by Brooks Riley

“They are shape, form, waiting to emerge. They present the plastic possibilities of life,” Albrecht Dürer said this of the pillows in various states of rumpled use that he drew on the back of a piece of paper he had been using to draw hands, wasting no surface to explore the ‘plastic possibilities‘ of everything. I see him wake up in the morning and look down at the pillow where his head had been, punching it a few times, contemplating the mutability of its form, and arriving at that morning epiphany about art itself.

The impression of a tousled head still lurking in the pillow’s shadowed indentation conjures a ghost whose presence can be felt if not seen, with an imagined long single golden strand of hair left behind within its folds. A hint of Dürer’s personality emerges from this fantasy, of a man who found wonder in all things—a pillow, a weeded piece of turf, a hare, a deformed pig, a rhinoceros, an iris, a beached whale. He would spend a lifetime exploring the elusive secrets of beauty and mathematics in nature, and nature and beauty in mathematics.

Personality is like ether, it hovers in the atmosphere long after death. Decades, even centuries later, long after the end of memories, traces of it move through the air like a fleet aroma caught at just the right odd moment. Where did that come from? It is elusive, and cannot be captured or bottled or even explained. Such is the personality of Dürer. It rises like a mist from a certain landscape seen from the train. It lurks in the amusing portraits of friends like Stefan Paumgartner as St. George, or Willibald Pirckheimer imbibing at the baths, or the selfie pointing to the pain in his spleen. It rages in two haunting, nude sketches of himself. Or radiates in that iconic self-portrait from 1500, which hung in his atelier, never for sale but as constant reminder of the perfection he would strive for with his self-proclaimed ‘diligence‘, that most German of virtues—a quasi-blasphemous Christ-like pose that sanctified his art through his person. Thomas Hoving once called it ‘the single most arrogant, annoying and gorgeous portrait ever created,‘ missing the point—or perhaps not. It was so life-like, Dürer’s dog ran over to it and started licking it before the paint was quite dry. Of the plethora of explanations for this work, I like to think he painted it in case the Apocalypse predicted for 1500 really happened. I will survive, it says. And he did.

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Doctor Qureshi Dares My Mother

“Maryam Jaan,” he says, “You must be proud
of your son Farouk, his wealth —praise Allah—
how he has made himself great in America.”

The doctor’s white hair is unruly like mine,
his bi-focals tipsy, his elbows rest
on the mahogany table hand-crafted

in Mexico for Ethan Allen,
classic Yankee firm Farouk reinvented
over the past 30 years over and over again

to help those who need help to make their homes
beautiful. He sits as usual at the head, his dark hair
slicked back, eyebrows arched at the dare.

Waitaminute, how unfair of the doctor
who goads my ami to choose favorites between
two sons, her betas, a Chairman of the Board

bankroller of Ami’s pricey healthcare,
and a dim bulb in the six light trumpet
chandelier bouncing of the buffed grain.

Dear doctor, faithful friend, first Pakistani champ
of the Scarsdale Bridge Club—mashallah—keep on
injecting Ami with B12, her weekly fix,

hear her heart beat, hold her gnarled hands as she
begs you use your wealth of healing savvy,
even declare martial law to please stop

voices, only voices always in her head,
but don’t provoke her as she sits up on
a Chippendale, sips saffron-infused Kashmiri

kahva from a china cup gold-rimmed hem
dupatta slips to her shoulders, “Doctor
Qureshi sahib,” she says, meeting his gaze

across the wide expanse of burnished veneer,
more geography than physiology on her face,
“I am proud of all my children.” Soaring

along the shoreline of Long Island Sound,
I’m as far from New Rochelle
as America is from a crescent zoon.

Urdu/English: jaan/my life; mashallah/praise allah; dupatta/veil
Kashmiri/English: zoon / moon

by Rafiq Kathwari, for Ejaz Qureshi

by Claire Chambers

At a Sheikh Zayed Book Award event in 2017, Marina Warner told the audience that the Arabic root word for water and story is the same. Both nouns, she claimed, relate to the verb 'to transfer', rawin being one way to say 'storyteller', while rawiya is 'to drink one's fill' or 'to be irrigated'. If the link between liquidity and storytelling is less immediately apparent in Urdu and other South Asian languages than it is in Arabic, nonetheless in the eleventh century Somadeva collected together Indian myths as the Kathā Sarit Sāgara ('Ocean of the Streams of Stories'), suggesting a similar understanding of the link between words and watery worlds.

