Rite's phone buzzed as soon as he touched down in the bay. Work week notifications and a dozen reviews, world portal provisional alerts, a call from Vermont. 39 second voice message auto transcribed. "Hey, I hope you landed okay. We're staying in DC til the end of the month, so I won't be able to visit you. Wish I could! Keep me updated on how it goes, tell Ray I said hi. (pause) _ also (unintelligible) asked for my new address but I don’t , really want to give it to him. They've been checking mail recently. Any chance you could look into setting up a PO box, or something? Love you." Cross country transit came and went but the postal service would never stop fucking shit up. Sure, I'll set up the PO box. Worth came from little actions, wait no, discipline, focus. He's foccused on getting off this plane.
The branched maybach was waiting outside the domestic terminal. It looked beat up, no courteous greeting from the invisible man in the front seat, no sign or signature touch down booze up. Rite's luggage was already in the back. His phone buzzed again, a BART card had installed itself into his wallet, my tax dollars at work. Kind of remarkable they don't do this in many other Metros. New York at least has tap. And vertical integration. San Jose's sprawl was a blinding eyesore even from 30,000 feet up. Illumination weight shift to platonic white, no deep skies up here, every picket fence an ATF violation, tapped and sore wood burnt by the an unbound sum of energy directing it, the cul-de-sacs forming a concave lens reflecting everything, focused Focus.
That's what New York didn't have. Every idea, song, piece of art, form, relationship, ambition, existed on every floor of every building, a 20 million person pressure cooker, getting grated and atomized by sheer friction into this volumetric cloud that sheds its dandruff onto the streets into patches. You eat it to survive til you shed yourself, you make the pilgramige for it, and you walk its weathered rivers (from) and pathways, hoping the to find that single mass of people places and things, roped in by gravity, centrifugally, and before you know it you're caught in neuropathy of the empire.
When the Gold Rush began, and Manifest Destiny wrought reality, California was ambushed by discipline and became a veiny organ of single purpose. No ambiguity was left to the people of the redwoods, or gold diggers, or rail road workers, or statesmen or businessmen. This was their paradise to defend, their reward for expansion, perfect cambrian canvas on which god kissed with golden fields and giant trees and rogue waves. The gold was just the most obvious gesture of this generosity, proof the ground was fertile. We got the message, and soon that ground gave birth to platonic cities, and those cities carried the tradition, wearing their path downstream from the rackett. The central forge of profit, divied off in sectors, a prize for the people who we're chosen to operate under the jurisdiction of humanity, too worthy for the blemishes they then called port cities, artists with antennas to heaven, alchemists who turn stone into silicon into computer chips into machines into a codified version of the world, anyone with the foresight to act on the 7th day, the one's with a vision, the ones with... Focus.