Sitting down after not writing for awhile feels like listening to the rumble of big turbines firing up in the hold of a city-sized ship. You stand up on deck in your new hat and your heavy wool coat watching seagulls overhead, preparing to wave to whomever you’re leaving behind, and then slowly, before you hear anything, you begin to feel a depth of sound vibrating in the soles of your feet, and it grows into a shudder, like an earthquake, which is accompanied by a whining scream and periodic clanking until you realize what you’re feeling is fear. You can’t visualize what’s happening down there in the machinery, for one thing. Maybe it smells like diesel and bilge water. Maybe sweat-streaked workmen in grubby overalls are yanking on huge levers and monitoring valves and shouting to one another over the din. There must be a large store of fuel down there, coal maybe, or something more instantaneously flammable, like petroleum, or—even more frightening to consider—something explosive. Possibly nuclear.
What it sounds like, basically, is danger. And inevitability.
Where are you going, exactly? And why aren’t the people you’re waving to going with you?
Shouldn’t the process of booting up your laptop—the dainty pressing of a single M&M-sized button—while you sit in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, drinking tea in your pajamas, feel tame and predictable? Relatively risk-free?
It doesn’t.
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