From the Archives: In Praise of Sneaky Irrelevance
In the third month of the year 2011, in a fit of vintage 21st-century madness, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—my city’s school, a school I loved in a city I loved—proposed eliminating its department of philosophy, among others. While that particular madness ultimately faded at dear old UNLV, I suspect it lingers in the broader culture, where we often forget that quality results come from quality process, quality process comes from quality thought, and quality thought comes from supple and creative minds. So it makes sense to train those minds to think beyond the technical specifications of the latest and soon-to-be-obsolete job posting. Anyway, that’s what I argued in 2011. It was old-fashioned then, and it’s older-fashioned now. But I trust that America still loves a good antique. Here’s the case I made in the pages of Vegas Seven, “In Praise of Sneaky Irrelevance.”
Photo illustration by Thomas Speak for Vegas Seven.
From the Archives: Throwing Rice
[In the late 1990s, just back from working at the Moscow Times, I lived in Los Angeles, writing, finishing my MFA, and working as everything from an editor of drivers-ed textbooks to a Santa Monica Mountains dog walker. I was getting used to a new way of being in the world—and of being back in my own country—and I loved to wander the many worlds encompassed in those two strange and lovely letters, “L.A.” This peculiar little matrimonial Halloween tale appeared in the 1999 edition of the Southern California Anthology.]
Illustration by Svetlana Larionova Miller.
Throwing Rice
West Hollywood, California, October 31, 199-…
The violinist played a sonata whose title we had already forgotten.
We listened, we spoke.
Avowed bachelors and bachelorettes received the tokens of their doom.
Family members and the friends of their friends asked us questions about money.
We danced to a song nobody else knew.
And they left.
And, walking through celebration’s ghostly afterglow, so did we.
Only the china remained, scraped-off cake frosting drying in gargoyle formations.
★
The city. On our own.
Cars lined up and sniffing at each other like unfixed dachshunds. Yapping and growling and making impact, but nobody’s getting any satisfaction tonight. Just be patient. Everyone wants to celebrate. Just be patient.
“It’s a vintage hotel.”
“Vintage?”
“Nineteen-twenty-something.”
“Oh, how nice.”
“That means no underground parking.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for a space.”
★
We got within two blocks. Nothing. We turned back. Twenty-three blocks from the Hotel Concordia we parallel parked, our Subaru’s tailpipe pointing the way to our honeymoon suite.
★
“Here comes the bride!”
They spoke simultaneously, two white-bearded young fellows in green three-piece suits, top-hats, and brass-buckle shoes.
“Are you gonna bring us luck?”
“You look great, honey! We almost wore that today!”
“Why, thank you,” she said.
★
With the rest, we flowed like plasma onto a main road.
Here car traffic was blocked off by striped sawhorses, orange cones, a vast array of silver and yellow reflectors, and a single burning flair.
“First night, baby!”
It was a mustachioed man in blue baby pajamas with booties and a hood.
“Yep.”
He took a long suck on his passifier.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Maybe the second night.”
“Aw, that’s no fun.”
★
A cheerleader hopped about not far in front of us, skirt flying up over smooth and muscular legs, short shirt lifting to reveal the tanned and toned contours of a lower back.
The cheerleader turned around, spit out some cigar juice, wiped the ashes off his goatee and smiled at my wife.
“Hey, hun, that’s what I wore last year!”
“Where did you rent it?”
“Rent, hell! I get a lot of wear out of that little number!”
“I’d love to compare sometime.”
“Honey, I’ll be around. If you search, you shall find.”
He smiled and skipped away.
★
My wife smiled at me.
I remembered a certain day walking by the track, turning to see the trumpeters boogie in the distance while the Professor of Marchingbandology, apparently a member of the revolutionary Frente Marchingbandista, barked commands over a loudspeaker. The trumpeters kept playing the chorus of “Carry On Wayward Son” again and again, each time interrupted by the sandpaper yelp of the Professor, who appeared to be an exiled New York intellectual named Bernie. A comical and graceless scene.
Then in floats my ironic counterpoint, the love of my life, all tights and tanktop and tanned arms, twirling a baton, twirling herself, twirling my heart…
When she lifted her arms and the shirt rose with them I felt the curve of her side upon my cheek. I rose and rose toward the hourglass pinch, a fine golden cilia haze tickling my new-shaven skin.
