The following excerpt was taken from a notebook discovered on a bench by the Ohio River in Pittsburgh. It contains the thoughts and feelings of a creature who claims to be a “Flussfremder.”
‘All Paul could think about as he tried to maneuver his way around a lethargic old lady in the cereal aisle of Food Lion was ‘Good God, you old hag, could you move any slower?”
‘The trouble isn’t understanding, in theory, that we don’t want to become that little gray man. The hard part is taking the proper actions to stave him off.’
‘That was probably the hardest thing for me: to watch him fade away right before our eyes, and knowing that no matter what we did, we couldn’t bring back our baby boy.’
‘Early morning presents an opportunity to actually enjoy drinking our coffee — that is to say, it allows us to notice things, instead of having our attention pulled in 36 different directions at once.’
