
No Easy Way Down
Someone said to her: “Are your avocados in the oven?”
To which she said: “Excuse me. Do I know you?”
“You are very angry, aren’t you?”
“Again, do I know you, sir?”
He moved about her in a drunken semi-circle and professed: “I am a visionary, missy. I see things you can’t imagine. Hexagons. Bike routes to heaven. Heathen paths to perdition and desolation.” He adjusted the rope he wore as a belt and riled himself up for a jeremiad, but she turned and walked away.
Clarity would wait another day. Another day in the southern city. Clear as a cross-oceanic Saharan dust storm—which are becoming regular fixtures of this anthropogenic age.

“We’re seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert / The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History