I felt like a pervert and a stalker and a happy young man and I waited and we dated and now she is my wife.
★
Actually, that’s not how it happened at all, but that’s the memory of her my imagination drummed up after seeing the goateed, cigar-smoking cheerleader.
Not a bad memory, for a fake one.
★
But there is something real here, something real and beautiful, I told myself, remembering an overcoated February afternoon near lake Michigan when two faces wrapped in scarves somehow saw enough through the wool to agree to coffee. The image may not throb and burst for you. But for me…
When the feather of a frame of life brushes me just so….
I feel it in my teeth. That’s where I feel it. A tickle in the teeth.
And the tickle is only reflectively felt. I don’t feel it when I read the sentence, but when, having read it, remembered it, reread it and remembered it from another angle, after investing faith and patience in it, I don’t so much remember it as burn it into my genetic code. I feel the tickle when something dear finally becomes a part of me. The feather’s touch is delayed, like the echo from a deep canyon. But it is sweet.
And I felt it there, walking with my wife. She was golden in a white gown, the most beautiful vision in the…
But the featherframe tickling me was she in a heavy hood, her burgundy scarf hiding lips I had yet to see.
★
I like the nightlife/ I like to boogie/ On the disocoayaiii!!!
I think it was Donna Summer who walked by us with a ghettoblaster, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps it was Dionne Warwick.
Anyway, she stopped and said Mazeltov.
We looked almost like the real thing, she added.
★
The crowd grew too dense for conversation. There was a red devil with a calico cat on its shoulder. There were any number of Elvises, one of them in a pink leotard. There was a blue Martian (“No, dammit, I’m Venutian”) with a giant papier mache erection that he kept pulling off and happily waving around. At the end of it was a white flag with the words “I surrender” written in laundry marker.
I tried to keep my eyes on the hotel in the distance, but three Sitting Bulls in pastel headdresses found their way in front of me. From then on I was the Miata behind the Mayflower truck, trusting those mightier than me to indicate the redlights and the greens and the exits off the freeway. I’m not that tall anyway, so it was just a matter of time, headresses or no….
★
A lad with a shaved head tripped over his jackboots and fell hard into my side. Instinctively I put out my hand to help him up. He sneered at me and I almost threw him back down. Then he smiled quickly and said with a gingerly lisp, “I’m not a Nazi but I play one on TV.”
“And you play it well.”
“Speaking of playing well, you two don’t look bad yourselves!”
“Well, we study the parts.”
“Oh, that Strasberg stuff just drives me crazy. I can never fully relax.”
“Yeah, that’s always tough.”
“As a matter of fact… Yes, I see it, just barely, but I see it. You’re not fully relaxed. You’re still playing the role. You have to be it.”
“We’ll work on it.”
“Oh, she’s doing fine. It’s you that’s got the tension thing going…. Wups, there’s my gang!”
He gestured to a pair of pretend skinheads to his right.
“I hope everybody gets your irony.”
“Oh, who cares.”
“Well, you’re pretty brave coming out here like that.”
“Oh, no, honey. You’re brave.”
And my new friend was gone.
★
“My feet are killing me!” she said.
“You’re tellin’ me!” called out a guy in stilettos and fishnet.
“We’ll get there soon.”
“How do you know?”
“It was straight ahead. If we just keep going, we’ll get there.”
“I’m just gonna collapse to sleep.”
“We’ll get there.”
★
If you take a rain check on your first night, is the second night your first night? Or is there only one first night, a single pitch down the middle, to be hit or missed but never to be seen again. Is there ever another such pitch? If you miss the first night, or foul it off, do you just swing wildly for the rest of your life, hoping for that grapefruit you can nail, hoping and hoping as Cupid the peashooter keeps flingin’ ’em up there for you to foul into the dugout or pound into the dirt. Do you swing wildly? Or do you play it disciplined, have a good eye, plan the romance, meticulously re-create that which was missed… Create just the right throb and doublethrob and unforgettable explosion…
The crowd goes wild.
★
I forgot for a moment about the feather I’d already felt.
“Stay awake. We’ll get there.”
“So I can sleep?”
I stared at her.
She wasn’t smiling.
“We’ll get there.”
