Centers are supposed to be good things, but I prefer edges.

The far edge of the world, at the back of the North Wind, east of the sun and west of the moon, as far as far, at the back of beyond, out of reach, out of touch, out of the ordinary, beyond the Arctic Circle, beyond so many things. Far.

No revolution vanishes without effect.

Oscar Wilde once remarked, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” This profound uncertainty has been the grounds for my own hope.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.

If, at the start of this story, the great divide was manifest in musical taste and distaste, that too has begun to close, as musical genres bleed into each other and no longer provide the airtight identities they once did.

My own dear city had long been the far edge of the country, not merely in geography, but in possibility, the left coast that presented alternatives and refuges from the mainstream; when Silicon Valley became a—and in some ways the—global power center, it became something else.

Expedition. Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda.

Revolution is a phase, a mood—like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass.