Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Or read, at least.

You probably can’t help but noticing that this page has been overhauled, as the October season wanes and is replaced by an oncoming winter. At some point I may try to institute one of those snazzy things that lets you choose which theme to use when reading, but for now the change is complete, and affects back-posts. So the pumpkins are gone, either till I figure out how to let themes coexist or until next October.

Since we’re on blogging news, I want to introduce everyone to my Dad’s new blog, Qala Bist .com. He’s actually been writing since early October, but we’ve been ironing out the kinks of him having a blog, getting the style set, and so forth. My Dad and I, despite our uniqueness, rarely do anything alone. So it’s only fitting that he start this up now. I think you will find his posts to be much like his interior design, for those of you familiar with that… layered, textured, fascinating, and (above all) colorful.

I have a couple of larger post ideas brewing in my mind’s eye, but it’s just not happening tonight. I spent tonight on the phone, which was great but cumulatively tiring. There’s even more news on the horizon on several fronts, but nothing to really delve into yet. Except one thing, I guess: I can almost promise that The Country Quiz II will be out this month. Note the “almost”. But if I went ahead and promised, then I would force myself to make good on it, whatever the consequences.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.” Or perhaps “today was just a day fading into another.”

To read. To sleep. And not to dream.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Al Qaeda: The Looming Terror
An AC360 investigation into the formation of al Qaeda, where they are now, and their illusive leader.
Tomorrow night, 10 p.m. ET
-CNN.com, 11 November 2007

A little over ninety years ago, Vlad Lenin completed a relatively bloodless takeover of power in what was then Russia. It had taken about eight months to become obvious that democracy had failed.

But, as in so many American wars of the last half-century, the takeover of government was just the beginning. Protracted fighting across the nation, against royalist-revivalists, lasted for years after the “revolution” was complete.

Lenin had written a pamphlet at the turn of the century laying out the plans and predictions for this coup, eventually leading to successful execution 15 years later. It was called Chto Dyelat? (transliteration), which can roughly be translated as “What is to Be Done?” The question seems profoundly relevant tonight, when I am somehow railing in frustration at nothing at all.

The question sounds more elegant in Russian. My frustration needs some art tonight.

Emily and I went to a movie tonight, “Lions for Lambs”. It was pretty awful. The movie simultaneously lacked subtlety and clarity. It pounded one over the head with preachy nothingness. Despite CNN (why do I keep quoting this source?) saying the movie was targeted at a “thinking-person’s” audience, the movie seemed to be written for toddlers. And the final conclusion, a crescending call-to-action, was left blank. There was no action. Only an uneasy settling of the fact that CNN (renamed in the movie to prevent a lawsuit) was so deeply manipulating the news as to distort reality. And the absence of action spoke louder than the prior 86 minutes of calling for action.

You can feel Robert Redford’s frustration in the film. It’s everyone’s. Everyone who ever believed in this “democracy” feels so swindled and cheated that they don’t even know which end is up. At least Vietnam gave everyone a fighting chance. People seemed to react to reality in Vietnam. People cared. Injustice was met with horror rather than indifference. The media took the right side. There was hope. Replication of Vietnam in perpetuity over the coming generations might not have been ideal, but it would’ve worked. People could’ve slept at night knowing they had some power or control in “their country”.

But this? What is this? When every aspect of the country has been sold and everyone who could care is in debt or discredited, how can one even begin to mount a response? What would it even look like? Who would be left to care?

So you have this slow choking of American belief in democracy and destiny and all those so-called lovely things we used to care about. Redford was trying to make a movie to shake some hope into people, as near as I can tell. He ended up making a deafening case for hopelessness. His suggested actions are to either (A) go to Afghanistan and get perforated by bullets for no reason after killing people who are not the enemy or (B) stare in horror at the television while realizing that everything you’ve done in your life is worthless.

Oh boy.

He really wanted to have a suggestion at the end there. But it was left blank for the audience to fill it in. At least Al Gore’s equally terrible movie ended with hundreds of suggestions for what you can do to “prevent global warming”. At least he maintained the illusion that corporations are not in control of the planet, but individuals are. At least he maintained the noble lie, full of hope and strong lyrics.

