The man's cart was loaded with finds.  Bags draping over neatly stacked.  If it was a competition you'd think he's good at that.  He parked the cart near a knee wall separating parking lots.  He dug through a dumpster.  He let the scratch-off lottery tickets fall to the ground after quick scratches and peering at each in the predawn mix of pole and store light.  Sitting on the knee wall man and cart blurred together in a plinth.

  It was June 2024.  Over the past four months there'd been a change, some sort of cultural shift turning entrances of fast food joints overrun by "funky" into landscaped boundaried territory.  And there was fringe.  You could see people in the treelines of highway ramps.  Backpackers, cart people, clearly disturbed, poor things, people thinking, some saying out loud waiting for a light to change.  Like castles of other times now museums, America has a feel of disparity--what it was/what it is.

  In the mid-1990's geographers talked about Eastern Europe in similar fashion.  The break up of the Soviet Union was redefining the outlines; more porous boundaries; no longer part of

But there.