Of Today's Many Long Arguments, the Saddest...

direction is more an abstraction to us than it is to the train itself, the idea of "west" specifically. Or so says Jim. I mention to him the futility of trying to pin down exactly in what way the train -- even granting that it's its own kind of organism -- perceives the "west", whether the train thinks about "west" in terms of the realm of ideas, or if to the train, as Jim is wont to understand things, is merely perceiving of itself traveling contrawise to another polar longitude, by which the air gets gradually dryer through the desert, colder up into the mountains, wet, and then finally all salty once it hits the edge of the coast, where even to god, Jim laughs, "west" is but an abstraction.

But then again, Jim offers back, where does tapioca come from, and who among us has ever seen the shell of a cashew nut?

I suppose we can answer all of these questions via the internet, even the first one. Jim is angered by the availability of this kind of information, thinks it's perhaps the root cause of a future Darwinian-suck of the human brain's capacity to imagine. I, for one, hope not.