i go out for walks nights and the sky is usually wide open with lots of stars, more than i used to see in illinois even though i'm in a larger city. orion has been a constant visitor. the moon was very clear and i could see all its patterns when it was full, but that was a few days ago and now it's not even up when i go out there, at about ten. there's still good vision; i can see the dog poop so as to avoid stepping on it, and i can see way across the park even at night.

i was asked if i like texas and i do, in spite of missing my old friends and old home; the weather alone has taken a hundred pounds off my back and they have a whole kind of music here that's interesting to me. people are nice. the red clay soil is hard to get used to. some of my students, international and otherwise, are cotton people, or frackers, or whatever, but i just teach them, and don't worry why they want to learn. sometimes though the future really scares me. the governor of texas goes out to california to tell all their businesses: come to texas. we're going from 30 million to 80 million and there's no water, but that doesn't matter, we're growing, we'll find some water. we're becoming more like california, we're moving into the future, embracing it, sometimes that scares me too. why should i like the future?

here's what scares me. the fortressing of america, especially white america, these black humvees with black shaded windows, blocking my vision of oncoming traffic, or walled fortress neighborhoods, that can afford a security guard who is some disabled angry ex-vet. a lack of genuine jobs and everyone scrambling around for what's left, that's not genuine but good enough to pay the bills. a totally collapsing, imploding europe, no jobs there, no economy either, no nothing; china pouring its money into its army; my friends more or less divided over the death of chavez. maybe the left kind of liked him, but to me he represented the intolerance of the left, and if the left is intolerant, there's nobody left! i'm already sick of the republicans and even the democrats can't do anything about our steady slide into despair, fracking, use of all our resources.

ah but i'm a pessimist, sometimes i oughta just look at the better side of things. a friend of mine, wrote a book about the solar power industry in germany, why can this country totally develop and utilize this resource, while we sit around fracking. and he says, i'm done with the book, and now i'm looking at the moon, because i've taken to walking at night, and i'm wondering why the sea of crises is at the top when it first comes out, but way over on the other side when it goes down, hours later. now i had some idea of how to answer, but didn't, some other people did and probably did a better job than i could, but days later i'm still looking up at the thing and going, sea of crises, who'd a thunk it. i didn't know such a thing existed. the thing is, i felt like saying, i had a kind of parallel thing going on, where i go out for walks often, and i see more of it than i used to, but of course i'd done nothing to find out what all that geography was called. and i'm wondering, what else do i not know?

a whole radio station devoted to red-dirt texas country music. 'nothing but texas, all of the time'...'if it ain't texas, it ain't country,' etc. etc. a person could get lost in this stuff, and just live to play it. after you do austin, you do san antone, and maybe the big d - then you get yourself an old ranch out in the hill country, or the green country or wherever. maybe there's part of it where you can grow yourself some food, or maybe you can do that out here, grow something besides cotton, and forget about the rest of the world. or maybe the earth's spinning is just going to wear itself out, cause some more earthquakes and such, and we'll have to find someplace more stable. they're going to start sending boats across the arctic soon, that'll probably scare the heck out of the polar bears, if not wipe them out entirely, and then what, maybe the north pole will just tip over and change the basic rotation of the earth. the sea of crises will look down on us in despair. people on earth, whoever's left, will crowd onto land that still isn't ruined. don't panic though, have faith. we made it through two world wars, we'll probably survive this too, one way or the other. chou