All this resonates with my new book, Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays, which was published by Oxford University Press last month. I eventually chose Rivers of Ink as my title when I realized how many words I'd written in my journalistic outpourings for this fine blog 3 Quarks Daily, as well as for Dawn and other outlets, over the course of five years. The phrase comes from the Spanish idiom verter ríos de tinta meaning to pour rivers of ink, corresponding to the English saying, 'much ink has been spilt'. If even a fraction of the ink cartridges I drained over the last half-decade were in service of equality, anti-racism, and internationalism, or (re)introduced readers to a confident and diverse body of texts, I will be happy.

Coincidentally, Rivers of Ink recalls the titles of two influential subcontinental novels: Qurratulain Hyder's Aag ka darya (River of Fire), which deals, amongst other subjects, with Partition and the post-Second World War South Asian diaspora; and River of Smoke, in which the nineteenth-century Opium Wars enable Amitav Ghosh to impart wisdom on present-day globalization and the political grounds of free trade arguments.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

I have come to the beach to drown out the heartbreak and listlessness and senselessness of life in the moment. I look at these waves that swallow everything. Tishani Doshi writes in "What the Sea Brought In", of a laundry list of things suddenly seen:

"Brooms, brassieres, empty bottles

of booze. The tip of my brother's

missing forefinger. Bulbs, toothpaste

caps,

instruments for grooming. Chestnuts,

carcass of coconut, crows, crabs.

Three dying fish, four dead

grandparents.

Slippers of every stripe: rubber, leather,

Rexine, felt."

I stare at the sea, and draw my own list of things to send back. Twenty seven photographs, two concert ticket stubs, three new years' parties, two hundred and eight measures of gin and tonic, a body, three sets of new sheets, five coffee mugs, three wine glasses (one broken), a foot board, three dogs (one disappeared), a rash vest, a pack of cards, a seventh grade mark sheet, a polka dotted dress, my first résumé, a coffee machine, two home videos, one voice recording, too many words to count, fifty seven lines of control, five long weeks of silence. I am tired.

Like Aragorn, I look left, right, east, west, something, and at just the opportune moment, I espy fireworks, orange, fuschia, and dazzlingly green; I am momentarily light.

Perhaps, this is why that moment in "The Two Towers", when awash in golden light, Gandalf and the Rohirrim arrive in deus ex machina fashion is on my top ten list of movie-manipulated affects. When younger, I loved myself some death and glory. Now older, I look for hope and redemption.

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by Brooks Riley

by Max Sirak

"If you wish to be happy, Eragon, think not of what is to come nor of that which you have no control over but rather of the now and of that which you are able to change." (Christopher Paolini, Brisingr)

"I believe that humans are primarily driven to seek greater happiness, but the definition of such is personal and cannot be dictated and should not be controlled by any group.." (Michael Shermer, The Science Of Good and Evil)

"It seems to me that every thing in the light and air ought to be happy, / Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough." (Walt Whitman, "Sleepers")

"Don't let millionaires and billionaires ruin your day." (Terry Pluto, The Cleveland Plain Dealer)

A Young Adult fantasy author, a science writer, an American poet, and a local sports columnist walk into a bar, grab a drink, bundle up, and then to go to a parade…

Given the international, cosmopolitan flavor of 3qd, I'm not sure how many readers pay attention to American Football. Were I a betting man, I'd venture to guess Futbol trumps Football when it comes to our fan base. However, I've been wrong before and I'll be wrong again, so who knows?

Either way – today I'd like to call a time out and talk a little about sports, fandom, and philosophy. Take a knee, gang.

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by Christopher Bacas

When the real estate agent parked in front of the office it was dark; an August day dwindling to eighty-five humid degrees. Air conditioners whirred and dripped from upstairs windows. He got out and stood by the stairs, tie and shirt collar crisp and taut above his suit jacket. In waves of steamy funk, his rectitude and wardrobe contrasted our clammy sandals, shorts and sundress. We entered the railroad first floor of a row house. The entryway was dark, on the right, two bare work desks. Next off the hall, a dining room table with neatly tucked, high backed chairs. The manager, Michael, handled the lease. Our agent sat quietly.