★
If you just take the pitch on the first night, are you really married? What makes you married? Bowties and lace and little plastic people planted in lemon spongecake? Your lasting love, which pre-existed and will post-exist the masquerade? Or is it the overall transformative portrait of that day, the throb, the reality so sharp that it burns in right at that moment, not later in review, but right at that moment, a legend simultaneously lived and recited, a painting whose greatness is assured even as the artist lashes at a half-empty canvas…
★
Someone belched in my ear.
Someone elbowed my wife.
Someone stepped on the heel of my shoe.
★
I wanted my legend. I didn’t want subtlety, irony, comedy. I wanted my legend. I wanted my throb.
My wife was falling asleep on my arm.
★
“Hey, look honey! It’s another pair of newlyweds!”
The voice rang out from several feet away. We felt the plasma around us rearrange itself as a pair of plastic people flowed toward us. It was a nice looking fellow and a lovely blonde bride who could have been us if they weren’t just playing at it…
“Wow,” said the fellow, now alongside me. “You guys even have that exhausted look! Don’t they look like the real thing, honey?”
“Oh, dear,” she said, addressing my wife, “pardon my husband we’ve just had a real wedding today. We didn’t expect to get caught in this! You two do look good, though.”
“Thank you,” my wife said sleepily.
“We’ve got a honeymoon suite at the hotel up ahead,” the man said. “I hope we get there before the little lady here conks out on me.”
“Don’t bet on it,” said the little lady.
“Aw, hell, they’re always down just when you get up,” said the man, his voice all bubbly and weightless.
“Actually,” I said, “We really do have to get to the hotel. We really did get married today. And our wedding night really is getting fucked up.”
“Hey there, don’t get sore,” said the man. “We didn’t steal your costume idea. We just picked a weird day to get married, I guess. Suppose we should’ve left tonight to the pretenders.”
“We’re not pretenders.”
“Sure you’re not.”
“You’re pretenders.”
“No, we’re the real thing.”
★
My wife’s head was on my shoulder, her eyes three-quarters shut. She breathed rhythmically, like a curled cat before the fireplace.
“These people take their dress-up games seriously!” the man was telling the woman.
We walked on, the four of us, to the hotel, where something would happen, or nothing at all.
From “The Bass Violin” in the collection “Decemberlands”
The Seventh Day
It was one of those winter mornings when you look outside and can’t bear the thought of being inside another minute—the sky blue as a storybook sea, the sun slanting in, hitting the window hard, throwing a golden square on the bedroom floor, and, in the center of the square, the sharp-edged shadow of you. These are the mornings when you throw open the window—never mind the frost, the unmistakeable sensation of your nose turning pink with chill, the sound of your mother telling you you’ll catch your death of cold standing there in your cotton pajamas, never mind all that—you breathe in deep and the air tastes like mint and the day ahead feels limitless. Yes, you’re already old enough to know that every day has its limits. You know that days like this in particular can’t help but disappoint. You’re no fool, after all, the most levelheaded of all the levelheaded kids in the Bronx. But you let yourself expect, if only for a moment, that something wonderful will happen today…
Read more in my illustrated holiday short-story collection Decemberlands, available at Amazon.com.
Illustration by Svetlana Larionova Miller, from Decemberlands.
From the Archives: Gorby and Me
How the leader of a foreign superpower changed my life—and a few others, too
[Originally published in the Las Vegas Weekly, March 25, 2004]
When I was a little kid—and I must have been an odd little kid, now that I think about it—I always dreamed that I would grow up to be the guy who ended the Cold War. Then along came Mikhail Gorbachev and ruined everything for me. I was 15 when he came to power and 22 when he left it and even his theft of my prospective life’s work couldn’t peel me away from my desire to study the country he’d led and lost. A master’s degree and three periods of scantily remunerated, definitively non-world-transforming work in Russia later, I was 27 and sick with the certainty that I’d become irrelevant. I beat a path back to my hometown, Las Vegas, to try to find a new mission in the real world. I’m still looking.
That’s one story. There are others.
Gorbachev, the former and final leader of the Soviet Union, came to UNLV last Monday, March 22, to talk about how to make the world a better place. I listened attentively. I took notes. I was truly interested. But my interest in the man’s words was in constant competition with my awe at his presence. Every time he spoke about our future, I kept thinking about his past. Every time he spoke about our world, I thought about the extent to which he made it what it is. This is the pathos of displaced greatness: The central historical figure of our time was standing in the Thomas & Mack Center telling me and several thousand others his prescription for restructuring global priorities, and my mind was not on the implementation of his new ideas, but the impact of his old ones.
