The stamped postcard was there from midnight to 10 AM.

I watched at least fifty people pass it by, so I chalked arrows for attention, but it was still passed by. In the morning I saw the mailman run it over.

Before my bike ride to work I picked up the postcard and put it in my back pocket, where it traveled an unknown distance. It had fallen out before I reached my office.

From a distance it is difficult to distinguish the smoke of swailing trees from a white blur of snow.

Friedlander, Self Portrait

I've been spending a lot of time in cars lately.

Photo by Audrey DeZeeuw

I picture the silo to be roughly twice as large as the nearest tree, and the nearest tree to be a football field away. Roads are straight and narrow with potholes and rivets, caused by the contracting and expanding of pavement that happens with the seasons, and from the weight of trucks too heavy and too frequent for the province to be lax as they are with maintenance.

Near the silo is a farm, labeled FERME, which I believed for several years and through many glass windows to mean "closed", another sign of desolation, but in fact it means "farm" in French when the accent is removed from the final "e". Of course I do not understand the language of rural Quebec, or of any French speaking place except the classroom, but this stretch of land I'm describing strikes me as very simple and completely devoid of interest. The only clever thing about it was my own silly misinterpretation of a ridiculously straight-forward sign. Perhaps somebody else in town needed to learn French as well.

Highlights of southern Quebec as told during the two hour drive between Burlington, VT and Montreal, include:

The drug trafficking. Many of these farmers, as explained to me by word of mouth, are forcefully paid to grow marijuana. I do not know where it is dried and stored, and that question has never occurred to me until now. The story we tell on the roadtrip generally rushes to the guy from my high school who was caught with night vision goggles, an automatic weapon, and a GPS pointing authorities to the exact location of a very large stash of weed. Hell's Angels was understandably upset. His mother, an overweight lady I remember from my early teens, who had an addiction to buying things off the Home Shopping Network and ruined her credit and her children's credit by using their social security numbers to get more VISAs for phone orders, and as I recall, smoked three packs a day, heroically drove north, met with a guy named Luc, and told him it'd all get worked out.

I don't know if it did.

The other highlight is a very large ceramic boy holding a milkshake that appears out of nowhere.

I have never been inside of a silo, despite having lived in a farming town through middle school and my teenage years. Nor did I really use or perhaps even know the word "silo" until surpringly late in my development, by which time for example I had learned to take off a bra and and wiggle my tongue at the same time, which came shortly after a very impressive and much talked about trick on the trampoline that I mastered; I guess that was around age 13. It was a forward flip combined with a rapid 180 twist. My neighbor had the largest tits I had ever seen, or ever will see.

Again, the point is that I did not, at that time, know the word "silo".

Silos store food. I'm a (software) engineer, but I have a hard time understanding the basics of how the grain is put into the silo, perhaps because I never cared. I can, and just now have, looked at an encyclopedia article to better understand the process. It was humbling to do because my father always made fun of stupid smart people, who he called "book smart", who tended to have, now that I think of it, jobs like me.

This for example struck me as odd:

"Tower silos containing silage are usually unloaded from the top of the pile, originally by hand using a pitchfork, in modern times using mechanical unloaders. Bottom silo unloaders are utilized at times but have problems with difficulty of repair." Emphasis my own.

I always assumed they were unloaded from the bottom, but perhaps there's a big hole at the top? They wouldn't remove the tin roof each time grain is stored. Much more shocking is that I'm quite sure the first time I saw a pitchfork was inside a city. This is shocking because I staked my entire move to Montreal, and then west to San Francisco, on my rural hometown being anything but "modern".

As a side note, but as I said the emphais is my own, my best friend in high school was named Silas.

Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927, oil on composition board.

I have been considering the silo today because on my way to work I walked by a homeless man in downtown San Francisco who sat under the highway to enjoy a schizophrenic rant, and at the clip I was walking (fast, I was late) the only words I caught were "the silo ... pitchfork," where the ellipses represent my gap in memory, and without giving him money, or thinking about giving him money, I did think: that would make a good beginning to a short story. I made note of his "smoke whiskey" voice that "reminded me of Tom Waits."

I later thought it more important to remove the pitchfork and replace it with a farm, which fits more in line with the autobiographical commute of my late adolescence. As my grandmother often says to encourage me: write about what you know.

I am Donna Summer's love child - no joke.

"I don't know," I cried without a sound, "I really don't know. If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I have done nobody any harm, nobody has done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. But it isn't quite like that. It's just that nobody helps me, otherwise a pack of nobodies would be nice, I would rather like (what do you think?) to go on an excursion with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else?"

From Description of a Struggle, Kafka

A self portrait by Jan Postma. I have a habit of looking at this photo every morning. It should be seen at full size.

Stamped litter

I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won't sign anything at all, because I don't know what to sign myself.