If you want to act out, if you want to run up, if you want to grow up, if you want to show up

Happy Halloween! Or All Saints' Day, since by now it's after midnight. I have returned to Boston.

I have also returned from the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The short version is that it was a mass transit nightmare, so well-attended that agoraphobia would have had to fight with claustrophobia for elbow room, and I was very glad to have gone. The longer version is shamelesssly cannibalized from an e-mail last night to rushthatspeaks and can be found under the cut, because I'm going to bed. This weekend involved a lot of travel.

( I'd marry Uncle Sam if I could do it legally! )

I am quite sure I would have heard and seen far more of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had I stayed home and watched the rally on Comedy Central. I wouldn't have had my novel about Ludwig Wittgenstein jostled out of my hand and nearly stepped on (which kind of doesn't surprise me) and I would almost certainly have eaten lunch. There wouldn't have been so much dust in the air that I got mud when I blew my nose. I don't know if the camera would have caught the sign that read, "I Know You're Hitler, Don't Try to Deny It—You're Invading Poland As We Speak." I couldn't make out all the words to Jon Stewart's closing speech, which I think was quite good, but I heard the cheering around it.

And let us be honest: whether I was part of a historic moment or merely a rather awesome pop-cultural oddity, I am not sure where else I would have been afforded the opportunity to hear a college guy in a gorilla suit plowing through a crowd shouting in a voice of genuine anxiety, "Has anyone seen Paul Bunyan? Why does everyone laugh when we say that?" For me, that guy will always symbolize the Rally to Restore Sanity. The Dadaists would have approved.

You and me and these shadows keep on changing

So this afternoon I went back to the Boston Passport Agency and picked up my new passport. It looks more like a book of tourist's postcards than an official document: red and blue-tinted woodcut-style images of Mount Rushmore and steamboats and transcontinental railways, with quotations from George Washington and other American dignitaries—I appreciate the inclusion of Anna Julia Cooper and Martin Luther King, Jr., but who let in Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ?—at the top of every page. It feels very defensive. I find myself wondering whether the requisite exit/entry stamps will even be visible among all the patriotic assertion. And I'm stuck with it for the next ten years, unless I suddenly change citizenships before then. At least it'll get me out of the country.

Because it is November and the sun is sinking fast: a mix of the distant, the lost, and the not quite safely gone.

( Were you a ghost? Were you a dream? Were you just meant to hurt me? )