Illusion. Let’s get back to that word. No one proofreads anything anymore. I have to remind myself when reading documents for the people I work for. I sit there, sometimes, thinking “Helen Rosner and I are the only people left on the planet who care about proofreading.” Today’s news doesn’t have time for proofreading or copyediting or even thoughtfulness. As in the movie, it’s about getting facts up on the roll. Or maybe it’s as my Dad would say and no one wants to work anymore. Personally, I think it might (as in tonight’s example) be the universe fighting back, railing through little clues to conspire against a plutocracy hell-bent on recreating something between the Fall of Rome and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs.

Osama bin Laden, not even bothered to be named in CNN’s website promo for its latest shock-n-awe program about idle terrorists, is described as “their illusive leader”. Now whether it’s because grammar is dead or work is dead or what have you, the intended phrase was probably “elusive leader”. As in hard to find. But the devil, they say, is in the details.

The sentence instead reads that the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, is an illusion. A mirage. And just to make sure that the universe is with us on the themes of tonight’s show, Dictionary.com’s first full entry for the word gives us this: “based on or having the nature of an illusion; ‘illusive hopes of finding a better job’; ‘Secret activities offer presidents the alluring but often illusory promise that they can achieve foreign policy goals without the bothersome debate and open decision that are staples of democracy’”

That actually gave me chills just now. You can look it up.

Orwell tells us this in 1984:

The program of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters; perhaps even–so it was occasionally rumored–in some hiding place in Oceania itself.

An argument could be made that it would be better a Two Minutes Fear. And while there is plenty of fear of Goldstein and fear in general laden throughout the ceremonies of Orwell’s Oceanians, it’s hard to rally around fear. Of course, the real powers don’t want people rallying at all. The real powers are squarely between Orwell and Huxley, using just enough manipulation and self-destruction to form their brew.

Go back to your Orwell. And your Huxley. And your Bradbury. And then tell me: Chto Dyelat? Because their answers weren’t very good either. Retreat. Run. Maybe you can make it to the woods or the Falklands or maybe they’ll get you first and take you to Abu Ghraib and torture the hope out of you. Maybe you can read or write or remember and be the last living testament to the way things were.

And I know dystopias end badly because they’re supposed to be cautionary tales. But we already blew through those checkpoints. There was no caution.

In a dystopia, my friends, what is to be done?

Okay, so I got to thinking. And I can’t just leave the last post where it ended.

You might be wondering, for example, what the statistical probability is of me making the playoffs after switching to an easier difficulty after just 57 games (35% of the season). Maybe this doesn’t sound very challenging to you.

Last season (2006), my M’s went 101-61, for a .623 pace. Assuming that same winning percentage greets my next 105 games in 2007, I’ll go 65-40, for a final record of 72-90. Which will NOT make the playoffs. For an indication of how much I’ll miss by, the Angels are on pace to win 101 games (sound familiar?) and the A’s 94.

Now, you might say that after playing 57 games on Impossible Mode, I’ve improved over 2006. I sure hope so. But I’ve also set my players back a notch. And if this baseball game is like any other, the player progressions for the season are at least partially impacted by the start the player gets off to. So one would think this might mitigate any improvement.

For example, Ichiro is hitting .186 with 3 HR, 5 RBI, and 16 R. Last year, he hit .271 (yes, last year’s difficulty was hard) with 78 R. It’s unlikely that he’ll suddenly bounce back to hit .271 or score runs on that pace for the last two-thirds of the season.

Similarly, Randy Johnson is 0-11 with a 6.13 ERA in 12 starts and 3 relief appearances (61.2 IP). Last year, he was 11-8 with a 1.70 ERA in an injury-shortened season (22 starts, 158.2 IP). Staff ace Mark Mulder is 1-8 with a 6.47 after going 20-6 with a 1.71 (in 247 IP!) last year. Only Eddie Guardado is within 2 points of last year’s ERA of anyone significant on the staff. And he won the Cy Young Award last year, with a 2-0 record, 54 saves (in 54 chances), and an 0.61 ERA in 59.1 IP (64 appearances). He almost won the MVP Award. This year, he’s only managed to get into 9 games so far (8.2 IP), but has posted a 1.04 ERA, no record, and converted all 6 save opportunities.

