Good Afternoon Charles,
I do hope you're warm and safe during this extended snow & cold spell here in Seattle.

I glanced at your post. I honestly didn't read it in its entirety. The title caught my eye as it echoes something Einstein said about the universe (?) "God does not play dice" or something like that. The other thing that spurred my curiosity was the word "Virginia". I thought maybe you might comment on the current Democratic political crisis in the state of Virginia.

But, no. Your post is about a cross country trip you took decades ago, Rob Lowe's gambling in a film "Oxford Blues" and Walter Benjamin. Hmm? What a thread combo.

You wrote about "Oxford Blues" once before. I've never seen it and never really intended to. Is it really that good?

Quite frankly, some insight from you regarding what's happening in Virginia now would be enlightening. It really is a conundrum down in Richmond, VA for the Dems.

Virginia Beach is the kind of place where time does not exist. I spent a few days there in the late 1980s, when I was 16. Then I happened to travel through there again a year ago. The place was exactly the same: same t-shirt shops with neon colors and 1980s slogans, etc. it was literally 1988. I strongly suspect it was 1988 there even 200 years ago.

The imagined absence of the variable of time is also why the groove is so hypnotic. In the groove all beats happen at the same time, the now.

Words

@lark. I should have included it, current Virginia politics. But what a fucking mess.

Virginia Beach, the world's largest resort city! No, it's not the largest resort, it's the largest city that is a resort city. I live here. I almost never go to the beach.

Virginia would be a bluer state if it weren't for the gerrymandering. We are a microcosm of the nation, with blue and red sectors. By the way, Northam is a good man, not a racist, and should not resign.

@5 Charles,
Indeed!

“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all,” Sebald has Austerlitz say, “only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.”