adj. entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of earshot—worlds and stars who would’ve been lost entirely except for the scrap of light they were able to fling out into the dark, a message in a bottle that’s only just now washing up in the Earth’s atmosphere, an invitation to a party that already ended a million years ago.

I’m on my way out the door to take a driving tour of my life as I knew it in 1989. The Santa Monica pier. The West L.A. courthouse. Possibly my grandparents’ cemetery in Westwood. My house growing up in Cheviot Hills. It feels like a million years since 1989, so much has happened… And now I get to write about it.