OK. Full disclosure. My mind, as minds will be, was also on my own life. I felt a little ashamed of myself. What kind of person goes to listen to a Nobel Prize-winner speak and sits there thinking, Boy, that guy really did a number on me! But he did a number on millions, not such a bad number, all things considered. If we all sit and think about the numbers he did on us, the numbers start to add up to something like a revolution.
★ ★ ★
By the time I was in third grade, I had effectively grokked the meaning of deterrence. When the subject of the Cold War came up—and, believe it or not, at Lewis E. Rowe Elementary School, it did—I liked to say things like “strength makes peace.” At the same time, I’d tell people that the original reasons for the arms race were pretty much lost beneath all the shiny missiles. I was against the unilateral-freeze movement, but I figured that if the two sides could be brought to discuss not their weapons but their actual differences, they might realize together that neither of them really needed the capacity to blow the world up a 10th time. Leonid Brezhnev was not listening, and I don’t think they heard me on this side of the pond, either. I decided to bide my time.
Several years later, Mikhail Gorbachev announced to the world, and perhaps more courageously, to his own generals, that effective deterrence didn’t really require that many bombs, and advocated a defense stance not of supremacy but of “reasonable sufficiency.” Gorbachev’s idea worked. I bore him no grudges. I was a good kid that way.
★ ★ ★
An actor named Boris, wearing a cowboy hat and a dusty vest, was to burst into a saloon, doors swinging behind him, and shout out, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”
No. That was Phoebe Cates in Lace. The mind plays tricks that way. In any case, Boris, a good guy playing a bad guy, was to barge in and make some sort of menacing cowboy declaration, and I was to coach him to say it well enough, cowboy-like enough, that at least the dubbing wouldn’t look ridiculous. We were on a closed Russian military base outside the provincial town of Golitsyno and about an hour from Moscow by slow bus. It was July of 1993, during my first trip to Russia, and we were shooting an Italian-American-Russian joint-venture western called Jonathan of the Bears, starring Franco Nero and a nice South African girl named Melody. Franco had been raised by bears; Melody was a Native American named Chaya. Then there was Boris. Boris, with a long, bent nose, bulgy eyes and a snaky frame, was taking care of some sort of Old West dirty work or other. I think he may have been some kind of cowboy scientist.
My job was to help everyone with a little bit of everything—dialogue coach, occasional translator, mover of things from one place to another and back. Sometimes my job was to do nothing at all. One day I was sitting with a group of Russian actors and stunt-men in a circle around a puddle. We were throwing pebbles in the puddle. We were watching the circles spread. “I want to work,” I said.
“This is work,” Boris answered.
I liked Boris. Read more…
From the Archives: Revolution Square
It’s 1996, I’m writing for The Moscow Times and wandering the parks and alleys of the capital, gathering it in, allowing it to become a part of me, each day finding new mysteries in its cool air and cold lovely stone. It’s my third tour working in this country; I’m no longer entirely a stranger here. But Russia, weird and wondrous, can’t help but leave even the most experienced foreigner feeling just a little bit strange. Here’s one of my adventures—and maybe not my proudest moment—described in a 2012 essay for Vegas Seven, “Revolution Square”.
From the Archives: The Morality of Slow
In 2011, I was editing the weekly city magazine Vegas Seven and recalibrating my sense of place in the hometown to which I had only recently returned. The city was at once deeply damaged by the Great Recession and, as always, energized and ready for change—constantly reshaping itself beneath our feet while we hurried from one moment to the next trying to keep up with it. Meanwhile, our digital existence seemed to echo our civic life, skittering about in our mental space, ever-shape-shifting, keeping us continuously looking down to make sure we understood where we were, seducing us into forgetting where we had been, telling us not to slow down, not ever, lest we fall behind. Amid this instability of both physical and virtual space, I reached a point where I sat down at (where else?) the keyboard and typed a thousand words that, I suppose, amounted to one: “Enough.”
Here’s the result—“The Morality of Slow.”
