Does anyone else remember that old short film, The Powers Of Ten? I thought of it today on my lunch break. I went down into the plaza outside my building and sat by the fountain, reading The Gold Bug Variations. There were a number of other people sitting or even lying down on the steps that surrounded the fountain, so I laid down, not unaware of the incongruity of lying down on the ground in the middle of downtown Chicago, and maybe dozed off for a few minutes. Every once in a while the wind would catch some of the water from the fountain and I’d feel a cool mist.

In the film, the camera zooms out from the hand of a man lying on a blanket in a park (in Chicago, actually) and continues receding by multiples of ten, until it is in deep space. Then it zooms back in and goes into the microscopic layers of his hand. I loved the shit out of that movie when I was little, and would insist that we view it at the National Air & Space Museum, which I insisted we visit every summer when we went to the Smithsonian, much to my parents’ chagrin. “Again with the Air & Space … ” They should have been happy I was learning. And I was too young to appreciate anything besides outer space and dinosaurs, so it was A&S and the Natural History, every time.

I came back from lunch just now, sun-drained and drowsy, the inside of the building colored a hazy blue while my eyes readjusted to the dim interior.