We went out to Hillsdale to pick up a free bookshelf from a stranger today. We found the place down a narrow, sharp-winding road surrounded by huge pine trees. The stranger's house turned out to be the exact same house one of Alex's Utah friends had lived in years ago. "It's so pretty out here. Can we go somewhere nature-y and take a walk before it rains?" I asked, after loading up the truck. "Gotcha," he said, "I know just the place." We drove ten minutes around the hills of Beaverton's elaborate suburbs & parked down a gravel road. The wind had turned biting cold, and we rolled up our hoods & held hands. "It's a whole other world out here; the houses are monstrous!" He led me down a long gravel alley that spanned a whole neighborhood, until we stopped dead in our tracks at the base of a tall but completely ineffective construction fence. He wanted to show me the house where his ex used to live, but this is all that was left. "Wow. People really fucked this place up since I saw it last. It used to be three stories tall." Fire makes fools of us all.