Seven years ago, with Las Vegas still digging out of The Great Recession, a national commentator argued that The Smith Center was the tomb, rather than the launching pad, for the city’s civic energies. I disagreed, a lot. This was my reply in the late, great Vegas Seven. How does it hold up?
Miller-March 29, 2012-Is The Smith Center the Last Good Thing?
The Set in the Woods
I stand on the edge of an artful world,
Where the red of the fire
Is dimmed by smoke.
Don’t be alarmed:
Everything is under control.
Only the eyes
Flash like traffic lights
Beneath the pale sunset moon
Of a temporary town
In a dried-grass clearing.
We have work to do:
“Quiet on the set!” they cry,
Out of pure habit—
Nobody is saying anything anyway;
Only nature speaks its night language.
They seem dissatisfied with the semi-silence,
But uninterested in its source.
Who wants to concede that the world goes on without us?
Even the wild dogs
And the dying leaves
And the face of a child in the forest
Go unnoticed, unheard, unseen, except by me,
Here on the edge, lost on the job
In the temporal space between last and next
And not-quite-now.
It’s never quite now with me.
I am not exceptional,
But somehow I am an exception,
Dazed by incomprehensible pauses in the action,
By my own elusiveness when community beckons.
I never knew life had such breaks.
I thought the story told itself, beginning to end,
In such a way that made it difficult for the characters to simply run off.
I wander into the woods, no purpose, no plan.
Like a hero from Cooper,
The child steps on a twig beneath dry leaves.
The twig—such lonely applause!—cracks;
From behind the cover
Of a lightning-struck stump,
A dog turns with a start,
A muffled growl, and then
A bark.
The child jumps,
The shimmer of surprise upon him like a feather on the soul.
Where had that dog been hiding?
And how did he get lost out here
Among the cedars?
The boy drops to his knees
And against my unspoken recommendation
Pets the lost mutt.
From the edge of the clearing
I smile to myself.
The kid is safe, I assume,
A local boy. I turn around
To those traffic-light eyes
Which now flash in the dark
As the director’s commands
Drown out the dog’s bark.
– Greg Blake Miller
Outside Golitsyno, Russia, 1993
How Much Caring Goes Into Your Sharing?
When we wander into Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, the first thing we must do, akin to adjusting a watch when landing on faraway soil, is reexamine the notion of “Sharing Is Caring.” Eggers paints a portrait of a massive social-media corporation—The Circle—that gradually but relentlessly redesigns society, extending its circumference from its sylvan California headquarters outward to the city, the nation, the world. The engine of this radical growth is the corporation’s capacity to make the absurd seem inevitable. In smooth rhetorical steps, it reframes service to the company as service to society, privacy as theft, and erasure of self as selflessness, trusting that nobody will wade into philosophical waters to ask whether one can be selfless if there is no private self from which to give. The Circle’s guiding principle is “All That Happens Must Be Known,” but those grand words are dependent on the more innocent slogan, “Sharing Is Caring.” Those words provide the pseudo-ethical foundation for every step the company takes, for the most outlandish actions of its leaders, for Eamon Bailey’s overweening dreams and Tom Stenton’s cynical schemes. They also offer a window into the way we live today.
At first the phrase seems innocuous, or even, in a bumper-sticker sort of way, wise and loving. But upon closer examination, within the specific context of The Circle or, more importantly, the broader context of life in the age of social media, it develops shadows, first around its edges and then at its very heart. In these contexts, “sharing” does not mean what it seems: It does not connote the voluntary handing over of some portion of one’s worldly goods and privileges to another who is in need. For the most part, it also does not signify the voluntary, mindful sharing of one’s time and effort to help or console a person, animal, or community in need. Rather, the ancient ethic of opening one’s door to the stranger is invoked here only in the most cynical of ways: In The Circle, the knock on the door comes from the new governing authority—The Circle itself—the opening of the door is far from voluntary, and the one who knocks seeks not your aid and hospitality but your will and identity. In the broader social-media context of our lives outside Eggers’ book, there is a less direct sense of an authority barging in with its bogus warrant, but in its place there is often a more insidious type of authority at work: A bland but almost binding cultural rule of the road that we must leave our doors open and consent to being raided, observed and robbed. Our time, attention, data, creativity, and sense of self are suddenly available for the taking, like so many old possessions scattered on the lawn for a garage sale.
