It’s been a long time since I’ve posted to this thing, but it’s not as if anyone reads it anyway.
I recently took a trip home to Cascadia for the holidays. The molecular biology program was generous enough to give me seven whole days off. I miss being an undergrad, boozing it up and lazing about. Henry shares my sentiment, but unlike him I’m not making wads of cash.
In any case that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. As I was traveling at 32,000 feet in a non-Bernoullian fashion, I was struck by the strange geometry of America. There were fields of corn, wheat, and rye that resembled pie charts, and i wondered what they were counting. Was it nitrate concentrations? Water levels? Alien abductions in the general population? Everything in America seems to be strictly delineated and geometrically precise, except for the occasional dark blue river cutting a swath of jagged chaos through the carefully grid topography.
Cities seen from far above remind me of circuit boards, with streets for wires and buildings for resistors, diodes, and transistors. And it strikes me that this is not a fallacious imagining on my part. Circuits are designed to shuttle electrons around and make them useful. Cities seem to fulfill the same purpose for people, shunting them down paths to produce results.
Did I mention that I hate flying?
