In the house, beyond the sound of the house cooling and shrinking, there is white noise, air pushed off of cars a half a mile away, transmitted across the valley and through the cracks in the window to his ears. He knows what is out of view, over the fence, it is schematically clear to him because he has been there, and will go there tomorrow, after he sleeps.

Marcus starts the drive by a right and then a left, a quick lateral jog that maintains a straight southern course. The streets here are compass-true, each crossroads making two lines that perfectly quarter the earth. Longitude is not the same as latitude, to understand the horizontal bands one has to tilt their head until it is parallel with the equator—twenty two degrees, understanding this infinite plane that slices the earth like an orange, revealing the fact that this entire town was created at some bizarre angle to Cartesian reality.

The drive begins with large houses on small lots, crowded together, maximum isolation, maximum comfort, maximum efficiency, cost completing this equation, the envelope of each house swelling and contracting until an optimum figure is reached, freezing it in its thin stone and wood frame. Traveling south the houses get smaller and the land gets bigger, as if each structure bleeds itself to create more space. There are more hills out here—or maybe you just see them more readily, as the land takes control over structure and yellow fields surpass green trees and grass under the blue-white spotted sky. The air is cool and the wind is light, and if he puts the heater on the windows and sunroof can stay open to the air.

In a satellite photograph a car is a tiny dot, maybe you can tell the color but not any real detail, not how old the occupant is or if they have friends in the back seat. Driving has the same perspective to Marcus, everything flattened and reduced to coordinates and flash-frozen at every present moment. Driving was a series of thin slices, like that fat criminal in his highschool biology book that they’d cut like deli meat and splayed out on glass. On the highway at night he would pass by a hotel, and if you looked at the right moment, knew the sightlines, you would see lobby coke machines on every floor out the windows for an instant, the building bisected by a dashed red line. Driving was about tangents, the orbit of a satellite was made of an infinite series of straight lines, with the Earth always pulling at a right angle. The way an object changes shape as you go by it, everything lining up for an instant and then spinning away, it’s perspectival moment spent and gone.

He looks to the side as a bean field passes by, the field opening up as the planting’s row lines point into his eyes, and growing more opaque to the sides until it is a thick yellow blur. It is a moiré that is the result of roundness, light falling at from every angle, but all of the light his eyes receive was pointed straight at his pupils, a sphere of particles bombarding his face at every possible now. The roof of the Volkswagon is reflecting the sun, creating a vertical column of light at a constant angle from the two o’clock sun, perhaps briefly illuminating the interior of some passenger plane, a cloud, or the moon.

The streets change surface from smooth asphalt to a rougher, potholed variety, one without markings and curbs, and this gives way to gravel. One moves to avoid the dust that one creates, constantly running from a white cloud in your rear window. There is a crunching sound from the tires, and Marcus likes to gun the gas and jerk the wheel to send the rear of the car swinging back and forth, until things turn uncomfortable. He stops for a train and watches it go past, slower than his car but massive beyond belief, and long string of inertia, its contents heavy and elemental. He can see in between each train for a moment, as the linkage passes in front of the car. If he took a picture at night, holding the shutter open, the whole train would become blur, semitransparent in the middle, revealing the road that points infinitely South.

Marcus lives in a house that goes like this: street-yard-wall-house-yard-fence-trees-ditch-path-stream-path-trees-field-highway-street-hill-horizon. Sitting in front of his rear window he feels like a suburban talk-show host, an animated diorama with tiny cars and trees behind him, framed and finite. As a child he could see the cars on the highway, especially at night, when he had to go to bed with people still rocketing by, audible even under the covers out of view inside his bed. The highway pushing sound over the gully, through his walls, around corners and deep into his ears, keeping him wide awake late, staring at his glowing red clock, waiting for it to have been long enough to get up and look. Occasionally his parents would take that road and he would desperately look out the window for a glimpse of his house through the trees, the house staring back, diminished and monochromatic.

On a dirt shoulder, it is time to stop. He turns the key and the car rattles to a close, shuddering gently as the aluminum cylinders transmit their force to the frame. The car is a decaying Volkswagon of middle age, red and sagging. Every mechanism in the car seems provisional, voluntary—the clutch or the radio or the seat belt all have an equal chance of working at any one time. The car had survived water, heat, cold, and time, expanding and shrinking until it lost any produced monolithic quality, but was merely a loose matrix of glass, vinyl, and metal. The car was alive, had lost the quality of product and had been consumed by the chaos and decay of the world around it. Gravel stuck in the tires and tiny flecks of white primer showing where the hood had been struck. He periodically filled the car with clear golden oil which it then quickly turned black and proceeded to slowly distribute over the road as he drove. Transmission fluid is a greasy red and radiator fluid, antifreeze, is a smooth neon green. There is water in antifreeze—water in his car.

His insomniac childhood nights, spent staring coldly at the blue/white wallpaper or creating patterns in the textured ceiling three feet from his face, lofted in the dark, his brother gone from the bed below to another room. Sometimes his father would come home late, the headlights briefly creating a sweeping illumination on the ceiling and walls as the car mounting the curb. The light always moved across his room in exactly the same way. His father would come upstairs and Marcus would pretend stiffly to sleep, modulating his breathing as he recieved a sandpaper kiss goodnight. The room always the same dark blue and grey, with the same warm light from behind the door, sneaking out of the cracks.

He stops for a second, enjoys the absence of sound, the void a negative shape, cast, the mold created by constant engine and gravel noise broken suddenly and gone. There are trees along the south edge of this westerly road, and to the other side a smooth bean field. His white cloud has overtaken him. This is not lost enough, and because he is alone and young, Marcus says it out loud: “this is not lost enough.” He isn’t trying to get lost, but it sounds good, like a movie. His voice sounds thin and small stuck between the dust, sun, and car. He gets back in, shakes the Volkswagon awake and turns around, east, to find the highway.