Somewhere near the American side of Lake Huron, the little camp where Balthazar Montgomery became a Boy Scout Junior Class lies undiscovered by modern methods. "How the green could grow over so many of my childhood memories is disconcerting," Montgomery said, his voice scarlet & quivering. "Can we blame Hitler?"
More people who live near the lake would rather blame Singapore, the country in which, in the 2010 National Day Rally, one junior minister who shall not be named twitted from his Tweeter account some vague disrespect for three girls he had met from Michigan who had no desire to return to his apartment to watch Thai ladyboy videos.
But in a Bingo Parlor with a condemned sign out front in Alpena, former grandmother Dorothy The Rain unlights a cigarette and commiserates with a reporter who hasn't won a single game yet. "It's not like people I used to know to take things so sensually," she tells him. "It's more like my former lovers in the Newark Tornadoes, rest their souls."
By used skyscraper salesman and H.P. Lovecraft impersonator Byron Coastal sees something like sentimentality in such earnest winsomeness. "Without vague remnants of our rumbling past," he says, "surely we're just another channel on Uruguayan television that some insomniac skips past before throwing up his dinner." He adds, "Aren't we?"