The new Flagpole column is out and up, depending of what kind of reading you do.
This was my starting point, but didn’t make it past the first draft:
If you’ve ever had any near-life experiences, you know that forever indelible is the sensation that there was something almost wrong about the very right thing that was happening. If it was beautiful, maybe it was the larger injustice in which the beauty swirled; if was horrifying, maybe it was the fact that others elsewhere in the world were carrying on, completely unbothered and oblivious. Whatever it was, this contradictory awareness, of the within and the without, added to the bite and by elevating the experience, keys us into one of the great dichotomies: destroying what we love.
The poetry of the cutting room floor.