What to conclude from all this? (Besides the fact that I’m a tremendous dork who loves baseball, statistics, and video games?) That this will be mighty difficult. Assuming the A’s go on to a 94-68 record, which is a very standard mark for a Wild Card team, I will need to compile an 87-18 (.829) record to catch them. In my Pro-level (3rd hardest of four levels) season in 2005, I only went .722. And that year, Ichiro hit over 30 HR.

Good luck.

I’m well aware that I haven’t posted in a while, and this isn’t really a “real” post anyway. The holiday season is hitting full stride and people have been crazy at work and at home. It’s a three-day weekend, but Em will be spending most all of it in Sacramento as the powerful at the capital try to play “Deal or No Deal”.

So hopefully I’ll have some time to update various parts of the webpage, catch up with my life, and maybe even do something meaningful.

But not yet.

Saturday mornings are some of my biggest video game times, when the whole world of possibility with free time unfolds and I can just let my mind go and relax a little. And of course I can’t stop playing MVP 2005, despite my aforementioned growing hatred of its hardest difficulty level.

So I’ve decided, in the 2007 season, to attempt the greatest comeback in the history of baseball. Rather than languishing on my 20-win pace for the season, I’m switching back to All-Star difficulty for the last 105 games of the season. The goal is to make the playoffs.

Here’s a testimony to my abysmal performance so far:
7-50 (.123) record
28.5 GB (Angels) in the AL West
26.0 GB (A’s) in the AL Wild Card
112-363 (-251) Run Differential
2-27 Home, 5-23 Road
.188 BA, 6.18 ERA
3-16 vs. West, 0-18 vs. Central, 4-15 vs. East, 0-1 Interleague
35 HR, 54 SB

And Ichiro is hitting under .200.

Can this band of scrappy Mariners, defending champions for the past two seasons (who broke their own AL record for wins with 117 in 2005) add to their accomplishments with the greatest seasonal turn-around in the history of sports?

Stay tuned…

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Glide has several buildings in the Tenderloin, and while I primarily work at one (the Family, Youth and Childcare Center), I often have occasion to visit the others, especially the “main” building at 330 Ellis.

This building is the home of most of our programs, including the free meals program, which serves 1,095 free meals a year, which just happens to equal (365×3).

The fog and condensation of San Francisco around this time of year (or really, any time of year) often creates a moist and damp atmosphere that certainly pervades the main building. After all, the door is always open there (it’s not just a metaphor). The environment, the very texture of the air is almost exactly akin to so many rainy or almost-rainy days in Oregon.

And thus, it just takes the right ingredients during an active or nearly-active meal downstairs in the basement, with all the hot air set to rise, to transport me to a kitchen in the suburbs of Portland, circa the late ’80s and early ’90s. Bacon, especially, helps. And maybe just a hint of cigarettes.

I have been a devout vegetarian for over a decade, but there’s something about the smell of bacon that I will never stop loving. That something is precisely this association. My mother’s mother lived in her bathrobe in the kitchen for a vast portion of the days that I would spend with those grandparents in Oregon. A chain smoker, she would chew on straws between the multiple packs a day. This probably doesn’t seem like a flattering image, but I adored my grandmother, and would make a special effort to be the first one awake every morning when my parents and I stayed at the house. She was always up before my grandfather, and I was always up before my parents. Early morning was our time, in the kitchen. And she would cook bacon and chew on straws and we would talk about politics and our day and play dominos and I would promise her up and down that yes, I would go to college and no, I would never smoke a single cigarette.

Tomorrow will be forty years exactly since the death of my father’s mother. Those of you handy with math can tell that this indicates that we missed each other on this planet by more than 12 years. And as much as I loved my grandmother who I shared nearly two decades of time with, the one I missed would have been my favorite. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of someone who would understand me better than she.

So I can only imagine. But for now, today, on the steps of the main building, they can share. Why not? And I’ll pause, take in a full breath of poisonous smoke and murderous bacon, and smile. This is home. This is a moment, a portal to worlds of youth and before I was born.

Grandmothers, I kept my promises.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

File this one next to “Iran will acquire toasters” as part two in a series of explaining basic principles of political reality that the entire world fails to understand.

