Dusk wells up nostalgia; nostalgia, that false sense of a glistening past: the cool air and clouds of soft gray wool, the occasional puddle and all the fallen leaves swept off driveways into the street; strings of plastic pumpkin lights instead of carved jack-o-lanterns; I'm unfamiliar yet reminded, and some bluish patches beyond the cloudy sky have tiny stars still there from before, and every day they move. I don't like the shadows cast by street lights; or maybe I do. I just don't like the lamps themselves. Cars go by, one after another, but I think people are only going through the motions of running errands; nothing they need is all that immediate. They could walk, too.

And I would like to walk at this time of night more often, but this time of night will never come again. Every moment presents the next ridge of an ever unfolding fan; the view back is equally obscured by such creases, making memory equivocal, the past subjective and only unyeilding in its ambiguity. I wonder if to walk at night on this sad hillside 50 years ago made any sense at all. Where would one walk to? How many sheep would bleat as one passed? Did the birds then, confused as they are now, cry out to each other checking the time? Verifying day from night was easier, maybe; this was a pasture, and I don't know the old geography. I suppose the fog had meaning. A drunken ranch hand would know its significance; he couldn't drive back from the town on the oceanside; he would have to sleep it off in his truck. At this hour, the taverns over by the beach channeled all the revelers and tired laborers up and down a solitary highway; the paths out here had yet to be paved.

Anyway, I wasn't around.