It took years to get to this point.  Some tired and degraded landscape that reaches to the horizon, waiting for the ocean.  I can feel restless roots, Russian thistle on the wind.

And thanks for the help and hope.  Thanks for the wells and walls.  We walk to nothing from this point, we walk to the unknown future.  Can you even guess?  Ten years from now, can you guess?  Ten years from now, will there be us?  You and I, this place, these people all in a panic?  Still breathing, here, but ten years from now?

Sure!  Why not?  Things move so quick these days, ten years has passed since I started this line of text!  The beat and hum of this 60 cycle world, each decaying orbit of the atomic clocks that keep is, our hearts struggling to binary square wave perfection, the world zooming under our feet.  Sure!  Ten years is nothing!  Ten years is a blink of silicon, a trashy half-cycle of electron flow.

There's a horizon that defines the wall on my left, a horizon pieced together from pictures of a mountain terrain.  My window replacement, custimized for my own nostalgia glands.  In the last ten years that I lived there, nothing happened.  The world crawled through the muck of the post-Reagan world, supposed to have been so good for the area, mired in 7.5 percent unemployment, no cash for development, the guys who owned the valley quietly owning more of it.  The desert shifting, moving, reclaiming.

Ten years since I left, the place is paved and carpeted in that American carpet flavor, Chiles and Starbucks and Furniture Row and Applebees and the only remaining grocery store is a Wal Mart.  The little back alleys all now inner-city dangerous, the center of the valley sinking in on itself, devouring itself on short-term high-interest loans, $4000 rims on $2000 cars, drugs and collapse.  The edges of the town now exclusive, gated, million dollar homes and million dollar retirees.  The desert, my desert, gone.  Tract housing, ten thousand acres of houses three feet apart.

The look over my shoulder, ten years past.

Sure!  Why not?  Commerce is required.  We have no time for nostalgia outside of what we can buy: the 1980s flying off the shelves as we reach for something tangible from an era of coked out excess, reach for something already artificial to distill and make even more artificial.

I used to wonder: what do kids in California think about, recall, remember?  Where is their nostalgia?  Video games and shopping malls?

Where will I exist ten years from now?  The world burning in various locations, tribal and coporate warfare seeing common protocol outlets for their favorite games, oil slowly dwindling, culture replaced so long ago by chemicals and media, where will any of us be?

A reaction to the future?  My dreams of dystopian survival are unrealistically unfortunate.  The world, she will turn with a glassy incoherence.  We will grind on.  Everything passes in time.

We're all right, we're all calm.