The man riding the shuttle with me was going through it. He’d recently moved back here, his childhood home, now that he is in his 60s—from Seattle—and he was being treated with suspicion and contempt, like an outsider, by people who’d only been here ten years. As if ten years was anything! He was furious, indignant, hurt.

He was sitting behind me—I was sitting up front with the shuttle driver—so it was a bit like talking on the phone. I’d relocated from West Hollywood, I told him, answering his direct question.

“So you’re getting bullied, too!” the man said to me.

“Well, usually I keep my mouth shut,” I teased him. “This time I felt compelled to share.”

We had been talking about the town’s slow decision to install more traffic lights. “I always thought I’d be a great city planner,” I muttered. “Thanks to… playing SimCity.” The driver and passenger both snickered.

The town lacks the infrastructure to support new residents. Naturally, apprehension, even overt anger, is leveled at real estate developers, at the county commissioner, and at all out-of-towners. (I keep trying to pull focus over to Flock cameras and datacenters and the corporate privatization of the surveillance state, but it’s an uphill battle, since the threat of outsiders is an easy and obvious scapegoat. I don’t know enough about golf to start shit about golf courses and golfing.)

I haven’t personally been antagonized, of course; I just repeatedly get told that antagonism happens. It’s happening to a faceless Other that no one has actually seen or met, I suppose.

“You lay out the town on a grid,” I continued. “You eyeball the town and zone it. Industry here, agriculture over there, residential, commercial.” Infrastructure. A little vision, a little foresight. “Then Godzilla comes. You survive disaster, you rebuild.” I sighed. “SimCity never covered traffic lights.” The men laughed again.

But now the man was upset. He was being treated by aggressive townspeople like an outsider, when he wasn’t! He couldn’t understand how quickly he’d been targeted, dragged into conflict.

A stranger had been sitting in front of the man at a high school football game, some distance away, had overheard the man—had whipped around in his seat and asked him if he had a kid playing on the team. The man had admitted, a little defensively, that he did not, and that he was a recent transplant from Seattle. Upon learning this, the stranger had asked him how it felt to watch his town burn down.

“This is a very generous read,” I said to him carefully, after some silence, “but maybe that guy believed he was making friends with you?” I became wry: “I mean, he was basically calling you a refugee,” I noted dryly. Perhaps the fellow football fan had expected to find some common sociopolitical ground, had gone poking around for it.

Well, the stranger had definitely wanted to talk, the man agreed vehemently—sharing all his thoughts on the state of the world, a firehosing. “And now you’re trapped there listening to some guy’s… podcast,” he fumed. I buried my face in my hands, my eyes watering, while the shuttle driver guffawed.

“You know, my best friend’s son is a teenager now,” I said slowly, after another long silence. “He’s reached that age”—I thought of the kid in the kitchen, sneaking up behind his baby sister, ambushing her with a tackle—“where he maybe thinks of conflict as connection.”

The man sitting behind me was quiet for a moment. “Yeah, well, this guy was like 40,” he finally grumbled.

I laughed. “I’m saying!” I said. The shuttle driver laughed, too.

Anyway, I understood the real reason the man sitting behind me was so bothered; I’d deliberately delayed validating him. I acknowledged it now. “That is weird, though, how the stranger just… picked you out of a crowd like that.”

“It is!” the man exploded.

“Radar,” I said, shaking my head.

The man ventured a guess as to what might’ve marked him as an outsider, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. He marveled that his own guess didn’t make a lot of sense.

“Maybe,” I finally chirped, letting the man’s uncertainty remain uncontested. You’re supposed to look at the trend, at all the other times you felt scapegoated or villainized or excluded, when you knew for a fact you actually fit in and belonged, I thought to myself, but I wisely kept my trap shut, since that’s my task, too.↩

Then the child wanted to help me clean. I appreciate that she sees so much romance in it—plus it helps her burn off a little anxious energy. I presented her with the spray bottle.

She marveled at how beautifully and easily every little mess wiped up with just a single magic swipe of her hand. She remarked on all the little specks and spatters around the coffeemaker.

“Yep, every time someone makes a cup of coffee,” I told her, “there’s a little splatter. It really makes you appreciate where a mess comes from, huh?” I sighed happily. “It’s no one’s fault. It just happens, because people live here. It’s the signs of life.” I was describing entropy to her, but not too hard.

