World Made by Hand

"I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. The local network affiliates withered away after the national network of cable channels went out until there was nothing."

"Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still wanted to know what time it was."

"The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices... were long gone. Some febrile evangelist was railing from the Book of Revelation."

"I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefore how important you were."

"It was obvious there would be no return to [what we used to call] "normality." The [resource-intensive] economy wouldnt be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history."

"... I had a pistol every bit as lethal tucked in the rear of my belt, next to my skin, underneath my shirttails. Id been carrying it [for] so many days that I had almost forgotten it was there. This was the kind of world we now lived in."

"We all knew the apparatus of justice had dissolved."

"Jesus, [...] look how we live? Im… a serf."

"Few dogs were around anymore. Some had been eaten during the hunger that followed the flu in the spring of that year. People didnt talk about it; it was so demoralizing."

"You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. Were not jacked up on coffee and television and... advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills."

"I remembered Albany... as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs."

"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not everybody cared where the supermarket got it as long as it was there on the shelves. A few elderly dairymen hung on. Many let their fields and pastures go to scrub. Some sold out to what used to be called developers, and theyd put in five or ten poorly built houses. Now, […] there were far fewer people, and many houses outside [the] town were being taken down for their materials. Farming was back. That was the only way we got food."