there is absolutely no consistency

When the sky still felt close enough to touch,

and gods were simply neighbors we carved into stone so we wouldn’t forget them.

At the time, we didn't really understand that the pattern-matching abilities of the human mind can easily find any abnormalities. If you've got a cat, for instance, you can probably sense when that little shit is trying to steal Twinkies off the counter (I told you no, Bilby.) Work as a mini golf supervisor, you can make a pretty educated guess about which group of teens is going to throw your clubs in the water feature. And if you drive a total shitbox like me, you can tell right away when something isn't right, even if you don't know what it is.

Let me provide an example. Last month, I was heading down the highway, doing my periodic flooring-it exercises to pass everyone that was going slower than Mach 8. This kind of strain challenges every mechanical item in the car, which is why I subject it to the intense maintenance regimen described as "don't." Suddenly, I could sense that the car was down on power, that it was unhappy with some shenanigan or even shenanigans that I had been commanding it to perform in recent memory. Rather than push it, I trusted my gut and pulled off to the nearest rest stop to take a look and see what went wrong.