Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

If you liked 76 pictures, you’ll love 84 pictures!

Check out the latest snapshots from the trip that was. Please note especially that you will enjoy this installment if you’re a fan of elephants.

I have other things to post about, but they have nothing to do with this update note. We’ll see if I get to them. I can say that it’s been a good weekend.

So it’s been awhile.

Check here for all the action and excitement of Day 4 (27 January) from our tour of India & Nepal. Please note that there are 76 photos on that page, making for some substantial download times, depending on the quality of your connection to the interwebs.

I’m a little embarrassed that my last photo update was on 18 February and it’s now 8 March. Almost more time has elapsed since the last update than elapsed between the actual third day and when the third day’s photos were posted. But at least I’m getting back on track now.

Hopefully it won’t be 20 more days till the next update.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Well that was fun, wasn’t it, kids?

We got to live for a day. We got to dream. Those of you more politically inclined, and certainly more Democratically (big-D and little-d) inclined than I got to run around, shake hands, pretend it was 1960 or 1968, but this time the promise was real. We got to think this one was different, that once again we could believe and that cynicism would get swallowed up, just for a moment, in the wave of euphoric hope that people claim abounds in this country.

It was exciting - thrilling even. I’ll even admit that I had some hope somewhere amidst it. It didn’t seem feasible, it didn’t make any sense, but hey… George Mason was in the Final Four a couple years ago.

Funny thing about George Mason. They still lost. By 15 points. In the semifinal.

The only consolation is that we get to keep our dream. We don’t have to watch an Obama presidency go down in the flames of compromise and selling out. We don’t have to watch him reveal himself as or become an establishment prop. We don’t have to see the glowing rhetoric turned to justifications for war or tax cuts or individual mandates to buy health care. We can keep the dream. Just like with RFK, but with less blood.

I know what you’re all thinking and saying, rolling your eyes and lamenting my dim awareness of things. Obama still has a lead in the delegate count! Obama is the clear choice of the people!

Here’s the thing, folks… the party establishment has been looking for approximately ever for excuses and reasons to pick Hillary over Barack. She has had the lead among superdelegates, the bellwether barometer of where the party establishment is going, since the beginning. A couple people started to falter in her support once Obama had crazy momentum, but even then she maintained a lead and a lot of people were hemming and hawing about “why we have superdelegates in the process”.

America loves its winners and once Hillary starts to look like a winner again, I don’t see how people will be able to hold it back. She’s again been able to dress herself up as Cinderella - and unlike all the March Madness and election Cinderellas of the past, she’s actually female. It could be argued at this point that the Clintons actually throw some primaries so they can always fit the bill of the American underdog that you just know is going to win. Incredible territory to steal from John McCain and Barack Obama. Unbelievable that the story going into August or November will be about how Hillary Clinton is the candidate of infinite comebacks… the same Hillary who was the presumptive president-elect for the entire year 2007. Pretty much no one can manipulate the public like the Clintons. Except maybe the Bushes. Ah, monarchy.

As alluded to earlier, I saw “The Other Boleyn Girl” two nights ago. It may be the revision of history looking back, but King Henry VIII was seen to quake in the wake of the scorn of his supporters at times. He trembled at the idea of casting out his popular first wife and even more at separation with the Catholic Church. How would the public think? How would they react?

If only he had had color televisions, cable news pundits, a rabble-rousing but ultimately unsupported rival, and the appearance of an ongoing rivalry with a power-sharing partner. That’s how to really keep them in check, Henry. The real American revolution was not democracy… it was how to evolve and perfect monarchy without letting anyone know that’s what was happening.

Do I still hope to be wrong, again? Sure. Why not, just for you. But haven’t we really known all along exactly how this would go down?

Good, if somewhat predictable, theater makes for really bad governance. God save the queen.

It’s 4:30 A.M. on a Tuesday
It doesn’t get much worse than this
In beds in little rooms
in buildings in the middle
of these lives
which are completely meaningless
-Counting Crows, “Perfect Blue Buildings”

I have 20 minutes to write this post and I feel like I could take the rest of my life. There’s a lot of pressure on today… not in my world so much as the world. Which in itself is a misnomer, because there are always more worlds, always more lives. Go to India, learn that we are not doing this thing once only for a one-shot deal. Everyone should be mighty thankful for that, because we’ve screwed this shot up pretty mightily. The humbling weight of history is almost all the gives me hope these days. No wonder I’ve been surrounding myself with the past and citing historical context for everything and watching movies about 1980 or 1536.

