The road closure was not Weston's fault. I want to be clear about that. The city of Eugene had done that entirely on their own, something about cleanup at an old gas plant site down by the riverfront, and the South Bank Path was just gone for a while, rerouted into a series of orange cones that implied a path without fully committing to one. This was not Weston's doing.
What was Weston's doing was everything that came after.
It started because we were trying to get to the farmers market before the good mushroom vendor sold out, which meant leaving by nine, which meant I was in his car at 8:52 in a hoodie, holding two thermoses, watching him open what I initially thought was a maps app but was actually, I would come to learn, a spreadsheet.
"I cross-referenced the advisory," he said.
"It's a farmers market, Weston."
"That they move to a different block when the main entrance is blocked, which it is, because of the gas plant thing, which has been ongoing since at least July." He zoomed in on something. "I found a thread."
The thing about Weston is that he is not wrong, exactly. He is just wrong in his proportions. The information he finds is often real. The amount of time he spends finding it exists in a completely different dimension from the problem it was meant to solve.
We took his alternate route, which involved a street I had never heard of and a turn that required a brief moment of spiritual commitment, and we got there six minutes faster than we would have otherwise. He made a small sound of vindication that he tried to disguise as a cough.
At the market, he stopped in front of a pickleball signup flyer someone had taped to a post and went quiet in a way that concerned me.
"There's apparently a real shortage of courts," he said.
"Weston, the mushrooms."
"Lane Community College only has a few and demand keeps outpacing—"
"I will get the mushrooms myself."
He came back with the mushrooms and a coffee and also a pamphlet, which he had apparently asked someone for, about the court situation. He was reading it while we walked. The sky was doing that specific September thing where it couldn't decide, still gray and about 52 degrees but with the faint structural suggestion that it might eventually become a nice day. He was wearing a hoodie he had already started to unzip, optimistically.
"I'm just saying, if someone mapped peak usage hours against available court time, you'd have a really clear case for expansion," he said.
"Who are you talking to right now?"
He looked up. He had the expression he always gets when he realizes he has been narrating his internal proposal document out loud again. A little sheepish. A little unrepentant.
"You," he said. "I'm talking to you. Because you're interested."
"I'm not interested."
"You're holding the pamphlet."
I was, in fact, holding the pamphlet. I had taken it from him at some point without registering that I had done this. He was delighted by this in a way that was, honestly, hard to argue with.
We walked back through downtown, which still had some residual Fiesta Cultural energy — a few vendor tents, a banner, the cheerful wreckage of a good weekend. He pointed out the scaffolding on two different buildings and explained what he thought the projects were. One of them he was right about. He did not acknowledge the one he was wrong about, but I saw him quietly update something on his phone.
The sun started coming through around eleven, the way it always does that one specific hour into a Eugene fall morning, and he tied his hoodie around his waist with the confidence of a man who had, in some sense, predicted this.
"Good route though," he said.
"It was a fine route."
"Six minutes."
"Weston."
"I'm just noting it."
He was just noting it. He notes everything. He cross-references the notes. He finds the thread. He shows up with a pamphlet about something he heard about eight minutes ago and by the time we get home he will have a mild, well-sourced position on it that is hard to dismiss because the underlying data is, unfortunately, real.
The mushrooms were excellent. He said he knew they would be, and I didn't ask him why, because I already knew the answer, and the answer was a spreadsheet, and I was not ready for that conversation before noon.