The Meatspace Times

Light fog makes the middle distance a realm of possibility. Out there, half hidden, a troop of horse waits to advance, swaggering bands of plastic Santas and garden gnomes plot the New Age.

In the trees green is gray and squirrels run respectfully as though in church.

The half-seen gives us a license that the fully illuminated does not. It is impossible not to speculate about the fog-shrouded. What lies behind and just out of reach? In fog the actuary becomes a poet, the analytical chemist a peyote-smoked visionary, and the realm of myth gains subjects by the hundreds. We can't not look for something else, it seems, even if we are not all that discontent or imaginatively unengaged in what is.

We can be perfectly happy with our two by fours and our cars that start and don't look too bad, our reasonable health and pleasant enough neighbors, and still probe the fog for more, for some unspecified Other that will astonish, delight, and terrify.

"This can't be it," we say, not so much complaining as voicing a deep belief. We want, by God, our magic.