Off-season brings rain and new life
to old habits. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we can’t help
wanting to. Roadside attractions of the great southwest
are nothing without us. The World’s Largest animals,
vegetables, minerals fade and fall over as junk
beside our beloved minor highways, and the Four Aces
in Kingman, Arizona, having suffered the attentions
of the Board of Health, has closed its doors
for good. I’m telling you,
if you believe it’s worse never to have tried,
then you haven’t really tried.

Though the evidence confirms a deeply unimaginative
lack of decent judgement, it’s possible,
in the echoey solitude that is resolve’s aftermath,
to venture out into the hour of diminishing contrast,
under cautionary perfumes of the chocolate bar factory,
with the intent to do no harm. The honourable life
is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.
Take this guy up ahead who’s driven 45 minutes
with his turn signal on through this jurisdiction of few exits,
as if the hope of a left is all he’s got now
in his one chance on this earth.