The Narrow Way

I've fallen out of touch with what people are saying about the Teens these days. In the early-to-mid Teens, it was commonplace that the media refer to the 2007-2009 recession as "The Great Recession." The Occupy movement was massive, and has now managed to disappear completely. The Teens were recession-aftermath years. Slow, lugubrious, and about a society that had lost a huge chunk of population. In the early Teens, after my time at Temple was done, and my final academic appointment at U of Sciences, I struggled to find a balance. Times were lean and mean. I was suddenly out in the 'burbs, in Conshohocken, on a purgatorial wavelength about the Aughts. During the Teens, Pink Floyd were constant companions. The Narrow Way is one I leaned on, because I did feel that, if I was going to survive what I was going through, it would have to be The Narrow Way. Echoes was big, too. As was the idea that Abby Heller-Burnham, willy-nilly, would loom largely over the rest of my life. People can say what they want: the Aughts in Philadelphia were really not normal, at all. If a fire was going to be started around Aughts Philly, it would have to be me that did it. And I did. The Narrow Way. But it's a good one, as of '26, feeding on its own energy the right way, avoiding the right pitfalls, filling in the right spaces. The years living by the river were a congeries of all these issues. As is the sense that ultimately, whether a fire starts from narrow circumstances or not doesn't matter. Come on, baby, light it. And now we'll wait for the world to catch up.