the streetlamps were like a string of silver arrowheads

Red Rose, White Rose, and all the goddamn tragedy of sunken, misfitting lives. Eileen Chang, how can you do this? From wondrous fragments of beauty—absolutely luminous!—to ruined shabbiness flat-lining in the grey corner of a grey city.

Wheels spinning, the gears are grinding down and flaking apart in the hollow spaces. Household domesticity: outward serenity, with the suffocating walls of respectability folding in. The firm press, the resolute pressure of bourgeois life, built brick by brick. To what end?

It's a soundless scream: he's choking on a noose with a silken slipknot. A glint of metal, blade, edge: potential rescue. Imagined? Please; please save him! Such delicate observation.

To no avail, he does not save himself.

The Next Wave

How amazing would it be if for California's next act, we showed the world how to build advanced, high-performing, environmentally-sound infrastructure? It would be wonderful if our state became the showcase for the future of transportation technologies integrated into comfortable cities and living communities.

It's how our state will move beyond "Silicon Valley", Internet bubbles and app-building. We've got the electric vehicles, the self-driving cars, and now the hyperloop ...

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_23854572/mercury-news-editorial-elon-musks-hyperloop-is-hypercool

Islands

I'm cleaning this computer, which must go back to the university, and found a note from May 30:

The island of lost happiness. What might have been, lost moments that ended too soon. There, these dreams are still alive, and you can live in joy with your loved one, forever.

It is the place where memories gather: lives cut short, alternate histories not written, roads not taken, paths untrodden, doors unopened, hearts unbroken. This is where those dreams reside.