Key West called after bloody Monday and asked if she should be packing.  New York wanted to know what happens short term and Minneapolis still didn't think I could have been that right last spring when I said I thought the market would break in October.  Sioux Falls was reading a typescript on a break the Saturday night before and told a coworker that "it's hard to explain, but a friend says the stock market will crash any time now and thinks he knows why."  Monday night he thought she was magic.

I'm not in the business business but I figured it was bound to happen.  That this would be the year was clear early and barring an exogenous trigger (the Tokyo drop broke the record set when Stalin died) markets fall seasonably, "when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang."  October.  How it signifies is a long story filled with forays onto unfamiliar ground and leaping from conclusions, a journey no one would take time for if its point were merely that we can have a depression after all.  We can't, not because of a supposed safety net in place but because the ground is gone:  an entity in practice now, intricate web of pickups and deliveries, the economy is a single system which fullblown panic will bring down all at once.  The question is not avoiding a recession or surviving a depression but splitting in time.

In seventyfive or so I saw a train headed obliviously for a cliff.  The engine is the US, the rest the west and there are no brakes but the cars can unhitch and roll to a stop at the edge.  The image meant the train I'd been chasing with bad news for several years was behind me if I could see the cliff and I could sit tight, hop on when it got here.  I took a look around and found that the cliff is the key to the riddle, the ultimate anomaly.  It discloses its import directly to an approach from the sixties.

The bearer of evil tidings,
when he was halfway there,
discovered that evil tidings
are a dangerous thing to bear.

 Robert Frost