Life is a Carnival

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly contemporized, denuded of childhood's native flora, stuccoed or in some other way hostile to the historical reenactments we expect of our former settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart sprouting in the demographic, in Street View's perpetual noon. With pale and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete. We sense a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold, though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old house. Look what they've done to it. Who thought this would be fun? A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store, cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity? Encore, applause, encore; it's almost like being there.