Where the Willamette River bends northwest, Yeon is a broad avenue with commercial traffic barrelling both ways. Its feeder streets, crosscut with railway spurs sunk into deep into the asphalt, disappear not downward, but stretch into the semi-darkness of cavernous warehouses to join the slow-turning shadows of exhaust fans, and the thick odor of grease.

     Stacked in the yards outside,
     mountains of wooden pallets
     sharpen their splinters.
   

At a pace that contrasts with double-trailer trucks bouncing tons of steel over "crazed pavement," I guide my bicycle along sidewalks bordered with weeds, purposefully losing direction, then it was thought that the transfer of all nervous impulses occurs across the gaps, called 'synapses,' between adjacent nerve cells. But this mechanism turns out to be of limited importance, being used mainly for muscle contraction. Most of the signals that come from the brain are transmitted via peptides emitted by nerve cells sighting a familiar building, instead of tacking that way, I'll explore this fissured plot further. 

 

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