From Northwest: The Sunday Oregonian, July 30, 1989

We met for lunch at Okie Joe’s, an all-male beer joint right off campus. We began with a pitcher of beer. Then hamburgers to help absorb the second pitcher. When the third pitcher was empty, we swaggered outside into the blaze of the New Mexico sun. I mean a desert sun, unmitigated by clouds, unmediated by humidity. We were a mile above sea level and the sun only about one mile higher. You could feel the flames.

Appearance is reality, said Lucretius, taking a tip from Epicurus and Democritus, and I thought he had it about right.

I was a philosophy major. Second lieutenant anyhow. Alan was crazy for economics, Fred for math, Bob for political science—politics. And we had plans. I mean plans for reshaping things a little nearer to the natural desires of the human heart.

WE CLIMBED into Alan’s car, a black Lincoln convertible about twelve years old. Beaten but functional. The doors worked but we climbed in, over the doors. Why not? Why the hell not? The top was down. I mean the top was always down, and why not? It never rained in New Mexico anyway, and if it did we’d simply drive faster, that’s all, speed forward beneath the rain. Let it rain.

Fred pulled a pint of bourbon from his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the cap, breaking the seal, and threw the cap away. Overboard. Into the abyss of eternity. My concept, his bottle cap, Alan’s terminology, Bob’s perception.

We headed north along the Rio Grande River on a street called—I forget what it was called. I’m not sure I knew even then. Probably it was called Rio Grande Street. Gone now, anyhow, superseded by eight lanes of stinking asphalt, the Interstate, or by something like Calle de Valle Oro or some such land-developer’s poesy.

And we always called the river the Rio Grande River. Any objections? We were veterans. Me and my friends had pushed the Germans all the way from Salerno to the Alps. With 40 million Italians trying to help out.

The wind roared over our heads. The sun roared down—yes, you could hear it bellowing. Like a crown fire in a forest. Like a blast furnace with the hatch open. Bellowing, screaming, howling, the cry of the hydrogen inferno. We heard and felt it and we raced north at eighty miles an hour in that black open speedboat of a car.

Passing the pint around. Shouting at each other. Rosy mountains on the east, the black warts of old volcanoes on the west, the brown desert and the skinny river in between.

We discussed my new model for the moral universe. Romantic naturalism, I called it. All values grounded upon the new. Only change, I argued, makes life possible, therefore all that is good is necessarily derived from—novelty.

The flaw in my scheme was that word “novelty.” Somehow it lacked the weight and dignity of, say, “Sein” or “Neant” or “Process” or “Reality” or even “Frijoles.” Think of refried frijoles. The intractable density of matter. Think of nausea.