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Comfort At a certain moment happiness is achieved and the next stage begins: inviting the dead, in the form they had when living, though new and improved, to check out the scene. Most join. Some say they’ll wait for Jesus. A few have issues around the issue of boredom, and changes to the brain that remove it while supposedly safeguarding brains. I’m one of those. No problem, says happiness, setting off in a gaudy, gigantic, improbable craft for parties in other dimensions. Take your time – what else is it for? I’ll be back. I hope that, while we wait and make up our minds, you’ll stay with me, listening with our old brains for years of weekends to our young bodies. How they missed us, how much they have to say! Though I wonder whether I’ll soon be as stupid as I was at twenty. And if you’ll still want me. A place near a tamed and cleaned-up ocean will help – you love the water, I can forego mountains. And our cats, all our cats, running freely and safely at last after rodents, delicious, bloody, and visible only to them. Old West Photos Boulders balance like gymnasts on boulders, boulders lean against cliffs, and the surveyor atop a boulder atop a cliff gives no scale whatever to the desert and mountains beyond. The chief has surrendered, to save his hundred followers and their hundred children. He has submitted to the army, the reservation, and whisky. Sometime later someone dresses him in buckskin, hands him a rifle, stands him before painted mountains and a papier-mâché stump. Look fierce. I can look fierce, thinks the chief. The crags are there, the arroyos deeper than ever. Wasi'chu will not see that what was basalt is now limestone, mud. The sheriff, girdled, overslung with metal and leather, looks like the hero of a medieval epic, and almost as stupid. Then there are twenty pages of guns attended, nursed, by groups. Cowboys, bankers. A Protective Association. Women have the air of women among men without women. Pinkertons have bowlers. Striking miners, Wobblies may or may not have some expression beyond the norm. Which the grain of the photos, the grime of faces and clothes set in stone. Notes: Wasi'chu --- Lakota (Sioux Indian) term for whites. Means "greedy," "cruel," "stupid." Pinkertons --- Pinkerton Detective Agency was a kind of domestic 19th-century Blackwater for the ruling class. Broke strikes, killed unionists, broke up demonstrations as well as guarding mines, houses, capitalists, etc. Wobblies --- members of the International Workers of the World, a Marxist-influenced but generally anarcho-syndicalist outfit whose motto was "One Big Union." Organized miners, some other workers west of the Mississippi. IWW still exists though of course very small.