Matthew Gallaway

I Skipped the Nevada Debate and Went to a Metal Show (Torche)

I bought tickets to see Torche at Saint Vitus before I realized that the show was on the same night as the Nevada presidential debate, which like all parts of the nomination process I've been following closely. As much as I was looking forward to seeing Michael Bloomberg get eviscerated -- something I predicted before the debate (just ask my cats) -- I wasn't about to skip the show. I discovered Torche a few months ago by way of a tour preview on BrooklynVegan; I won't pretend to know anything about the contemporary metal scene (except that there are a lot of sub-genres, and that one of my favorite bands from last year was a metal-adjacent Belgian band called Bruno), but the Torche song featured on the post -- 'Admission' -- was intriguing to me: it sounded like some of my favorite post-hardcore bands of the 1980s (Hüsker Dü) with a tremolo-bar shoe-gaze sheen by way of My Bloody Valentine. The rest of the album was more recognizably metal, although I would say it's more dirge-like with metal 'references' -- certain chord progressions, drum fills, the inflection of the singer's voice, and so on -- than what I would typically associate with 'metal.' If you Google the band, their genres are listed as 'sludge metal' and 'stoner rock,' which paints a basic but not-completely-inaccurate picture, as labels tend to do. Another reason I was intrigued: when I saw the band photo, my gaydar went off, and it only took two clicks to learn that the singer/guitarist Steve Brooks is, in fact, gay. (Sometimes gaydar works.) I soon had tickets to see them. As someone who sometimes feels like an empty circle in the Venn Diagram of Contemporary Gay Culture, I wanted to know more about what was happening in the gay corners of sludge metal.    

After taking the 2 to the L to the G and walking ten blocks north on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, I found the club, which thanks to its lack of signage and windows also had interesting parallels with a kind of gay bar slash sex dungeon that (to my knowledge) has mostly gone the way of the dinosaur. I felt a little nervous about going in, which I'm sure was just a residual reaction to the dread and longing I used to feel contemplating the idea of going into a gay bar.  

Inside felt more familiar. I had spent thousands of hours in similar venues all over the continent and abroad. The club comprised two rooms; in one, a long bar, in the other, a small (but perfect) performance space, maybe big enough for 250 people or so. The bathroom, heavily stickered and decrepit, reminded me of hundreds of others I had seen (and used) back in the day, with the worst BY FAR being the one in the basement of CBGB. (If there's a museum somewhere dedicated to CBGB, I hope they reconstructed the bathroom, because there was nothing else like it.) Back at the bar, I spent time analyzing the crowd: no surprise, it was mostly male and mostly white (in probably Iowa/New Hampshire/Park Slope percentages if I had to guess). (I didn't see any MAGA gear, however.) Most were 25-45 and many were appealingly sturdy in build. There was a certain look -- beard, leather/flannel, maybe a pocket chain -- that made it sometimes difficult to say whether the guy in question was 1) a metal fan, 2) a gay leather bear, or 3) both. According to an interview I read with Steve Brooks, the band doesn't have a large gay following; he lamented that Torche has never been asked to march in a Pride event and that he once received a fan letter telling him to enjoy the 'hot chicks' in Sweden. (File under: the dispiriting fan letters of straight men.) Having some experience in gay crowd assessment, I can say with confidence that there were some fellow gays at the show; like always, how many was a question, but there were some, which is always better than none. 

The band was amazing. They opened by playing the first four or five songs from their latest record -- the one I'd been listening to -- which for a few minutes made me feel young. It's hard to describe how loud it was; every kick of the bass drum and every bass note felt like a hammer ripping through my chest as a Category 5 hurricane of guitars lashed down from above. (I had thick gobs of wax in my ears.) A mosh pit formed and dissolved and formed again, like tide pools. I stayed on the fringes, admiring a pair of tall women who were in the thick of it. It was a polite mosh pit; someone's glasses were knocked off and people stopped so that he could pick them up. Mostly I felt blanketed by the wall of sound. It was headbanger music. I loved it. 