We’d been at these tables before. Something always derailed the deal. Once, ready to sign, Beth mentioned I was a musician. That manager slid the lease out from under her hands. Then, he hustled her out of the building. Another management office, Orthodox-run, gave us keys and an address to visit. When we got there, the front door of the brownstone swung back. Inside,a battered staircase listed to the right. Up the stairs, smells of stewing meat, garlic and ammonia. Boleros blasted through a chipped door. The third floor unit was wide open. On the door, the marshal’s eviction notice peeled under a graffiti tag. Inside the unit, moretags covered every wall. Garbage bags, smashed appliances and shards of glass spread the floors. In the bathroom, a dead bird swam with crack vials in a scarred tub. The toilet, a cornucopia of trash. I laughed at first. By the time I got to the car, anger dripped out of my pores.

“It looks great!”I told the young Orthodox woman in the office.

She was blasé; never bothering to look up while pulling a clipboard with paperwork affixed.

“You need to fill out an application. We need three references, six months of pay stubs and twelve months of cancelled rent checks. There’s a credit check,too. Forty dollars.”

I spit out “Place is a DISASTER! Garbage and graffiti everywhere. Dead animals! The front door doesn’t have a lock.”

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by Holly A. Case

Peter Viereck (background, right)
and student, 1958

About this time last year, the idea came to me that it was time to write a conservative manifesto. Conservatism had shown itself to be hollowed out and practically free for the taking. Fiscal conservatism, "family values," and sincere deference to Christian morality had either never truly been part of conservatism's essence, or were betrayed wholesale during the election. What remained was an empty vessel awaiting content. Drafts of the manifesto proliferated on my hard drive. In conversation with confidants its completion seemed immanent. Interlocutors wondered about practicalities: What would be the first line? And the last? How would it be disseminated? What would be the next step after the manifesto?

But it never came to be. The problem had a name: Peter Viereck. He was both the inspiration for the manifesto and the reason it was never finished or disseminated.

In April 1940, Viereck had written his own conservative manifesto in the form of an essay titled "But—I'm a Conservative!" The title had two meanings. The more obvious one was a reaction to the prompt Viereck was given by the editors of The Atlantic. Tell us "the meaning of young liberalism for the present age," they urged him. To this the twenty-three-year-old Viereck replied: "But—I'm a Conservative!"

The second meaning was personal: "But—I'm a Conservative!" Its origins were more obscure, but those in the know would have caught it. Viereck's father, Sylvester Viereck, was a fairly famous poet, and an unrepentant fellow traveler of the Nazis. The elder Viereck claimed that anti-Semitism was not essential to Nazism, and that an American version of Nazism could simply jettison the German Nazis' preoccupation with the mass expulsion and extermination of the Jews. But the young Peter was not convinced: Nazism was anti-Semitism, and "Political anti-Semitism is no isolated program," he wrote, "It is the first step in an ever-widening revolt of mob instinct against all restraints and liberties. It is the thin opening wedge for the subversion of democracy, Christianity, and tolerance in general." The son yanked hard to pull conservatism out from under his father and the Nazi Right, insisting vehemently and repeatedly that Nazism was an ideology of revolt, the very opposite of conservatism. And like Marxism's "materialistic assault on all our non-economic values of the spirit," he found it revolting.

Like his father, Peter Viereck was a poet, and before the decade was out he would win a Pulitzer Prize for his work. By then his elder brother, George Sylvester, was dead, killed in action while fighting against the Nazis in Italy. Their father got the news while doing time for sedition.

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Whiplash and Mercies

silence thick as her stews
filled my grandmother’s house
but for the cars on 15 on wet nights
close, hissing toward Picatinny
black Buicks, big black Packards
heavy as her life
wide whitewalls spinning
on two-lane asphalt
before the interstate
sliced through
table in her living room
a glut of snaps of Jim and Jack
Howard Frank Velma Ruth
Gladys Leo Leroy Pat
the lot of them by-gone
in black & white
mugging hugging beaming
being
young as they’d been
in their taste of time
vitality a temporal joke
skin taut as cloudless sky
on a blue blue day
pillowed day-bed
against the front wall
beneath a window
across from brown coal stove
radiating from October
until earth-sun geometry
more suited blood & breath
chairs stuffed as turkeys
holiday mists real as pin pricks
bright and huge as a looming moon
crisp as frost
memory is fierce and tender
how it claws and cradles the day
shadowlight shifting,
illusory shapes filled with
the whiplash and mercies
of some
lord
?
.

