Dome Coda

        54. Now I crouch in my outlaw dome, writing these notes under butterfly wings that redden with the smog-hyped sunset, while Karen builds the shed into a crafts-room. Perhaps a shade more liberated than our parents -- if so, in part by new technology and social conditions, in part by an effort of the will. I bring water to the bamboo, which grows to shelter the dome from the street and with luck will cover the top before the city inspectors take to cruising with the fleet of helicopters now proposed for the police. We have given up on the government: we are becoming guerrillas of life in an Amerika of death, outlaws in the technological wilderness. Let me tell you, there is nothing like standing under a helicopter as it swoops down to begin its gassing run to inspire one with new vision. Most young people I know who want to use technology would cheerfully rip it off from any institution they could, and some do manage to.

        55. If the nursery survives, the ferns will grow through their cycles of frond and spore above our son's bed, refreshing his air, and generations of water-dogs will pass through their larval stages in the vinyl-cupped ecology drawn from the local ponds. I'll get someone to rip me off a good microscope, strong enough to watch their sperm dance and to penetrate the nuclei of our flesh, and we'll learn some things.

        And I will tell him the fairy tales of our age. How each life, plant or animal, grows from a word in a language that, within my lifetime, we've started to learn to read and to construct. And how his someday children may live in houses written from this genetic language in a Yin script: full living creatures, exquisitely adapted to live in symbiosis with man and supply his needs of space and shelter, temperature and food, water and clothing. Taping a jury-rigged oscilloscope onto bean sprouts, we'll study how different music or anger in the room changes their electrical moods and dream about how Man and House will feel about each other.

        And if the building inspector comes, that too will be a lesson our son will someday understand.

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