in the few moments of my indecision I told myself that enough was enough. I was stranded in an endless sea of traffic, in the maze and mangle of streets and stoplights that I must battle and blitzkrieg through, this mess of cars and bars... somehow I think it could have been different. only five hundred years ago I might have walked over these very central, centrifugal streets and met nothing but silence and stillness; perhaps I would have walked south on where north I-35 would later be perched. I would walk the wrong way on all the one-way streets. I would be free.

enough was enough. told myself that I wanted no longer to be human if this is how humans behave, told myself that I wanted nothing more to do with a world without beauty in it, and that cared not for beauty. it had been beautiful and joyful once, when man, evolved, dropped from the trees like ripe fruit. when we merely shared the earth with everything in it.

pushkin, my parrot, is on top of my closet door, squawking, scuttling. he can only shuffle in one direction: right or left, left or right. a one-dimensional life. I look at pushkin and I feel some sort of strange empathy. 'totalitarian' culture has thrown up walls around me; now I can only move one way, follow the signs, follow the streets. my life consists of insignificant, shallow choices: paper or plastic? fries? do I turn on the television or not? before culture unrolled, the world must have seemed so big. but when something is developing, it is defined. now is what has happened. we are living in a defined, very definite place. I feel confined, constricted, as if the snake of eden has wrapped itself all around me and I am trapped. culture. but this -- this one-dimensional life, this one-directional course -- this is what we have let it all come down to: religion. this man beating this woman, the drug dealers lining too many streets in the neighborhood, women willing to sell themselves for a pittance and men willing to buy them, the rats and the roaches, the joblessness, the fatherless children and the mothers who do not care, the far too many people who do not care. nobody cares somehow.

guns, germs, and steel. maybe this is the way it had to play out. maybe this is natural selection in action, maybe man was never equipped to save the world. I don't know. I don't know.

but even in this strict-and-stern place, I feel lost. why can't I play the game.

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