The Cascades have beckoned me half my life now.

San Francisco's utter urbanity, its seeming civility & existential exigencies of the extreme become ever more distant, both in space and in time.

Gone now are the grayness & the gayness, the bigness and the badness, the glibness and the madness, the gritty grimness and the pestilential sadness.

The Revolution wrought by Reagan has surely receded.

The objective of perspective not necessarily needed.

The City's separate sense of identity seems semi-sweetly swept away now in my life.

Who can tell, one day His Honor Mayor Brown may even forsake his fiefdom and finally take himself a wife.

Generations from now, when Halley's Comet makes its inevitable return back past the Earth, will anyone then alive remember to open up my own little tragi-comic time capsule of mid-life angst, written as I sat and wondered with Otis on the Dock of the Bay?

I very much doubt it.

The essential essence of one solitary, self-aware, even self-absorbed sense of a persistently single man's meandering path on a spinning and tilted cobalt ball of stellar flotsam & jetsam is no more relevant than the gurgles, bubbles and swills of a sylvan brook.

Whose rain drops and ice melt are so far removed from the channels, locks and shipping lanes of a great river.

In May I shall flee the waters whence I came.

Farewell to the Ashippun, the Bark, the Oconomowoc, the Fox, the Rock and the Wisconsin.

Their melded journeys as they form and flow toward the Mighty Mississippi, currents churning relentlessly downstream like the “City of New Orleans”, surging on toward the Gulf shall now flow on without me.