What does “Sharing Is Caring” mean when the sharing becomes obligatory (you have no choice but to share), ceaseless (you cannot stop sharing), unvaried (you cannot decide what to share and what not to share), and ubiquitous (everyone shares everything all the time, so that any effort to opt out is socially deviant)? In our world outside The Circle, of course, this sort of sharing is less obligatory, and we have more choices about when, how and what we share. But do we tend to allow the “Sharing Is Caring” ethic to become a sort of de facto rule in our online lives? Does yielding our time, attention and data become a custom so ingrained in our way of life that it is difficult to opt out, or even to consciously grasp what exactly we are yielding? Are we in the grips of McLuhan’s Narcissus Trance, so consumed by a communications medium that we no longer understand the way it controls the pace, scale and pattern of our lives? Have we become Dallas Smythe’s Audience Commodity, a resource ripe for harvest?
In ancient monastic traditions, the notion of voluntary self-emptying is a path to enlightenment. The ego yields and the individual dedicates self to something (God, spirit, community) larger. The bumper-sticker value of “Sharing Is Caring” is built upon its subtle association with this saintly ethic, half-remembered from old tales and dusty sermons. But The Circle uses the phrase as part of a cynical bait-and-switch. When “Sharing Is Caring” is based on obligation (in The Circle) or mindless surrender to cultural norms (under the de facto rules of our online lives), sharing cannot be caring. Caring implies that one has been careful—full of care—in ones choices, particularly in the willful decision to serve another. When sharing is obligatory or mindless, it derives not from caring but from obedience or reflex. It is demonstrably not caring. Sharing, in this case, is set above caring. It does not really matter whether you care or not.
There are times when the notion that “sharing is greater than caring” might be useful: Think of reasonable taxation that allows us to maintain a judicial system and build schools and foster public safety and protect the nation and stitch together a social safety net. There is no admonition in the Constitution that we must care—with all of the individual will and empathy the word implies—in order to give our government the necessary resources to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” Paying for these things is the price of admission for Americans. We can shift the shape and scope of our public expenditures through political action, but short of revolution, civil disobedience and garden-variety tax avoidance, we cannot selectively opt-in or simply opt out. In the broad sense, when it comes to paying for the upkeep of the nation, it once again doesn’t matter whether you as an individual care or not. Your tax bill arrives all the same.
But we have traditionally drawn the line between such sectors of life where sharing is greater than caring and those where sharing is the outgrowth of caring. We cherish a private sphere, a zone of self-ownership. Traditionally, we share the details of our lives with those whom we care about and who care about us. We try to make conscious choices about how we spend our personal time and who we invite to share that time. We choose our causes. We devote ourselves with care. We express solidarity when we feel it. We guard our thoughts and experiences and convey them to others when and if we’re inclined to do so. When it comes to sharing the content of self, we like to believe that we pick our moments, control our message, and choose our audience. But do we? How much do we share by reflex? How much do we share out of a sort of numb conformism? How much to we share without even knowing we’ve shared? How mindfully do we empty ourselves? Is our sharing unconscious? Or is it conscious but cynical, as we craft alternative selves, identities designed and constructed to suit the norms of our online community—the circle we live in, one that does not need Eamon Bailey to set the agenda because we ourselves help set it every day. Are we reshaped by the alternative selves we construct? Are the alternative selves, that is, constructing us? Are we sharing or being shared? Do we care?
– Greg Blake Miller
Mar Monte
The hole was dug,
Neat and square.
The boards were laid.
Hands worked here,
They placed these boards,
Bracketed the corners
To frame the pour.
The barrel of the truck spun through the dark of night.
The foundation was poured,
The sludge made solid.
The gray of concrete reassures.
You can trust gray.
Sludge filled the square.
This all happened long ago.
It dried smooth,
Ready to be
Dressed in hardwood. Danced upon.
A grandparent, a great grandparent.
Your people were married here, in this building.
The pour was hard and strong. No cracks but the vents placed for pressure.
Eighty years go by with a gasp and a cough and a sigh
And the birth of three generations.
You return here, where you have never been, but they have, and you are
The legacy of the pour.
The cracks have grown. The vent was not enough.
You look upon the crumbling verandah
And you know that you, that we, have a responsibility
Not only to live
But to mend.
But you have grown in a different age
And have not built those skills.
– Greg Blake Miller
June 19, 2017
Reentry Shock 