I live in a leafy medium-sized city. I could live anywhere but I live here, not from any particular attachment to this city but just because that's what happened. Circumstances, which are unavoidable given the apparent existence of time. Where would I go if suddenly I had an instinct to return "home"? I don't have a home. My mother and two sisters live in Frederick, Maryland, which is pretty much a nowhere place, and anyway I never lived there myself so it couldn't count as home. The idea of home in this sense is not very important to me, although I do like my mother and two sisters, despite the fact that we have nothing whatsoever to say to one another except things that start with "Remember that time..."

I was born in Vallejo, California, which is an anus of a city about which I suffer no twinges of dreary sentiment. For a decade I lived in San Francisco, which is a city I love, but it became in time the scene of too many personal reversals and so I fled, to come to where I now reside. Maybe success and contentment will catch up with me here and I'll stay forever! Maybe my dully ordinary personal shortcomings will continue to undermine my efforts, my middling efforts, and I will blame my surroundings and move someplace worse, or someplace better, or someplace neither worse nor better but better for me or worse for me or neither better nor worse for me but different for me and therefore better for me after all in the sense that sometimes change is salutary in itself, or different for me and therefore worse for me after all in the sense that sometimes change is an easy panacea or evasion, new circumstances to distract from the so-called deeper issues. Maybe a meteor will travel millions of light years and hit me in the eye. A meteor aimed at my eye would supplant my deeper issues and become the overriding issue, the one true issue. But of course everyone already has a meteor aimed at their eye, people would cease to function if they starting obsessing over their looming personal meteors, the personal meteor shadows in which they cower and shiver like frightened children. How I love the comma splice, rules of grammar be damned.