I was at work late tonight, and then walked home along Commonwealth Avenue, rather than the heavily-trucked straight-home route. My sneakers moved kind of slipper-like in the dark, the leaves on the ground looked like raptor paw-prints and the loungey park statues were easily regarded as living. Two months ago my brain was all Dead Milkmen; with autumn now, it's totally not.

����You know all those times of lurching up in bed, heart-attacked, gasping and stricken? I think that happens to everybody sometime, but we don't really think about what it means. I don't mean what nightmares "mean", but rather what it means that we have that wrenching category of storm inside us; and what is it doing in there all the time that a nightmare isn't opening a hole to let it kick us in the chest? We ignore this most of the time, but the stuff we get into--that we invent, the real and unreal, the talking to ourselves, the holding people's hands, the closing our eyes, the hoping, the making of stories--might be all there is that's truly fearsome. I don't want to call it psychology.

����Last week I went to meet Erin in Portland after thirteen years. That was something like raising the dead. A sweet 70s comedy kind of raising the dead. Driving home I started to think about the worlds under people's surfaces--hot volcanic undersea places with strange chemical compositions and unexpected ecological mechanisms--whose vibrations across our wet eyeballs and pink skin result in the particular strings of words out of our mouths and particular pants across our bums.

����It's kind of a shame when there's no activity--no lava flow or weird calcium deposits, no explosive steam-blows.


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