Two weeks ago, in what might have been an improbable and random decision, I moved to Corvallis, Oregon. I have been spinning my gears, doing nothing useful, for quite a while, and so I decided to make a move. Despite the situation with the pandemic, I had to do something. What I am going to do, I don't know. 2020 is such a mess that any achievement or movement counts as a wild victory. From March until August, I had not had an in-person conversation with a person I knew of, except my mother. Things were at a dead end. So I came here.

Corvallis is an almost irritatingly wholesome place. And, I realized in my first week here, a pretty flush place, after being in Eureka, California. Corvallis is a weird mixture of laid-back hippies and German engineering. Lots of health-food and book stores, music venues, bars, and also the parks are all immaculately well-kept. The buses run on time, and are free. I was starting to settle in, despite the unpredictability of the future.

the sound of

traffic,  as the night sky surrenders to day and commerce

overwhelms all 

the sound of 

sidewalk musicians,  a benign exchange of coins for

a few moments of heaven 

the sound of 

geese, flying overhead in precise formation

hundreds of wings,  all moving South  …

Zombies were -- pardon the expression -- dead as a fucking doornail. 

Everyone made a zombie movie or a zombie game or a zombie novel. Always the same plots with a few variations. Sometimes the variation was better makeup, sometimes a different pseudo-scientific origin. Alien brainchips, voodoo magic, mutated fungus. But it was always the small group of survivors, always the gore, always the paranoia, always survivors turning on each other before the walking dead overran them. 

The…