This is it.

This is the world I was born into. A place of asphalt parking lots and one-stop shopping. A place where they make a pill for everything, and the writing on the pills is much too small to see. Who knows what they've written on all those pills? Not me.

Yesterday, I went for a walk with my 5-month old daughter, Eleanor. Together, we toured the grocery store, parking lot, and strip mall. She's too young to know that a strip mall is just about the most depressing thing on earth, and that she, too, has been born into a ridiculous, disposable American world of bills, cars, pills and bars.

Nonetheless, I held her in my arms and we walked and I showed her the world she will inherit. Automobiles traversed the parking lot, and the November sunlight made everything glow. Some people waved from their cars. Others were on cellphones. At the grocery store I bought: a loaf of bread, a box of cornmeal, and a carton of buttermilk.