Was that too harsh? I don’t think this post is going to get any more easy-going.

The inspiration here is an online news article that is (finally!) not from Fox News. It’s this one, wherein CNN elaborates that no less than 21,000 people were mistakenly let into the United States in 2006. Security measures should have stopped each one of these twenty-one-thousand souls from crossing into the precious New Promised Land (USA).

Not only is this a fact, it’s one that the government itself is willing to tell you. Or “leak”, at least. So the actual number could be much higher. This doesn’t really matter, because there’s probably not much of a difference in your mind between 4,000 or 5,000 people and 21,000 or 25,000 people and even 40,000 or 50,000 people. Maybe if you think hard and put it into a context like sports stadiums, you can kind of grasp it, but in the end, sports stadiums of various sizes all start to run together and look the same anyway. At a certain point, numbers all start to look alike and those of us who are not mathematicians (read: everyone reading) really don’t distinguish these big numbers very well.

The point is, a metric crudload of people who were supposed to be too dangerous for the common people to interact with were let into the United States of America.

The rhetoric that is taken as a given (roughly equivalent to “the sun will appear to rise in the morning” or “Senators are doin’ it for themselves”) in the US government is that just one person who shouldn’t be let into the country (or on a plane, or into a stadium, or into a country club) will instantly lead to a breach of security so fundamentally devastating that it will instantly manifest terrorism. After all, there are about a quadrillion people out there who “hate us” (for no reason, of course) and every one of them has no life aspiration beyond blowing Americans into little tiny formerly flag-waving pieces.

Even if some of that is slightly exaggeratory, the general gist is true and is displayed daily. Not just by government sources, but by all sorts of media, ranging from “leftist” to “right-wing”. We need to live in fear of the constant numbers of terrorists chomping at the bit to blow us up where we work, live, and play. The only thing keeping our physical bodies intact is the watchful eye of American security.

The problem with the watchful eye theory is that American security is run by the same people who do all the other jobs in America. And 85% of all people, in work and in life, are asleep at the wheel almost all the time. So we get our stadium full of 21,000 would-be terrorists into the country.

Conservative estimates with this simple formula of mismanagement of the border (21,000) times people who hate us (10% of surreptitious dangerous would-be entrants? 5%? 1%? 0.1%?) would range between 21 and 2,100 incidents of terrorism per annum in the United States. Say you have the most incredible law enforcement ever, that using the combined forces of the Patriot Act, wiretapping, suspension of the Constitution, martial law, and a pod full of those precogs from the movie “Minority Report”, can anticipate and prevent 95% of terrorist acts on US soil, even though the same people let 21,000 dangerous people in the country.

2006, you owe me, conservatively, between 1 and 105 incidents of terrorism on US soil.

Not that I want, like, endorse, or do anything other than abhor terrorism. But hopefully my point is blindingly obvious by now. We have not had any terrorism on US soil since 2001. For six years, despite pursuing a foreign policy hell-bent on generating terrorism and inciting generations of hatred, there has not been a single act. Not one. The numbers above, times six. Or really, to the sixth power, to fully illustrate the beating of the odds.

There are only two possible explanations for this.

Either (A) there are no terrorists or (B) US law enforcement is working at a 100.00% rate of anticipation and prevention.

I think we’ve blown up (B) as though with a rocket-propelled grenade. How do you account for the 21,000 mistakes? How do you account for the math above? And how in God’s name do we have US law enforcement that despite allowing a burgeoning drug trade, endless gang warfare, and sky-high incarceration rates, suddenly learned how to prevent something purportedly likely with 100.00% accuracy?

It also just doesn’t wash with the fact that I carry a backpack, often extremely full (I pack lots of layers to account for San Francisco’s schizophrenic weather), onto a subway five days a week, and it could just as easily have explosives as jackets. (Note to SFPD et al: It does NOT have explosives. It has jackets.) If BART felt they could effectively anticipate my explosive:jacket likelihood, they would not have just spent millions of dollars on new hidden camera systems, entirely to prevent terrorism, that not even Turkish hackers will know the location of. (I learned about this on the local news at the ER.)

But if I grant (B), then nothing else really matters. I think I’m more scared of a world in which law enforcement can anticipate and prevent with 100.00% accuracy than one in which we risk occasional private acts of discord.

