I went to the meeting of all the people in my state who teach what I teach at colleges. Except half of them were convened in a room in the big city, and the other half of us were connecting using something more cloudy and skypy. It lasted three hours.

The biggest deal about this was that the evil bastard who got me cut loose from the college up north would be there, and thus I would be outed, in terms of where I ended up afterwards.

And yet when I finally saw him on the video feed, my heart leapt with joy, because he looked fucking awful; much older and grayer and even unwell.

It was wrong of me, right? But I’m all too human. I just sang: karma, bitch.

Myself on the other hand, I looked handsome as hell, staring back at myself. No lie. No prejudice either I’m sure.

During the rest of the day, in and out of the car, there was a promo for some upcoming show on the radio, and one line of it went: “The shooter has no more hold over me”.

It had resonance in my own native language and to it I sang back again:

Walk like a coati.

Then I wrote memos. Hardware is dying, I said. Software is consuming the world. The virtual is overtaking the analog. The implication was that “we” should catch that wave and surf it forward.

But I am not of the We, in this case; they just don’t know it.

I have a kind of gun. I wear a kind of nonstandard fatigues.

Yet I am the soul civilian in the early stages of at last manifesting.