karen who escaped chicago to california showed me a picture of the mountain trail through bright yellow flowers leading the eye up to the heavenly peaks she walks, and we took her to our devastated man-made island with it's trundling fishermen and iridescent lagoon with radioactivity and petroleum seeping ever upward from the buried nuclear bunker. we showed her ono's death lotus and lamented it was the only lotus surviving for it would not and could not die. and we talked of how the autopilots will run you over here, while they all stop and wait for you like a cute ducking to cross in sunny california. and we were kind of queasy and kind of proud, being perverse, being survivors, being chicagoans.