There's something very purifying about being immersed in music that for building blocks uses a kind of primeval anger and impulse for violence -- music that, to appreciate it, demands that you literally 'bang your head' -- to construct something towering and beautiful. After the show, as I thought about the debates I had missed and the underlying political process of our times, I realized (not for the first time) that one of the reasons I support Bernie (first) and Elizabeth (second) far more than any other candidate is because they also give voice to a kind of deep, fundamental anger with the hope to transform it into something good, something helpful, something that will benefit more than it will harm. When people claim that Bernie supporters are 'too angry' or that Elizabeth is 'too strident' (or whatever they said after the debate), it always seems to me that these critics -- let's call them 'moderates' -- are positioned in a place where 'change' might seem desirable in an abstract but incremental way, but they don't know what it's like to be erased or marginalized or otherwise oppressed by a class of corporate management drones like Michael Bloomberg (never mind Donald Trump). 

We live in angry times. There are countless good reasons to be angry. It seems pointless to deny it and better to recognize it, to harness it before it leads to actual (as opposed to symbolic) violence. (Or more violence than we already have.) 

In the same way anger has a place in art, it has a place in politics.  

The Week in Pictures: February 7 - February 15

SUNDAY

At home with the cats, Zephyr and Clio getting along. 

A look of death from Clio. 

Elektra stays above the fray. 

Clio in a better mood. 

MONDAY

I like the rain on the city streets, the streaky lights, the windy chaos. (It helped that I was only three blocks from home.) 

Broadway around 7:00 am. 

The rain reminded me that there's been almost no snow this winter. 

I've always liked this block. The apartment buildings are decorative without being ostentatious. I always think about how much nicer it will be when we eliminate private car storage on public streets ('parking'). (My prediction is that this will happen within ten years.) 

Meanwhile, our local NYFD members have taken to parking on the sidewalks, which is another way the rule of law breaks down under the current administration. 

Bikers also park on the sidewalk, but in their case, it's understandable given that they have no place to park on the street, which *should* be their right as much as car owners. Here's a radical idea: how about we eliminate two parking spots on every side of every block and replace them with bike corrals. 

Our current mayor hates bikers, though, so we're going to have to pin our hopes on the next one (or move to Paris). 

TUESDAY

As the New Hampshire primaries started, I was going to tweet about how the youth were rushing to the polls and somehow use this picture from our garden as a metaphor. (This tweet did not see the light of day.) 

On the way to the accountant, I remembered how I used to walk through Bryant Park every morning on my way to a job I detested. This park now feels like an old friend. 

This statue in front of the New York Public Library is another old friend ;)

This stretch of Seventh Avenue also used to be part of a different commute. 

WEDNESDAY

It finally stopped raining on Wednesday. One of the things I love about my Planet Fitness is that it has beautiful views from the treadmills and ellipticals.  

THURSDAY

Lately, I've been trying to find things to love about the Financial District -- where I work now in a much better job -- such as the afternoon light on these columns. I often think about Darlene Alderson when I'm walking around, which makes me feel a little optimistic, because she hacked the bank accounts of the richest people in the world and gave the money to literally everyone. (The show made this seem pretty easy?)

FRIDAY

On Friday I took my guitars to a 'guitar guy' to be set up. He works out of his apartment, which used to be on the Upper West Side but is now in the 140s, which meant I could walk home. I passed the Invisible Man sculpture and plaque in honor of Ralph Ellison: 'The very idea of being in New York was dreamlike ... ' 

SATURDAY

Saturday arrived sunny and cold, but with the orchids in bloom. 

It Was a Hard Week, Let's Go to the Heather Garden

As you would expect in early February, most of the park is still asleep, which makes the flowering heather that much more beautiful, almost surreal. 

There's no snow this year, but the dried oak leaves and bare trees are a reminder of the season. 

As are the low, gray skies. 

I don't know exactly why I feel calm and hopeful when I'm walking through the heather. It's not like anything has changed anywhere else, and it's not like I've forgotten the rest of the world. 

Viewed by itself, a single plant is often scraggly and unkempt, lonely in the hard dirt. 

But a patchwork -- flowering in shades of red and white and purple -- is reminder of how a transformative landscape is always greater than the sum of its parts.   

One Night in the TWA Hotel

Our hotel room at the TWA Hotel at JFK overlooked a runway, which meant we were only a few hundred yards from the many airplanes lined up for takeoff. It was strange to take this in without any of the usual pressures and indignities of postmodern travel: there were no other people in the room, nobody coughing, crying, or laughing, nobody checking their phone for the latest gate change, nobody fighting with an airline employee, nobody ordering airport food from a tablet, nobody settling in for the night on three lounge chairs under a coat. The collective nightmare of the terminal had been replaced by a serene chamber in which you could suspend all knowledge of the hordes and their corporate overlords, in which you could believe that the last fifty or so years hadn't happened, or in which you had somehow stepped into a different universe filled with order and tranquility. 'I could get used to this,' I said, thumbing through a LIFE magazine from 1963.   

