There Is Travel And There

No One’s Forcing You To Do This. You Willingly Tie Yourself To These Leashes. And You Willingly Become Utterly Socially Autistic. You No Longer Pick Up On Basic Human Communication Clues. You’re At A Table With Three Humans, All Of Whom Are Looking At You And Trying To Talk To You, And You’re Staring At A Screen, Searching For Strangers In Dubai.

I Like The Dark Part Of The Night, After Midnight And Before Four-thirty, When It's Hollow, When Ceilings Are Harder And Farther Away. Then I Can Breathe, And Can Think While Others Are Sleeping, In A Way Can Stop Time, Can Have It So – This Has Always Been My Dream – So That While Everyone Else Is Frozen, I Can Work Busily About Them, Doing Whatever It Is That Needs To Be Done, Like The Elves Who Make The Shoes While Children Sleep.

Maybe He Hadn't Thought The War Through. It Had Seemed Like Simple Fun When He Had First Pictured It, With A Glorious Beginning, A Difficult But Valor-filled Middle, And A Victorious End. He Hadn't Accounted For The Fact That There Might Not Be Much Of A Resolution To The Battle, And He Hadn't Imagined What It Would Feel Like When The War Just Sort Of Ended, Without Anyone Admitting Defeat And Congratulating Him For His Bravery.

In All My Life I'd Never Been Approached This Way, The Car Pulling Up, The Where You Going? It Was Something I Wish Had Happened Hundreds Of Times. I Was A Looker - Someone Who Looked Over At Every Car At Every Traffic Light, Hoping Something Would Happen, And Almost Never Finding Anyone Looking Back - Always Everyone Looking Forwards, And Every Time I Felt Stupid. Why Should People Look At You? Why Should They Care?

It Was Called The Middle Ages, The Dark Ages. If Not For The Monks, Everything The World Had Ever Learned Would Have Been Lost. Well, We Live In A Similar Time, When We're Losing The Vast Majority Of What We Do And See And Learn. But It Doesn't Have To Be That Way.