The 38th Parallel

From the moment of birth your past is like the DMZ at the 38th parallel. Enter purgatory at your own peril. There are those who wouldn't extend the metaphor with the North as hell. The North may be death in life but Hades is a vast battlefield in which death is not infinite but as far as the eye can see. Most people think of the past as a version of the familiar in aged form, but in fact everyone carries a cemetery of ancestors one is seldom prone to think about even in the age of Ancestry. Hades is real and you don't need Charon to cross the Acheron. You may visit it in your sleep.

read Joan Baum's NPR review of The Kafka Studies Department

and listen to "Boogaloo Down Broadway" by Johnny C