The furniture and design of the room added to this surreal effect. Stephen and I began taking notes: would it be feasible to cover at least 30 percent of the walls in our house with this vertical slotted wood? Paint seemed so predictable; wallpaper was even worse. The lamp reminded me of a similar model -- albeit a desk lamp -- my oldest brother had in his bedroom in the house where we grew up in the early 1970s, when I was a young kid and he was a teenager. I understood that I was in the grips of a nostalgic frenzy, but I didn't care: it felt good to be assuaged by these relics and reproductions from a past that felt remote but not unlived. I wanted it to last indefinitely. 

Eventually, Stephen and I roused ourselves from our stupor and explored the former terminal. Every curve, every step, and every tile had -- as far as I could tell -- been perfectly restored. I had forgotten what it felt like to be awakened and stimulated by architecture. This  building, it seemed, was the opposite of the surveillance/luxury nightmare that is Hudson Yards, for example, or even the Oculus, which though open to all still feels like a cathedral to capitalism. Here, although the main room was open, there were many pools of space -- in, around, and under the staircases and platforms -- that, in contrast to the terminals we have now, offered a sense of privacy and refuge. There was no barrage of advertising or purchasing opportunities.

The hallways were long and devoid of any branding, except for the TWA red, which, given that TWA is dead, added to the nostalgia. Imagine if, every time you went to a new place, you were able to walk through a passage like this, with thick padded carpet and blank walls. Imagine if you were able to walk through a hallway like this and board a plane. Why would you ever care about anything else? In retrospect, this sense of escape -- when combined with a relentless individualism or selfishness -- seems like more a problem than a solution. 

The illusion of living in the past only began to break down when we went to a cocktail lounge that had been crafted into the interior of an old plane. Like everything at this hotel -- and every upscale hotel -- the drinks were expensive. It was a reminder that this experience -- by which I mean an immersion into a stimulating, optimistic architectural environment or museum set from the past -- was beyond the reach of most, which is an economic reality of the society we've built over the last fifty years. 

The illusion was further shattered by an uncomfortable proximity to the people who can afford this kind of experience, by which I mean the British man sitting next to us who was mansplaining the benefits of a leader like Margaret Thatcher to his American female companion who had suggested her preference for Elizabeth Warren; or the group of investors who spoke of football scores and the best resorts in the Caribbean (with one criteria: to make their demanding wives happy).

Listening to these conversations, I had to wonder: were we also horrible, oblivious members of a privileged class of people? Granted, we were only staying one night, and it was a bit of splurge, but how do you draw a line in these times? My sense is that if it were actually drawn -- using any number of metrics -- a lot of us would be surprised to find ourselves on the wrong side of it. It was, I realized after we left the cramped bar, more comfortable to view people from a distance, to against immerse ourselves into a nostalgic haze, to imagine that, by virtue of being in this building, we were aligned in collective our desire to make society modern and equitable, accessible and hopeful. 

The next morning, the hotel, which no longer serves as an actual terminal, looked a little sad from across the road. It was not very big, and the vintage cars in the parking lot made it look like a carnival after the lights are off and the tents have been taken down. 

I reminded myself to remember the glowing passageways, a symbol of the possibility we all need of moving from somewhere old to somewhere new. 

Into the Fog

1. On this day, the last Sunday of the decade, the fog settled into the Pennsylvania hills, blanketing the trees, bringing the sky down to the earth. As I looked out the window of the car and thought about the coming months and years, I felt a mix of satisfaction and unease. Important things in my life -- my relationship, my publishing job -- felt relatively settled, and for that I was thankful, but there was another part of me, the part I think about as my 'artistic' life, that seemed stagnant. I was tired of doing the same things over and over, of trying to recapture something ephemeral from my past. I had a tune stuck in my head, a part of a song -- 'NYC' by Interpol -- I had loved for a long time and had recently taught myself to play on the guitar. I could almost hear the hushed backing vocals in the chorus: 'Got to be some more change in my life (New York cares) got to be some more change in my life (New York cares) ....' Over and over, it becomes a directive, a mantra, a suicide note, a rebirth. 