Jim Culleny
11/27/11

by Carl Pierer

In a time of rapid urbanisation, cities distil contemporary issues. By 2050, more than two thirds of the world's population will live in an urban environment (DESA, 2012). Social questions, political problems, and environmental concerns are increasingly raised in an urban context. In particular, due to the concentration of people and consequently economic activity, cities are large contributors to the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and responsible for 40% of GHG emissions from transport (I.E. Agency, 2008). This suggests that a greener organisation of cities can make a substantial contribution to mitigating climate change. The argument here is twofold. First, we present the argument for mitigating by changing the urban form, in particular to a dense and circular city. Secondly, we present the case of Curitiba, illustrating that urban form can significantly reduce GHG emissions from transport, even if the city does not conform to the ideal of high density and circularity.

The theoretical framework for modelling the city is relatively simply. The standard, classical economic model of the (monocentric) city supposes that there is a central business district (CBD) in which all economic activity occurs. City-dwellers commute to the CBD in the morning and back to their residences in the evening. Since this is an economic model, people try to maximise their utility given their income. The utility depends only on the size of living space and the length of the commute. Because a longer commute incurs higher costs to the commuter, the closer a place is to the CBD, the higher the demand from people wanting to live there. This in turn means higher rent prices, and so less living space for the same amount. The model is simplified by allowing a linear trajectory from each point of the city to the CBD. Consequently, the city according to this model is radially symmetric. If we look at the density of the city according to distance from the CBD, we see an exponential decay. That is, near the CBD the city is densely populated (meaning, in particular, high rising buildings), but further away the density is falling (bigger houses, fewer people, the classical suburb scenario).

Of course, this model is rather simplistic and many cities are not in line with the predictions. Some points along which this model has been developed include to allow for multiple centres of economic activity or for other desirable amenities such as distance to green spaces. However limited the model may be, it does illustrate nicely that the urban form is a major factor influencing certain sustainability issues (something that has been confirmed by empirical studies).

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Sughra Raza. Wall at Alfred P. Murrah building, Oklahoma City. 2015.

Digital photo.

by Emrys Westacott

In the beginning, there were only professors and students, and relations between them were very simple. A student would give the professor half of the fee for a course at the first class, and the remainder after the last class. A few poorer students, who could not pay the full amount in cash, would sometimes bring vegetables they had grown, or a fish they had caught, and the professors accepted these graciously. The widow of a former mathematics professor pickled the vegetables and salted the fish before distributing them among the faculty.

As the college grew, so did its reputation, and as more classes were needed, more professors came to teach. To make things easier for the professors, the widow began collecting the fees and depositing them at the local bank. She also began keeping simple records. At some point, no-one could remember exactly when, the professors agreed among themselves to pay her a stipend for the services she provided.

When the widow died, the professors decided to replace her with an experienced bookkeeper who was given a contract and a salary. This person also took on and standardized a few small administrative tasks that the professors, in an ad hoc sort of way, had previously performed for themselves. The college continued to flourish, student numbers increased, and in time the need for additional administrative assistance became pressing. To simplify things, the professors now agreed to become salaried employees of the college, and the larger decisions about the direction and operation of the institution were put into the hands of individuals who were good at that sort of thing.

The college continued to grow, and so did the administrative work required. More's Law states that in any institution, the closer an employee is to the power center where salaries are determined, the higher the remuneration they receive. True to this principle, the higher-level administrators began to be paid quite a lot more than the professors. As their work became more complicated, they found it necessary to increase the administrative tiers within the college, bring in more specialists and employ more assistants. They also found that they needed bigger, more elegant offices.

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by Brooks Riley

by Pedro Rosa Mendes

1.

It rained forever the whole night. There was no other sound other than a woman weeping or praying or begging,

“I did not, I did not, I did not“

in the house next to our miserable hotel, the Dokone, formerly the Florida before the war ravaged the old quarters of Mamba Point in Monrovia.

From one of my notebooks:

12 November 2003. There is no light. Wolf lyes flat in bed, on his boxers. He meditates. The woman stopped crying after I shouted

Stop it!

to the darkness and the rain. I shouted to the man beating the woman with a belt, or with a whip. Eventually, Wolf rises and sits. He starts recalling:

There was an offensive from the Northern Alliance against an area under Taliban control but which was not affiliated with their regime. There was a bizarre military alliance between enemies back then. General Dostum’s forces stormed the region, including the village from where my interpreter came from. Everything was brought down. When we reached the village, my interpreter looked for his house. Dostum’s men had killed is entire family. My interpreter had six children. From newborns to grown-ups, like a staircase. It was still possible when we arrived to the village to see where Dostum’s had crushed the children’s skulls. A stain… It looked like the victims had been grabbed by their ankles, or so I guessed, because one could still see purpled marks of hands printed on the babies’ legs. The heads… Just like that. Young skulls are soft. I entered one of the houses and there was the body of a girl. I couldn’t exactly understand what happened with her since her dress was folded back, covering her head. I mean, the place of her head. My interpreter cried out, desperate. He cried and cried and cried. I walked outside and raised my hands high:

how? How?…

It was winter. It was Winter 2001. Everything was frozen. I tried to dig a grave for my interpreter’s children. I didn’t succeed. Everything was frozen. I remained with him for three days.