Americans always vote on Tuesdays. This decision was made in the antebellum years of the United States, with the winds of war looming on the horizon. A move was needed to unify the country, now and forever. Or maybe it was just more practical to pick a day forever. We’ve been living with it ever since.

Tuesday was named for Tyr, the Viking god of war, the equivalent of Mars, the Roman god for whom March was named. We are the Vikings, we are the Romans, we are at war, and we are not paying attention to history. We still believe in Empire and a God of War. And we honor this symbolism with making our most important, or illusory, decisions.

Maybe if we had been voting on Wednesdays all along, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It’s a little naive to think that, given the restrictions put all seven days on who we are able to pick from in the first place. But maybe it’s more naive to think that if you pour this kind of collective energy and symbolism into a specific day, it doesn’t stick at some point. It’s the first War Day in the Month of War. And this will, by all accounts, seal our fate for the next 4-8 years.

Maybe on 9/11, the US should’ve done something useful and declared war on Tuesday instead of terrorism. Declaring war on War, which is the same as war on terror, but perhaps we could actually defeat Tuesday. We know exactly where Tuesday is hiding. We probably have even less understanding of its motives, but at least we don’t have to blow up three countries to get rid of it. Congress already blew Daylight Saving Time into a day-eating monster; it can take out Tuesday just as swiftly.

And instead of renaming, we could just eliminate it completely and have a 4-day work-week, a 32-hour stint that can sustain the same levels of employment for the next three years that we have now. I’d happily donate my 8 hours so that we don’t have a full-scale Depression in the coming days and have to start an even bigger war, perhaps a final one, to try to dig out of it. Are you in?

I don’t really think anyone’s going to win today. The chorus of people with deafening cynicism about Obama is getting louder. Why hasn’t he taken controversial stands, outlined plans or policies? Why does he vote awfully meekly for someone with such vocal courage? I can continue to hope for upside and pray that he’s been sandbagging all along… that the first 100 days would feel like revolution from within. I can’t rule it out yet. But there seems a futility about this whole exercise. If he really weren’t in someone’s pocket, wouldn’t they just get rid of him? Would we really get to keep someone that’s up to the challenge?

But go, vote, hope. I will board my train and get a seat because so many people would prefer to stand in the middle of the train than sit at the front or back. I’ve been trying to discern a motive for this behavior (short of believing that Americans are obsessed with sitting) that makes sense. Why someone would rather stand up for half an hour around others standing just to be in the middle of the train. But I guess it’s explicable… a flight to the middle, toward the average, toward American ideals of pointless effort and uncontroversial conformity. One’s just that much closer to the exit, perhaps, ready to bail as soon as the wind turns. Even if there are twice as many people in one’s way.

Tyr dies in the end, along with all the other Norse gods in the Vikings’ own mythology. Chaos wins, takes over, runs amok over all those seemingly the most powerful and dominant in the universe. Eventually, some far off date after the devastation, there are the small glimmers of the budding of a new world. A big, painful jab at the reset button on a computer that takes quite a while to boot up.

Anyone got a version of Disk Defragmenter that works on this one?

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Little is so humbling as setting slightly optimistic goals and then being bowled over with malaise and inertia. The fact is that I have found myself so overwhelmed by the online efforts I would like to produce that I have been unable to make any progress on any front.

But for now I bring you the slightest bit of progress: a landing page for the Photo Diary of my time in India & Nepal. It’s not much, but it’s a start… and it gives me a place to send all my friends who don’t read this blog so they can check for updates on their own.

There is more to come. I have a to-do list a mile long, almost all of it involving webby projects. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like without the Blue Pyramid’s demands hanging over my head. Less connected and quieter, to be sure. But would I have written 3 more books?

Enough of such concerns for now. Today is booked, so little more will be coming out today. And then it’s a work week. But it’s March, which offers hope of loosing the chains of inertia. Not losing them, to be sure, but loosing them. I know you were wondering if that was a typo.

Type. Oh.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.