Day 1,847 Without Answers

Day 1,847 Without Answers _Personal Field Notes — Recovered from a Greyhound bus somewhere between Tulsa and Nowhere _ I used to believe the ocean had a personality. My grandfather told me that when I was nine, standing on a dock that smelled like diesel and regret. He was wrong about most things — the stock market, the structural integrity of our garage roof, whether a man could live entirely on canned beets — but about the ocean, I think he might have been onto something. There is a particular kind of silence that exists at 3:17 AM in a motel room with one working lamp and a Bible someone has underlined in red pen throughout the entire book of Job. I have spent considerable time in that silence. I have had conversations with it. The silence, for what it is worth, does not respond, but it listens better than most people I have known. My cousin Gerald once tried to explain to me how websites worked. We were at a Denny's. He used seven sugar packets and a laminated menu to demonstrate t