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by Michael Liss

What moves the American soul?

We love arguments, contests, and elections. Love the drama, the passion, the polarizing candidates, the fake piety, the rank partisanship, the heart-felt and often appallingly disingenuous editorials, and the heavy dose of moral relativism.

It’s that time again. Baseball Hall of Fame ballots for the class of 2018 had to be postmarked as of Sunday, December 31, 2017. The final results will be announced January 24, but the angst is well underway. This year, in particular, the garden-variety question of who, on performance, merits induction, has been largely dominated by the public evaluation of a generation of original sinners, the steroid boys.

It’s been more than a decade since the first retired PED’s user came on the ballot, but this year’s discussion was juiced (sorry about that) by Hall of Famer Joe Morgan’s November letter to every member of the Baseball Writers Association of America (the voters) essentially begging them not to admit tainted candidates.

Morgan is right to be concerned. In a manner that mirrors the chaos and distrust in our political system, the fans and the writers are gradually turning towards acceptance of behavior that was once considered disqualifying. They aren’t alone—institutions and people in positions of authority are doing it as well. The Commissioner’s Office itself has a bifurcated approach—significant punishment for present users, but a queasy truce with the past. Retired offenders are no longer persona non grata. Fox Sports hired former litigant/third baseman Alex Rodriguez as a color commentator last season, and, if there was resistance from the league, it was very hard to hear. Other ex-players have begun to drift back into the game, and their presence no longer is seen as controversial. That couldn’t have happened without at least a wink and a nod from the Commissioner’s Office.

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More Legal by the Minute, More
Difficult to Fire

photo of a rightist with gun, FB 2016,
pistol pointed right at camera
barrel practically screwing the lens
bright silver halo at the business end
the moment the flash went off:
………………………………. lightning! lead
dressed in camouflage he was
neat.beard.militarish. intending
to be a threat maybe pretending
to be a threat who knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men?
of course, the shadow knows
but that was then on the radio
and it was fiction in a way
but there he was in 2016
and probably still is a year later
more trumped up with a sense of reality tv on steroids
becoming more legal by the minute
and more difficult to fire
.
.
Jim Culleny
12/29/17

—the Shadow

.

by Dave Maier

A reader writes in to ask a question about skepticism. Enrique asks:

I get confused with the dream argument. It confuses me to read the argument of the dream because I see several interpretations. Do they refer to the dreams we all experience while sleeping? Or do they refer to a class of dreams that has nothing to do with our sleeping bodies?

Enrique goes on to note that philosophers like Barry Stroud seem to equivocate when they talk about this argument, saying both that the argument refers to ordinary dreams (that is, the ones we have while sleeping) and at the same time that ordinary dreams do not pose any particular skeptical problem (although "philosophical dreams" do). In either case it seems that the dreaming argument is not where the real action is.

I agree with Enrique that the dream argument does not seem to get at what is really driving the skeptical worry. It’s true that a lot of philosophers address that argument specifically, which makes it look more important than it is, but Stroud is right that that’s not the real issue. And indeed there are a number of perfectly good answers to the dreaming argument in the literature, none of which put to rest the skeptical problem as a whole. So I advise noting the historical importance of the argument, but not to take it (or its refutations) too seriously. But since understanding the skeptical dialectic is essential for understanding modern philosophy, let’s go past that particular formulation to say more about skepticism in general. (See also an earlier post on the subject.)

One way of making progress here is to distinguish different kinds or aspects of the Cartesian commitments driving the modern skeptical dialectic. First, of course, we know that traditional Cartesian metaphysics divides the world into mind (res cogitans) and matter (res extensa), and we naturally think of the epistemological puzzles as following from that: if we are constituted as knowers by one sort of substance, how do we come to know about another sort of substance entirely? We are used to regarding our senses as delivering knowledge about the physical world, and indeed how could we not? But on Descartes’s mechanical conception of the physical body, our senses themselves are physical processes outside the mind, and thus on the other side of the metaphysical (and thus epistemological) gap. This is one thing making it look like dreaming is a good example: our purported sensory perception during the dream is itself (as it happens, and as we see when we wake up) a merely mental process – one which is, unfortunately for our knowledge, subjectively indistinguishable from “real” perception. But of course as we’ve noted this way of thinking of it leads to further puzzles.

