They’re chewing up the street in front of our house with unbelievably elaborate equipment and for the first time, I miss California. In California, I wouldn’t be the only internet unemployee out on the stoop this morning, sipping a cocktail assembled from the ever-dwindling pantry (today it’s a Madrugada Eterna: diet peach tea powder and vanilla extract over crushed ice), laughing, sharing pleasantries, trying to absorb the final few rays of sun into my gut before we’re plunged into an endless frozen night. I bring out a crystal bowl full of peppermint candies for the construction workers. “This is fuckin’ weather,” one of them says, but his emphasis is awkward and I can’t quite parse his meaning. “What’s the plan for today, Josh?” another asks, and I say, Eh, who knows, a couple more pages on the book, some videogames, take some clippers to these nails. “Friend, you are off the grid,” says a third, and I say I wish. I say to get really entirely off the grid you need a dedicated commitment to a particular lifestyle, as well as a mastery of bureaucracy. Another says, “Funny how you got to always embrace that which you loathe in order to escape it,” and I sigh and say Amen To That or some such platitude, the words falling out of my head and disappearing into the exhaust before I can even hear them.