2. My brother, his daughter (my niece), and I had just spent the weekend in Pittsburgh with our parents and a collection of other relatives to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. The party had gone well. In addition to immediate and extended family, the guest list included friends who had known my father for decades and my father's weekly poker game buddies; almost 100 people in total. My brother gave a short, funny tribute -- 'my father taught me to hate utilities' -- that was followed by one of the poker guys. 'Dave plays the craziest games and [following an aside from a guy across the table] -- oh right -- he cheats all the time!' My father, eyes watery in the light, went last. He stood between the round tables and slowly turned on wobbly legs. His voice and hands trembled as he spoke through the microphone in a barely audible voice, first thanking my mother and then offering a few words to express his relief that none of his five children were in jail or addicted to drugs, that we were all good citizens. Everyone clapped, the music played, and people ate and drank and danced. 

3. I didn't think much about it at the time, but in the days that followed, I found myself returning to my father's speech. Though I couldn't immediately explain how or why, his words seemed to reflect the yearning for change I was starting to acknowledge in myself. I felt a level of compassion for my father that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, when he drifted into the Fox News wing of the Republican Party and helped elect Trump. I had viewed his actions as a transgression against who I was -- not to mention everything I wanted our society to be -- but I now found it difficult to summon my earlier anger. Yes, we would always live on different planets, but it seemed to me that he, simply by growing old, had become a different person. More than his frailty, the way he had framed his expectations for us, his children -- though maybe a little crass -- struck me as honest in a way that so much of our past did not. For my entire life, my father had been competitive in the extreme; playing -- and winning -- had often seemed like the most important facet of his life and, by extension, ours. It was one of the reasons why, when we were growing up, we all played sports; consciously or not, it was playing sports -- and being good at them -- that, in our eyes, made us valuable to our father; it was how we earned his admiration, respect, and -- ultimately -- his love. But that version of my father -- and us -- was now gone, leaving an absence that felt somewhat miraculous to me, for it offered the potential of change when I assumed there could be none. 

4. It's a psychological truth or cliché (or both) that, in order to become adults, we must learn to parent ourselves. Just as we possess an inner child, we have an inner mother and father, and while these inner parents may ultimately bear little resemblance to our biological ones, my experience is that the relationship and dialogue between these parties, particularly when we are younger, reflects the strengths and weaknesses of our own childhood.  

5. It now occurred to me that, for as long as I had considered myself an artist, I had treated my artistic self in a manner that reflected the childhood relationship between me and my father. It was a relationship based on performance and discipline, of refusing to acknowledge defeat (and of framing life in terms of winning and losing). I didn't regret this kind of self-parenting; nobody learns to play an instrument or writes novels without possessing an internal voice that demands we practice or sit down to put some words on the page when the countless distractions of life beckon. And that's how I spent much of my time over the last fifteen years, putting words on a page, approaching the exercise with the same discipline I had learned from my father -- and coaches -- playing sports. As an adult -- even a gay adult -- I was no different. It didn't matter if I felt uninspired, or if I was tired or maybe wanted to watch some television; I just set aside the time to write and did it. This perseverance was -- or had been -- pleasing to me, or at least the part of me that felt like I was accomplishing something intrinsically worthwhile. And looking back, I feel like it was worthwhile, because I made records and wrote books that allowed me -- although I wasn't aware of this at the time -- to engage in a kind of cultural conversation that located me within a generation or era, and this sense of participation in something 'bigger' than myself, particularly in retrospect, allows me to identify (and, sometimes, identify with) the forces that shaped me. In short, it's because of my art that I feel as though I lived through something tangible (and artistic) that has nothing to do with nostalgia or -- worst of all -- its commidification.   

6. But having marked my past in this manner, I was less sure that I needed to continue, or at least in the same way. I'm already fifty-one year old. Do I want to spend the next (or last) fifteen or thirty years of my life writing novels? Or is there maybe something else I could turn my attention to that would offer similar rewards but without the punishing discipline and disappointment I associated with writing fiction? Obviously, if I were a celebrated novelist receiving big advances for each new work, it would be a more enticing proposition. But I felt burned out on that dream, in part because I had done it once and could only look back at the commercial side of the venture with ambivalence. I realized that I could lower my expectations for my works of art. Like my father with respect to his children, I could be grateful for their presence beside me.  