We might do better to put the metaphysics to one side for now (but bring it back in at just the right time). The skeptical conclusion seems most dramatic when it concerns our knowledge of an “external world”, but its lasting significance has depended on considering it purely as an epistemological puzzle – that is, independently of what exactly it is that we seem both to know and (thanks to skeptical considerations) not to know. After all, the ancient skeptics didn’t need Descartes’s dualistic metaphysics to get their argument going, and they didn’t attack knowledge of the “external world” in particular.

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by Thomas Manuel

In both academia and in the minds of the general reading public, there seems to be a hierarchy when it comes to fiction. ‘Literary’ fiction is (infuriatingly) deemed to be more noteworthy than genre fiction, for example. Similarly, within the supercategory of genre fiction, there are some subtle, mystifying hierarchies. Most readers identify genres as sets of tropes, archetypes and milieus and know they’re employing purely subjective preferences when picking one set over another. But at the hands of many literary theorists, thought leaders and my mother, obscure aesthetic principles are deployed to bolster these hierarchies – such as the claim that science fiction is somehow more redeemable than fantasy fiction. This has gotten my one-horned, fire-breathing goat.

Dragons and faster-than-light travel

Science fiction possesses the heady connotations of science-ness, extrapolative thought experiments and futurism. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to lack any logical rules whatsoever and is thus relegated to the dustbin of escapism. Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone, opened one of the show’s episodes with the claim that science fiction was the improbable made possible and fantasy was the impossible made probable. While framing the dichotomy as the improbable versus the impossible is cool, it’s also completely wrong. As China Miéville once wrote, “a certain generic common-sense… has allowed generations of readers and writers to treat… faster-than-light drives as science-fictional in a way that dragons are not, despite repeated assurances from the great majority of physicists that the former are no less impossible than the latter.”[i] Science fiction’s embrace of the language of science and technology makes it seem particularly rational and forward-thinking but on closer inspection, exceeding the claims of science – being irrational – is one of the key features of the genre. And that’s okay.

If this fact has to be elided over at all in the popular discourse, it’s because the benevolent dictatorship of our Silicon Valley saviours depends to a certain extent on the blurring between the idea of science and technology – that iPhones somehow take us closer to Mars. The reputation of technology as the only thing that still works in a nonsensical world that’s choking on itself is propped up by a lot of questionable assumptions. A similar situation exists with the industry of futurism. These institutions never seem to like science fiction for the complex philosophical and moral questions it raises about the world as it exists today. How strange.

While space is cool, it’s the philosophical and moral weight of science fiction that makes it such an affecting experience as a child. We definitely come for the robots but we stay for the humanity.

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Daan Roosegaarde. Gates of Light. Windvogel. Glowing Nature. 2017.

Installations by Studio Roosegaarde.

by Leanne Ogasawara

It was 2011. I knew it wasn't going to be easy moving back in with my mom after all those years away. Two decades was a long time and now I had a little boy in tow.

But at least it was home, I thought.

My son would be going to the public elementary school I attended. He hardly spoke any English at all and couldn't read or write his own name, so he was a bit nervous on his first day. I decided to walk him over to make sure he found the room okay and didn't have any communication issues.

And it was the strangest thing. The suburban streets on the way to school were lined with big cars like the cars the secret service drives in the movies. Big and heavy-looking, they were everywhere. Wondering if something was happening, I asked in the office about it, but was told nothing special was happening that day. Then, later I told my mom about it only to be informed that no, those were the parents' cars of the kids being dropped off at school. She told me that everyone now in our neighborhood drove large minivans and SUVs. She hated the cars and hated what had become a big traffic jam every morning because of what she called "the drop off line."

So, let me get this straight, I thought. In the past twenty years, while people in Japan or Germany have been making use of light, fuel-efficient cars and public transportation, parents in the US started buying big cars to drive their kids to school everyday and wait in line while the car idle. Isn't that illegal? What about the bus?

Of all the things that I found myself unable to adjust to on my return, maybe the biggest shock of all was how little has changed in terms of the environment. Wait, let me rephrase that. people are talking about it a lot more. Maybe even talking in inverse proportion to lack of doing anything. A few things have gotten better but in general the consumption patterns are so much worse than I had even remembered. Today's hyper-consumerism: for me that is the bottom line.

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