So we’re left with (A). There are no terrorists. At least not that want to do anything in the United States.

I guess you could allegedly make the counter-argument that terrorists all have an extreme penchant for panache, and the bar has been raised so high by 9/11 that it’s just too darn intimidating to commit terrorism on US soil. Daily events in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to contradict this theory, not to mention the old days of Israel, Northern Ireland, and wherever terrorism is sold. Granted that only 2 of those 4 examples are in the fabled “post-9/11 world”, but I think they’re quite relevant given that it’s allegedly the same enemy as the one that is coming for us on US soil. So even if I grant this crazy argument that only the biggest plot ever would be satisfying to commit within American borders, all it means is that we can stand down and relax, because we’re going to see something coming a mile away. The fear and paranoia paradigm still doesn’t wash.

The only other counter-argument I could possibly imagine would be that the deterrent is so high that terrorism doesn’t get carried out. And while ending up on the rack in Gitmo isn’t appealing, I don’t think it’s deterring countless acts of terrorism in the Middle East. And certainly it’s no secret that US law enforcement rates are not fueled by precognition and do things like let in 21,000 “bad guys”.

So what would be deterring people who hate the US, can get in, will likely not get caught, and are willing to kill?

We’ve got another binary choice here. For the sake of clarity, we’ll move on to two new letters. Either (C) there aren’t any such people or (D) they see a distinction between attacking US civilians and US occupiers.

You might say we can rule out (D) off the bat, because of 9/11. But if that’s the case, we’re left only with (C), which means that 9/11 was not what it seemed. But if we rule out (C), it makes (D) very hard to explain in the context of 9/11 as well. In fact, why did 9/11 happen and then lead to six years of uninterrupted bliss inside a porous and osmosis-prone United States?

I can’t explain it. But I will go with (D), in part because (C) would have to mean accepting that literally everything we are being told about both Iraq and Afghanistan is untrue, and that’s a little more than I want to handle tonight. (D) is at least logically consistent and sound outside of 9/11, and even more logically consistent and sound with an inside 9/11. (You see what I did there.)

So then we have a people who blow up people only for the purpose of kicking out an oppressive occupier. Who will only attack military or invasive parties and steer clear, despite plenty of motive an opportunity, of attacking civilians who have stayed out of the conflict directly (despite empowering the conflict indirectly).

I’m no fan of violence. I’m an ardent pacifist who advocates peace and non-violence about all things. But I also like semantic and logical political arguments like this, a throwback to my debate years. And I’m left feeling that you can’t really call this phenomenon in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere “terrorism”. It seems pretty military to me, or at least paramilitary. And while that doesn’t justify it any more, at least we have defined terms. These people are just rebelling against an occupier in the old traditional method. Adhering very strictly to terms of engagement more civil than those used by the oppressor.

Which, in fact, brings us all the way back to (A). There are no terrorists.

Sleep easy, America. There was never any threat (from abroad) to begin with. Border guards, go ahead and let an extra thousand in, on me.

Part 3 in this series (mostly noting it now so I don’t forget) will likely involve breaking down the problems with fighting a force which routinely employs suicide bombing as though they were ardent individualists.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

I change my mind about everything so often these days that I feel like I’m seven different people.

At least I’m not alone.

I was going to write a post all weekend. I know, I still haven’t managed one on Sunday. You can see last week’s post-Sunday post for the reasons. Was it really only a week ago? That’s weak. You could well convince me that it was months ago. Well, it was… last month. And what a difference a month makes.

It’s time to get rid of the pumpkins. October is gone, and what’s replacing it may be just as scary, but without the illusion or the mask. I’ve never been a fan of smashing pumpkins, either the activity or the band, but the pumpkins mold so fast these days they stand as a metaphor for political integrity. The face that smiles at you with a consistent look when you have the most hope about its designs is already rotten by November.

I go back and forth about things so quickly. Sometimes I think that all of human fear can be traced to our adaptability. We adapt so quickly to changes or new ideas that by two hours after we’ve thought of something, we already fear changing and letting it go. Our rapid-fire adaptation becomes our undoing, because it still takes that initial surge that beats down inertia to get us going in the first place. And each of those pulses or surges, overcoming our fear and our status quo, takes its toll of exhaustion and demoralization.

