CPlatt

In the pleasant days when I was a senior writer for Wired magazine, I had enough free time and spare cash to build a 12-sided tower on top of an outcropping of rock that locals began referring to as Charlie Mountain. I could drive to it up a steep dirt road that a friend installed for me with his trackhoe. But, access to that road required a drive of about 8 miles on other badly maintained dirt roads, and I realized that I was never going to make much use of the place. It was just too inconvenient. Someone else owns it now, but the location remains in my head as a state that I would like to find inside myself, enabling serene, detached objectivity. In reality of course I am neither serene nor detached.