7. Having dispensed with the daily routine of writing, I've started playing the guitar again, but mostly just learning songs I've always loved instead of writing my own. I need to bring my acoustic guitar into the shop for some repairs, but I'm no hurry. It feels good to have the callouses back on my fingertips. I'm taking photographs and deleting them from my phone. I'm looking forward to spending time in the garden this spring with Stephen and the cats, to walking the streets of my neighborhood, to running under the George Washington Bridge, to hearing the seagulls as they turn and dive over the lighthouse. 

8. As for this blog, I don't plan to post on a weekly basis, the way I did for the past few years. I knew it was becoming stale. I had reduced my subject matter to gardens and cats and the occasional observation about life in a time of small hopes and endless despair. But I have no plans to abandon it, either. I will always love blogging as both a form -- the perfect combination of text and images -- and the era it represents, when the internet felt like a place of opportunity and connection instead of capitalism and surveillance. 

9. A few days ago, I found these pictures on my phone and asked myself if I was ready to post something new. I decided that, if I could describe the silver fog and the whisper of the trees, I was. 

The Year in Review

1. In January, the frozen landscape felt hard and unforgiving. 

2. In February it snowed, and somehow the snow seemed softer, until you touched it with your naked fingers and wondered: "How do the plants survive?" 

3. In March, the spring bulbs began to appear. "Where do they come from?" is a natural question to ask until you remember that you planted them yourself last fall, or maybe the one before that. 

4. As it does every year, the ancient dogwood flowered in April. 

5. Clouds of azaleas floated across the park in May. So much color made us feel hopeful for a little while. 

6. In June, the peonies began to lose their petals, but -- whether because of resignation or desperation -- they still looked beautiful. (Or that's what we tried to tell ourselves.)

7. In July, everything that had seemed so magical a few months ago began to feel oppressive and garish. 

8. In August, Dante died and the park -- ambivalent and serene, somehow muted -- offered comfort. 

9. In September, the autumn light began to slant down through the turning leaves.  

10. The butterflies came and went in October. 

11. November was marked by long shadows and thin hopes. 

12. December turned cold, a reminder that the year -- like all of the others before it -- was finally coming to an end. 

The Politics of Evasion

1. Lately I've been running without a watch, which raises an increasingly relevant question: namely, if you run without recording the time, pace, distance, heart rate, and calories burned, have you even run at all? 

2. I want to say the answer is yes, of course I ran, but there's a part of me that, over that past decade or so, has been conditioned to answer in the negative, that if I do something that isn't somehow monitored, tracked, and measured, than I haven't done it at all. 

3. Exercise has been ruined by this kind of data-tracking obsession, although I'm trying to resist; book reading is another area where I'm trying not to record what I've read. Would you believe that sometimes I read books and don't rate them on Goodreads or Amazon, or discuss them with a book club, or even Tweet about them? It's true. I check many books out of the New York Public Library, read them, and return them without comment. I'm trying not to feel guilty about it. 

4. Sometimes I miss the garden in the winter, because gardening is an activity that hasn't been completely colonized by apps and digital performance. If I were rating the beauty of the snow on the orange dogwood leaves, however, I would give it five stars. 

5. It's more fun to rate things that can't be bought or sold, like watching a wild gray panther pad across the rocks of a snowy mountain range. 

6. This decade was all about digital tracking; the next one is going to be about disappearing without a trace. 

 

Every Landscape Is Political

1. As I walked through the park, which in late fall had become a comforting assortment of browns, greens, and grays, I tried to imagine the mindset of a conservative. From what I've gathered, there are millions of them, and their representatives and allies are currently holding the most important jobs in the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of our federal government. Many more can be found running things at the state and local level. But what do conservatives think about as they go through their days? Do they not encounter the same problems as other non-conservative people? Do they not wait for hours on hold with their banks and insurance companies and cable television/internet-service monopolies? Do they not have high co-pays and deductibles? Do they not feel the water on their ankles and knees when the tide comes in or when there's a rainstorm? If so, what is their response? What are the solutions they envision to the problems they encounter?   

