I'm electric with vertigo, even though I'm on the ground, vertigo like I felt once when I stood on the edge of a high cliff in Arizona and looked straight down.

At some point, even the greatest misery begins to fade. Life, or what passes for life, plods on in it's own unending weary footsteps, and somehow we plod along with it, if we stay lucky.

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become.

Laugh as much as possible, because one moment will stop this moment.

Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.