The octopus, or,

 This is complicated thinking and not just for young people.

  Real, Heart of Darkness type stuff.

  Our country, western tradition's core.  It's how we survive the nations ascending and descending.

  It's not burning each other up as witches.  And not trading Capitalism for corruption and crime.

  It's classic tales of new people per diem, confrontation, and engagement as collisions occur in the universe.  It's start-ups and adoptions and bramble, oh my!

  How's that working for you?  The question sort of echoed and barely made it into my been-at-a-concert ears.  New shoes, wrecked.  Memorial Day white pants, blotched with red wine and dirt samples of contemporary culture.  Apparently, I needed oxygen.  I'd parked my wilting self on a knee wall close to an exit but not all the way to an ocean of a parking lot.  The older couple with tanks of the stuff on pull carts broke open a crispy new lead, hose and hooked me up.

  Do you think I'm dying?

  We all dying sooner or later Missie.

  The words of the man made it over the wall.  The absence of anything and noise wall.  My brain realized the man had made great effort to push the words in the direction of me.  Me!  I'm still me!

  Don't talk, it works better, the woman patted my knee.

  I had sworn to God via my mother never to go to a Greatful Dead concert.  To date I had managed to live nineteen years of 100% truth at the end of the day.  A turn towards journalism from novel-thinking though

  At?  My father held the phone in the air for about four minutes while my mom decided if she was going to talk to me.

  Not really at.

  Near.

  Did you hear me?

  Is this long distance?  My father inquired of the collect call.

  What's this about?  An angry-sounding sibling picked up another phone and coloneled.

  Never mind.  I'll see you all someday.  Click.

  The oxygen tanks on wheels had left condensation tracks away.  The predawn sky was taking on light and cloudshapes were chunks of darker charcoal not moving very fast.

  She and then they had promised I wouldn't be a revolutionary.  I know nothing about Russia, I'd reiterated.  Berlin is not in Russia, a thickly accented person said from the front seat without turning around.

  Face half beat red from not moving.

  THERE YOU ARE LARA

  I bursted, both ends.

  She blew out a breath and without breaking eye contact threw me the sweater that had been over her briefcase arm and she said, 

  Near an airport

  Found you

  I sucked in all my breath to stop the bursting, wiped my face with the sweater and then sat on it long enough to wrap the sleeves around my waist.

  Now will you work with me?

  In the City I got a telegram from my mother:

  Your. Grounded.  Don't.  Come.  Home.  Until.  You.  Figure.  Out.  Your.  Your.  Future.  Love.  Mom.

  In the orchestra playing as the wall came down over years I played strings with Didion.

  When I bumped into an old French friend on a dancefloor in Montreal, half on purpose, and blurted out her pal-name in the flash of recognition, she made dance moves, wagging her finger, shaking her head, mouthing No, nooooo, no; hands clasped hiding the steeple, then shaking tremble, dropping arms to sides and wiggling, away.  A couple decades later people were trying to relay such times to younger people the way a grandpa will demand the wrench, god dammit, the wrench.  Just had the thing fixed, give it!!  Yep.  Now.  Here.  We are.  "Feeding the pigs together."

  It will still be cheaper here, a foreign-accented man said to me in the aisle of a home improvement store in June 2020.

  "America's promises, which Serb gunners took seriously at first, bought Sarajevans a brief reprieve.  But they also raised expectations among Bosnians that they were safe to live again.  As it turned out, the brutality of Serb political, military, and paramilitary leaders would be met with condemnation but not with the promised military intervention" (Problem, preface).

  Not a genocide then.  That was part of the big tidal plain floods all along.  And hot spot activity just splashed all over pop culture.  Outside of records' offices nothing was categorical.  Then digi-this-and-that eliminated boundaries twixt wars and revolutions and economies and "styles" like Olestra taking the healthy gut materials out of a body with the oily discharge. 

  All the coming and going without language and law enforcing place and people blurred even nation-builders into the smoking holes of 9112001.