3 uddenly, over the PA system, they started playing the national anthem, "Gender's Just a Marketing Ploy," which had been written specifically to piss the people off whenever they heard it. I lit up a Mitsubishi and walked a few blocks from there and stopped and leaned against a Migraine Pizza kiosk. Occasionally the moon would go behind a cloud or another boat would pass, filled with people. A horn would sound or an engine or a mix of engines and a radio or a fan, or some small motors and the shuffle of venetian blinds. Or a half Djamocan voice screaming in the distance, "Hey, shut the fuck up!" 4 Then another voice from a different place, calling out a name, and another voice from a different direction, calling out another name. Then, from somewhere else, another name. Then, a name each, from a thousand different directions. All these names met each other in the soft night air and their sounds mathematically cancelled each other out -- while, almost simultaneously, back home, all the hopes of the people they stood for were, likewise, cancelled out. Stopped cold -- for life -- just because someone said their name out a window, one night. And that's why nothing ever happens in this fucking city.

5 walked a ways further and stopped at a high, cold, metal wall, designed to look like hundreds of rat-chewed wharves, standing upright in shallow water, at night. I started to hum the pop hit "Incest With the Proper Stranger," which, at the time, was probably the number 1 most revered song among world conflict management specialists, like myself. 6 There are, of course, only two morals to this story, and the first is: "Don't waste time figuring anything out, just do something else till it goes away." And the other is: "Don't risk exposing the bogus certitudes which masquerade as the complexity of human motivations and their expression in the psyche and in action. Or else!"