A few days before, I’d asked her if she’d happened to step on a potato chip earlier. The child had stooped to examine the remains of a potato chip on the floor, assessing it out loud. “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I’d said to her—not really looking to assign blame for the crumbled chip—“you can help out anyway.” I’d presented her with a handheld vac: a responsibility. The child’s mom had walked in just as I was coaching her daughter: “Maybe angle the vacuum so that it’s almost kissing the floor. Yes, exactly! Just like, uh, calligraphy. HELLO,” I said, then, to the child’s mother.

Now the child was narrating what she was doing. Eventually I shambled over. “What are you muttering about over here?” I asked her, amused. “Are you talking to yourself?”

The child’s mother was exasperated. “Why don’t you ever clean at home,” she exclaimed to her small fry. I whispered something about it being true that other homes are more fun to clean than one’s own. The child’s mother left the kitchen, frazzled.

Her mother’s observation was true, though: the child had glowered at me darkly when I’d gently suggested she wipe up where she herself had eaten breakfast earlier. She was wary of cleaning up that mess in case it meant accepting blame for the mess made. But she sees me tidying all the time! Cleaning up a mess—doing the thing that must be done—isn’t the same thing as admitting that you made the mess. (And I’m not claiming to love tidying others’ messes, either, for sure—but I’ll gladly wipe down a countertop twice a day, since I am also using the countertop.)

“Why don’t you ever try cleaning your room,” the child’s brother said to her, and his sonic-eared mom snapped at him to knock it off.

“I know why you prefer cleaning the counters,” I whispered to the child. “Instant results!” Laborious tasks—like going through storage or reorganizing a house—don’t provide the same dopamine hit of spraying a countertop, where you get to instantaneously enjoy the reward of your labor.

“With big projects, it isn’t always easy to see if we’re making a dent,” I sighed, propping my chin on my hand. “Your mom has to remind me all the time.”

A few months ago or more, the littlest child had been having a horrible, terrible, no-good very-bad day. I’d agreed that it is difficult, once you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed, to get yourself back on the right side.

“I woke up on the wrong side, too,” I’d mumbled to the child’s mom. “Some days I just wake up like my god my god, what have I done.”

My best friend looked startled. “Are you kidding,” she said, blinking.

I shrugged.

“Jenny,” she said, “you were so sick when you got here. Maybe some of that was your gallbladder,” she said. She shook her head. “But you couldn’t eat anything.”

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, frowning. “I just kinda forgot. Thanks.”

She’s brought it up a few times since. “And you look so much better,” she said to me recently. She heard how it sounded. “Sorry,” she said.

“No, hey, thanks,” I said. “The blush of life?” I joked. Maybe I’ve gotten a little sun, a few nutrients. Maybe I don’t look like someone just dug me up.

Anyway, the child was cleaning up her breakfast spot, and she looked at me and asked me—in an indirect and terribly oblique way—if it were her fault a toy had spontaneously broken during normal use. She worried she’d put too much strain on it. Not your fault, I told her, realizing this was yet another analogy for frail, poorly-engineered infrastructure.

She told me—again—about a children’s talking toy calculator that had spontaneously started smoking, its insides melting. “I wonder if we did too much—” she began.

“No,” I told her, “that was a defective lithium-ion battery and it really should not have been inside a children’s toy.” Or inside anything. “That is not your fault, either,” I told her sternly.

We do not break things merely by, ourselves, existing; that’s the mark of a poorly-designed thing. When coffee spatters everywhere, the countertop does not just go “oh okay” and cave in.↩

I guess the next-door neighbor can also see me. He rolled his garbage can outside and waved.

“Hello, sir,” I said. He stopped by his curb and looked up, so I stopped, too.

“I can see a little bit of blue now,” he said to me, squinting up at the sky. I looked up, too.

“It’s getting better every day,” I told him. He seemed skeptical, tense. “I check the AQI, Air Quality Index, once a day,” I continued. “Ninety-something today. A hundred twenty-something yesterday. Two hundred forty-something the day before.” My smile fell. “Some rain would do it,” I said then.

“Everyone else is getting it,” he said. The rain, he meant.

“I’ve heard!” I blurted. Listen, if a strange man would like to discuss meteorology with me, I’m down. Talking about the weather gets a real bad rap.

“Not us, where we could use it,” he continued sadly. He examined the blue spot in the sky. “As long as I can see a little bit of blue,” he told me, “I can be happy.”↩