The cemetery is tucked away at the back of a dingy, tired neighborhood that houses the mostly black working poor of North Charleston. It must be strange for them, the slow, cumbersome processions and the faces staring out of windows, the inexorably inevitable march of the dead and the dying. They sit in their rocking chairs on the porches of peeling paint, rotting wood and rusty nails, sipping cups of lemonade, the kids playing tag in the front yards and the dogs on their bellies basking in the sun.

A mad whirl of dust and gravel follows the hearse as it makes its way down the windy ribbon of road that leads to the grave site where my cousin will be buried. Dead at twenty-two, he will be covered with freshly dug earth that will settle over time as the dust settles on my jacket and black dress shoes. The sun is behind a grove of old Willows whose shadows glide and twist and flutter in some exotic, indecipherable rhythm, ghosts out to dance as the day winds down....

I used to write. I used to have things to say. I used to think that what I had to say was interesting enough and that I could say it well enough that others would not only read it if they stumbled across it, but seek it out. I imagined that I would be interviewed by obscure literary magazines with clever titles that only Joyce fanatics would understand. I would talk about the role of art in our intellectual and social evolution, how it could bring gods to their knees and free us to expand indefinitely, to realize the inherent sameness of us all, thereby eliminating the desire to make war, to step over one another for gold and glory, to shroud ourselves in imaginary borders and create enemies out of brothers and sisters. And I would believe it, with a passion deep and hot, and that belief would spread communicably, infecting whoever came within proximity, crossing continents and large bodies of water, jamming automatic weapons and penetrating weapon silos. And then everyone would...