9/5 Write forward, not backward. Write for yourself, not for the audience. Damn, it’s so easy to lose track of that.

Neighbor party again, several people standing on the grass, others sitting in lawn chairs, a canopy has been erected, and the usual, great music is coming from a surprisingly tiny speaker across the street, in front of their house.

“Is it electric?” a woman asks from behind me as I pull out the charging cable from one of our Jeeps and plug it into the other. She repeats her question as I turn around, but points to the rear of the car to the other flap door. “Or is it both?” – “It’s both,” I say. “It’s a hybrid.” – That was the end of our conversation. Plugging a cable into a car is still a sight that turns heads in America.

It reminds me of the conversation I had in Tucson in the visitor parking lot at the Titan missile silo, where the old man, a farmer, came over and told me I’d definitely get noticed in that mojito green Jeep. He, too, was curious about the electric part, but when I told him about the range of 27 miles, I could feel his curiosity turn into dismissal in an instant, and nothing I could have said from then on would have pulled him back. It’s a hybrid, the 27 miles are fine for a day in the city, it’s an early implementation of the technology, almost just a proof of concept, and modern cars, only five years younger than this one, have ranges of hundreds of miles.