Lethargy was a constant companion, the deliverer of unexpected benefits and the assassin of grief, compared favorably by those who caught a glimpse of it to the hedgehog which surrounds itself with its very nature and therefore survives. Our footpaths found solace following the river which had become so polluted as to give off the smell of insecticide and honey and we bathed there sometimes just because we knew we shouldn’t, because the water held riches dear to the imagination. Crustaceans mostly, and diamond jewelry tossed in a fever of rage. Part of the problem was the music which kept pumping in over speakers situated in the corners of all the buildings and all the markets, music with words that were mostly unintelligible and instruments that had long gone out of fashion like the lute but which still spoke to the romantic in us who otherwise might have perished. For lack of sustenance, lack of recognition. Our bald spots became more pronounced and someone suggested it might be the fault of the stars pouring their poison down onto our heads from on high, from the places where they had been fastened into the fabric like rhinestones, and half those present registered their frustration with all explanatory narratives by penning some of their own with deliberately exaggerated heroes at the center of them who obeyed the least whim and bias, who scuttled off to the shores of distant islands and promised never to return, only to return again the following week because they had been bidden to by someone else who looked just like them and who had himself only recently arrived from another land entirely  full of desperate people looking to him for hope and maybe even some financial wherewithal, if not outright salvation. This particular regress, like all chains of a certain speculative nature, gets old and brittle and falls apart before you can get to the end of it, before you even get half way, and it makes us wonder out loud if maybe it’s time we stopped searching endlessly for origins and stories with ogres in them. For the answers to pesky metaphysical questions that have been asked for generations but which, in our case, should probably have been left to their own devices, at least until we were finished putting the flooring down in our houses or shooting at the neighborhood elk with our expensive, precision store-bought bows and arrows.