There is also joy and euphoria, though. The elation of knowing that the future is unknown, unfixed, able to be altered. In living life being close to many people, I have found that few others know that true exhilaration. Most only see the panic, the terror, the insecurity and instability innate to not knowing what tomorrow holds. But embracing that sensation, wrapping both arms around and holding on for dear life, squeezing the unknown till it begs for constraint – that is, in some ways, what life is all about. I crave that feeling, much the way I crave heights or breakfast burritos or good conversation. Smashing one’s ruts and routines like so much rotted squash.

But then I don’t. As soon as I decide something, get excited, put all the ducks in a row, there’s a change of heart, or of mind, or of … will? I don’t know. Turn and turn and turn again. It makes it hard to think or write or conclude when all I want to do is change. Change is good, but when change is the only constant, things become more of a struggle. Usually when I’ve used that phrase before, I’ve at least meant day to day or week to week. These days, it’s up-to-the-minute.

Through my life, people have accused me of being a manic depressive. I’ve playfully embraced the label, now called the oxymoronic “bipolar disorder”. From bi, meaning two, and polar, meaning poles. But anything which has poles has two of them. And this is “disorder”. From dis, meaning I’m putting you down, and order, meaning the way things should be.

In that succinct two-line phrase, we have all the metaphor we need for the modern state of “mental health treatment”. Taking a basic premise of everyone’s reality (or even aspiration) and calling it a problem.

Throughout much of my writing, I have defended the sine-curve lifestyle associated with so-called “bipolar disorder” or “manic depression” (note the contradictions in the old name, too) as being preferable to any other perspective in which one lives. It’s all over Introspection, usually fueled by rage. That people aspire to flatline their emotions is emblematic of what I find to truly be wrong with our society. People have been rendered afraid to feel, afraid to be governed by instincts and gut-level reactions that have been honed for centuries as guardians of our understanding and even our safety. For a society so critical of the reserve and restriction of the Victorian era, it is amusing that we still admire the emotional numbness of that era’s ideals.

Plus, the “treatment” just doesn’t work. I could give you a list of names of people who are on drugs for seeing the world properly at my place of work, or my last place of work, or countless other environments. You can spot the flattened effect a mile away. In contexts outside of “bipolar disorder treatment”, flattened effect is itself labeled a disorder. And yet the even-keel, robotic drone of mild pleasantness is seen as positive change, even salvation. Side effects may include fainting without warning, loss of bladder function, nausea, sore throat, and suicide. But you’ll feel okay about these things!

Okay. My intent here was not to take a tire-iron to this dead horse that angers me so. My intent was more to draw a (surprise!) metaphor for what’s going on. I told a friend a few weeks ago that he should not give into the temptation to think that what he was going through, what he was feeling, was not real. Because it is real. It’s real and true.

The world spins on an axis and it travels on an orbit. Level and rate. We have no reason to believe that the solar system itself does not have a similar experience, perhaps also spinning and certainly orbiting or drifting through the absolute space (such as it is) of the universe. Every second, the Earth is in motion in two or three or four different directions, simultaneously, effortlessly, but at a speed that would make fighter jet pilots flinch.

The serf farmer born tied to a Russian plot of land in the 1700’s, living and dying there every moment of his century of life, traveled as much as any jet-setter of the modern era in terms of absolute space.

This is the amount of change we experience every day. Massive, rapid, unfathomable alteration.

Last week, upon the death of a clam who predated and outlived our Russian serf, I called to mind the image of a nervous planet whistling into a darkened woods. In truth, of course, that planet is a whirling dervish, flying like a top (bey-blade?) in a circular dance almost unaware of what is in the path. There may be spooks and spiders and goblins aplenty. But the planet just spins and twirls and dances away, regardless of surroundings.

Earth’s course is predestined. Those of its inhabitants are not. As long as we pay attention. As long as we let ourselves feel.

To feel the rhythms of reality, to be aware of the endless change and travel innate to existence. To attune to the unknown, the unanticipated, the overwhelmingly vast but ever-ever-ever-turning.

Watch for falling goblins.

