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Frederick: These sensations these poems give me are haunting. Very similar to the scene in the 70's-80's of stateworkers in the Empre Plaza in Albany... And I agree about L. A., a city whose trouble is that it's a place where anything can happen and where somehow nothing happens. Yes, the lives this world lives through us! Gerald S. CV In that decade, adding machines at the U.S. Department of Labor in San Francisco covered a third of one’s desk; and, bored between totals, I would divide something by zero and listen to the endless grinding. In her spare time, Milly, surname forgotten, typed my novel, all five hundred pages. Immensely fat, diabetic (like me now), soft-spoken, she nevertheless stood up to our boss, officious and nasty, who had her own secret life. Otherwise the job involved continually updating binders full of directives for DOL programs that multiplied under Nixon: ill-designed, underfunded, intentionally (it was obvious) self-defeating. When I moved to Los Angeles, one of my quasi-imaginary, wise, sardonic informants said, “In this town there are wannabes and hasbeens.” “What if a wannabe,” I asked, “spends his entire life wanting?” “He becomes an *extreme hasbeen.” The Evolved The smile of a cultist, or an addict lying in a doorway; the virtual enthusiasm, world without end, of an arch-geek … One imagines something *less than ourselves. Or symbols: a winged sphinx, an inflexible golden circle, a light subtly dancing in the void. But what if you knew they were on the other side of a wall (every wall is a door, said Emerson, horribly), slumming a million years downscale – would you flee? What if they had no insignia? Only the glance that dissects instantaneously without interest or disgust, a kind of dreamy pity for you cowering on this side of the wall.