It’s a good way to make a room feel crowded, the thought that we are never alone, that with every street we cross safely and person we say goodbye to a thousand future humans wink in and out of existence, the chorus of parasitic could-bes from which they stepped forward still applauding or catcalling, rooting for the branch that might eventually sprout them. They have bullhorns and kazoos and oversized maracas.

My great-grandfather was an engineer on the St. Paul. As the ship approached New York City on March 16, 1896, his captain scrawled the words “He has given entire satisfaction” on a piece of paper, folded it into quarters, and handed it to the man who had been so badly burned in a boiler explosion that he had to be put ashore. Six weeks later, the captain and eighty-three other stalwart men met a triangle that sings to ships, that collects grandchildren, that makes people like me not anointed just the dripping ghost of a close call.

We were the rats that day, Team Sibley/Charnley/Allen—the go-get-’em squad that felt threat through the deck, a salty withdrawal, and pushed our good and steady engineer toward the boiler room while the other not-yets got caught dreaming, leaned over the rails thinking this is the life.

We are all lousy with destiny.

A soldier in WWI’s Italian army, Sant’Eila died at age 28 while lined up against the Austro-Hungarian army in one of twelve battles of the Isonzo. It took twelve before everyone decided to go home. There were many Futurists among the casualties—their manifestoes did not protect them, and their politics were generally less pretty than their parchments.

It’s too romantic to imagine that New Cities sprang up all over the battlefield like bubbles—inflate, pop—as the Futurists checked out, their dreams jumping away from their corpses. It’s too mawkish to imagine a handful of gleaming, sci-fi capitals latticed by terraces, bridges and aerial walkways complete, for a moment, on the shores of the opaque, quartz-blue Soča while the wagon wheels of horse-drawn supply lines rolled on.

I’m doing it anyway.

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Apparently the clouds on Venus and Jupiter hold the most potential for this sort of thing—this thing I’m not altogether sure is in the best taste, or in our best interest—but I’m finding it difficult to explain how profoundly it affects my feelings about air travel here on Earth. We should clearly either be asking permission or taking trains. Planes should broadcast Arecibo messages non-stop.

This is the grave of Bohumil Hrabal, who wrote, “Wandering through the streets of Prague, I switched on my X-ray eyes and peered down through transparent pavements into the sewers to find rodent general staffs mapping out operations for rodent troops, generals barking orders into their walkie-talkies about which front to put pressure on, but I just kept walking, listening to the crunch of sharp little rats’ teeth under my shoes and thinking of the melancholy of a world eternally under construction, and when I looked up through my tears I noticed something I had never noticed before, namely, that the facades, the fronts of all the buildings, public and residential—and I could see them all the way up to the drainpipes—were a reflection of everything Hegel and Goethe had dreamed of and aspired to, the Greece in us, the beautiful Hellenic model and goal.”

Hrabal died after falling out of a fifth-floor hospital window. People have various ideas about that—about whether he meant to or not, to be blunt—but it doesn’t matter very much to me. There were seeds on the ledge; he had seeds in his hands. Whatever else is true, he’d been feeding pigeons.

And one day soon I’ll be the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. I will shed my stupid seat and my reflectors and possibly lots of other things, and I will loftily roll into Spring with lovely wooden fenders, a vintage Brooks saddle, swoopy Japanese handlebars topped with grips of French cloth and twine, an elegant little rear rack sporting WWII Swiss saddlebags of canvas and leather, ’60s/’70s Campagnolo Super Record pedals*, and sparkling rims with orange Velo logos flashing round and round. My name will be Cake & Ice Cream.

*Via Bekefy

And I don’t care.

Yosemite’s coyotes are often mistaken for “white wolves” by overenthusiastic tourists. The coyotes don’t mind being misidentified, but they sure would like some of those salsa-verde Doritos you’re waving around.