Early this morning, we posted a new video for The Mep Report, my former podcast with which I still interact from time to time:

Most of the material is old, but it’s repackaged in a nifty new way intended to promote the show. This one isn’t going to take over the world, but it’s hopefully the kind of thing that makes people want to listen.

Not many people wanted to listen today. In general. It was, again, one of those days that makes one question nearly every assumption, every action. I came so close to not making it into work today. I can’t even tell enough to know whether going in was a mistake or not. At this point, I’m past the point of caring.

On the way home, a prophet got on the BART train. He was a firebrand preacher, raised in the ‘hood, with a goon on either side of him mugging, leering, and laughing as he spoke his truth. The man was eloquent and profound. He found his target audience, a man twice his age from the Vietnam era, engaging him in a repartee of the man’s life and his own perspective. He quickly found more than his target audience. After one stop, I had to put my book away to listen.

Only a tape recorder would have done him justice, but one key moment was his declaration that television is a harder drug than anything else out there, “except maybe alcohol and cigarettes”. He broke down television to its component parts: “tell-lie, and that’s their vision.” His target audience was clearly impressed, verbally affirming. Many of the others surrounding were annoyed or afraid. And just as many, like me, were listening.

After two straight days feeling debilitated despite working for one of the most important social services agencies in California, hearing this man was the most inspirational moment of my week.

He wasn’t perfect (at one point he said he liked Hillary more than Obama, though at least he prefaced it by saying that there’s no point in voting because no one’s vote counts), but it was a damn sight better than anyone else who’s standing up and calling out these days. It made me wonder why I’m not doing more of the same. It also made me wonder how he’d react if I asked for his contact info and said that he should be speaking to more than just BART trains.

Probably, he’d feel patronized. Who the hell am I, anyway? But the man had a voice and a vision. He was able to capture the despair of this day and mix it as a message of unification for a muddled mass of misfits rolling northward toward nowhere.

And why did it hit me like a testimony to our time that this man was speaking to BART trains instead of crowds? Why wasn’t he leading the charge, the voters, the revolution? The inspirational populism of All the King’s Men came to mind, and I had to acquiesce, as I was walking away from the northbound train, that he had no reason to be less corruptible than anyone else. Sure, “the best minds of my generation can’t make bail.” But also, “show me the money.” In the end, he would probably be just as buyable, just as susceptible, just as able to adjust his story and perspective to meet the needs of the imp of self-interest.

In a way, are we all doing the same thing every day? In a small, small, but damning way? Why do I not speak truth to BART trains? Why do I not rave at those who might listen, at those who don’t listen, at those who seem inexorably locked into demanding that I listen?

It’s not fear. It must be a sneaking suspicion of self-interest.

Out, damn imp.

Above ground, now. Walking westward, toward the sun and its descending shadows, still not gone yet by an act of Regress. A woman, seconds before entering a gym in her designer work-out gear, screams at a young woman on a bike in angry sarcasm: “I’m so glad your mommy bought you a bicycle!”

I wasn’t there to see chapter one of this interlude. I only saw the aftershock. Maybe the woman almost got run down. But the dripping bitterness just seemed out of proportion. The younger one stood perched over her bike, stock still, in that kind of silent shame that cuts deepest when one is sure one has nothing to be ashamed of. And did this woman really just yell and then bolt into the carded confines of her high-priced gymnasium? After unleashing invective at the allegedly spoiled?

She eventually moved on. And so did I, hurrying now. And the wandering mind recalled the ongoing rage of a born bicyclist who uncharacteristically turned his rage on everything this afternoon, just before this journey began. Usually his rage is confined to bicycles, but today it was for everything, valid or in.

“He seems in a weird space today. Let’s just leave him alone.”

The zookeeper is very fond of rum. I feel that the last 48 hours have brought me closer to an understanding of why people drink alcohol than I’ve ever had before. There have been many moments of thoughts akin to temptation in the past. A mid-sophomore year (college) night above a pulsing party in the space below comes to mind, as the scent of cannabis wafted to my window. “It would be so easy,” I moaned. Over and over.

I remain, as then, steadfast. But these are trying times. Times without measure.

Stand up, ye prophets. And I may even, soon, have the courage to stand with you.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.