2. In some respects, the answers are obvious enough: they would deport, incarcerate, or eliminate anyone who wasn't white or straight (and many who were) or whose net worth fell below a certain threshold TBD; they would allow businesses to operate completely unfettered by environmental, financial, labor, or antitrust regulations; they would build up the army to prevent other countries from invading our lands (or cyber lands) with their armies and to protect companies operating outside of our borders. They would drive everywhere in their Tesla Cybertucks. But then what? In short, what does the future look like for a conservative?  

3. For a test case, I decided to focus on climate change. As far as I can tell, there seems to be one conservative answer, which is to gamble that we can 1) find another planet after we've depleted this one, or 2) engineer a technical solution that would restore some semblance of climate stability. As for the first option, I suppose it's possible, given the size of the universe, that the earth is merely one of an uncountable number of planets, the destruction of which is no more consequential than, say, crushing a little piece of styrofoam. As for the second, it will require a lot of technological wizardry -- and we've seen how well that's going with the internet -- and it also implies a kind of satisfaction with the status quo, namely that if we could 'fix' climate change, we could continue to drive (and park) and fly and consume indefinitely without any serious consequences. 

4. I was beginning to worry that our conservative rulers (who can be found in both parties) were incapable of acknowledging the implicit relationship between the passage of time and change.  

5. Here's what I could say for sure: there are parts of the park that come to life, even as the rest of it prepares for winter. 

6. And the colors are perfect, for all who are willing to behold. 

 

The Architecture of Elm Trees

1. When I got out of the subway station at Amsterdam and 163rd, the sky was filled with pigeons. Perched on the tops of the surrounding buildings, they circled in waves over the intersection of Saint Nicholas and Amsterdam, which served as a kind of parade grounds for the birds. 

2. Earlier that day, I had gone to my office, which is in the same neighborhood as one of the buildings regularly featured in Mr. Robot. I think one of the things that keeps people in New York City is the sense that your life isn't quite real because so often you pass buildings and streets that you've seen on television. As you walk around doing the same things as everyone else -- going back and forth to work, maybe going out for lunch or dinner or drinks -- this odd familiarity and dislocation gives you the feeling that somehow you're secretly on television, too, performing for an imaginary audience, which makes you feel important, maybe a little famous. One thing television never gets right, though, is how long it takes to get from one part of the city to another. In a recent episode of Mr. Robot, Elliot, running away from the 'Dark Army,' sprints into Central Park at 57th Street and two seconds later is running down the steps toward the Bethesda Fountain, and then a few seconds after that is escaping onto a bus on 110th Street. A real show about New York would spend most of every episode sitting on a subway in a tunnel waiting to pull into the next station, but I guess that wouldn't make for very compelling drama.  

3. Back in the park, I found another kind of comforting illusion, the kind where the rest of world doesn't exist. 

4. Looking at the red berries, my mind returned to the recent season of The Great British Bake Off, in which -- several times -- Prue Leith said something along the lines that blueberries have no flavor. It was a potentially alarming idea, given that I've long considered blueberries to be one of my favorite kinds of fruit. I guess they don't have a ton of flavor, but I think they fall on a very subtle line between sweet and tart, and that subtlety is part of the appeal. Maybe the problem is not blueberries, but that we live in unsubtle times. 

5. I always forget how much I love this ancient birch tree until the leaves have fallen off. 

6. If I were running the world, I would shut down every other block in the city to cars and instead have a series of narrow paths lined with garden plots.  

7. The elm trees also look impressive without their leaves. Over the past 100 years, something like 50 million elm trees in North America have died from Dutch Elm Disease. You have to wonder if our country would still be falling apart if these trees were still around, entrancing people with their magical branches. If something vanishes without 'impacting the GDP' has it even existed? 

8. It was time to leave the park, at least for now. I said goodbye to the heather garden, which looked like a tropical reef. 

9. Like the pigeons, I continued my infinite circles around Washington Heights, always under the watch of the George Washington Bridge. 

November Views of the George Washington Bridge

1. After the resumption of standard time, the afternoons became very short and the shadows very long.

2. The light was disorienting but beautiful.

3. I tried not to think about anything except the air, the sun, and my hope that the media would accept the fact that a majority of Democratic voters support the kind of institutional change espoused by the two most progressive candidates, and not the incremental change represented by the other candidates. There is, I thought, only one bridge to the future. And then I stopped thinking about anything but the air and the sun.

4. I parked my bike and walked to the steps, which offered a better view.

5. In the distance, I could see a bridge or the shadow of a bridge, behind which the sun was sinking fast.