The story is stunningly brutal and cruel.  Don't read it.  Do anything else, but do not read it.  Because once you read it, you will be completely preoccupied trying to convince yourself it is not true. 

Yay!  I can pay my rent!  Such are the turning points in my life.  But, you know, I think of war refugees, who are poorer than dirt, and homeless -- and hungry, always hungry (never sick, because if they get sick they just die) -- and then I think of how much money I give my landlord and I want to kill him.  (Oop.  That's not what I meant to say.)  I meant to say that then I think how fortunate I really am. 

Of course I could not find out anything about my bank account until my DSL came back on a couple hours ago.  It was off all day.  That's because I had today off from work.  (My DSL knows...  It watches me... it waits...   It will be up and running fine all day tomorrow, while I'm at work.) 

But -- I must have some sort of DSL-guilt, I keep talking about this -- it is free.  And it's even faster now.  It's latency is down to 30ms from 50ms.  It used to graph flat at 50, with occasional spikes.  Now it graphs flat at 30, no spikes.  Flat.  Things just keep getting better, life is good, there's no sand in my food, I think I still have a job, and we just enjoyed the first ocurrence of a blue moon on halloween since 1955.  Come on al Qaeda, nuke me!  Nuke me now, because right now I'm content.  But hurry because I'll be securely ensconced in my impregnable misery in no time.

Just go here.

People who are viewed as intellectually enlightened and informed are increasingly adopting the fanatical view that this conflict needs to become (or is already) a religious war.  The sane moderates maintain in a tragically diminishing voice that this is a political conflict masquerading as a spiritual imperative.  Not to diminish the extremity of the horrors which have occured, but unfortunately, framing this conflict as a merely political one offers only mundane, pedestrian benefits to the powerful elite compared to what they can gain through exploiting the frenzied hysteria of a patriotic American fatwa. 

Who will our Mohammed be?  FDR? Lincoln? Washington? John Adams? Benjamin Franklin?  George Mohammed Walker Bush?  And when it is all over how will we account for ourselves?  Will we bother to examine our collective conscience then?  Will we feel any need at all to do so? 

We are revealing our true selves as individuals and defining our nation by our response to this attack.  I daresay we are a nation of courageous individuals who, over the last thirty years, have abdicated arguably the greatest democracy (certainly the most powerful democracy) of all time, turning it over to an oligarchy of rich, mostly white, men who are using this crisis for their own narrow, selfish purposes.  They are the real fifth column in any battle brought today by true patriots and defenders of freedom. 

Freedom is not a prize to be awarded to either 'us' or 'them'.  Ideally, freedom tolerates no imposed distinction; there is no 'them', only us.  There will always be those who seek rebellion against society and who repudiate the inclusiveness of freedom.  The danger is to adopt their destructive view as our own, to descend into their brand of hatred and to adopt their posture of judgementalism, thus becoming not defenders of freedom's high ideals, but the petty custodians of some cheap imitation of freedom.  Let whatever distinctions there may be, be only the distinctions which others have chosen for themselves.  Let us not lose our grip on this precious gift of freedom in the tears of our grief, nor in the fever of our just rage. 

It is, least of all, a nation we defend; much more we defend the ideal of a free and open society which can exist anywhere but which, for a couple centuries now and to our great good fortune, has chosen to exist in America.  We are blessed.  Let's not blow it.

I do not support the so-called Patriot Act.  Since it is now enacted, I do support strict adherance to its 'sunset' provision limiting the life of this draconian act. 

I am embarrased to be a human today, on a planet where the dominant free society enacts a law that virtually criminalizes immigrant status.  This exceeds the shame caused by Bush-the-former when he blocked HIV positive people from entering the US. 

What is going on?  Callers to Talk of the Nation on NPR are actually advocating torture for suspected terrorists.  What's even scarier is that such torture is the scheduled topic for today's show. 

I lit candles, watched the clock, shutdown everything electrical and precious (read: computer and monitor), snuggled into bed and began to read by flashlight.  At 1:30 AM the electrical shut-down in my neighborhood, scheduled for midnight, had still not ocurred.  When I woke, the microwave clock and the caller-id box indicated that there had been no shut-down. 

The candles were nice.  Going to bed early was nice, as was getting up early.  Maybe the lights will go out tonight. 

A sobering excerpt from a speech you should read. 

There's more.  Go read it.  The truth hurts; in fact it hurts so much that it might -- just maybe, if we are strong and see with open hearts, and if we are brave and feel the full depth and breadth of our national agony -- it just might transform us for the better.  There is no question it will transform us -- the only question is whether that transformation will be for the better or for the worse. 

I used to write essays for my journal, things that took time and tears to produce.  It was not a 'blog' kind of writing, not given to the staccato pace of a good weblog.  My journal entries were introspective, reflective and, too often, preachy.  I wanted my writing to have a better perspective, a view not limited to the world of me, I wanted to create these words with a view toward the broader world.  A blog -- a thing perhaps best described as a narrative of websurfing, thick with links to and pithy comments about other fascinating websites -- seemed a structure that might promote extroversion in my writing (and maybe even in my thinking), a format that might help me get out of myself. 

Every soul did once experience greatness in one of its incarnations.  Every crippled creator today has, somewhere in its karmic record, an experience of flowing, lush, endless-seeming creativity which perfectly and appropriately expressed the contents of every void, and every shadow, and every humble hiding thing within.  And everything has happened already.  In the moment that is life, the moment of the soul, there is no past and no future -- all that was and all that will be, very simply, is.  My task is to give that creator, that god, an incarnation in this temporal plane -- this existential flatness upon which god has smashed itself, splattering godself into its component parts; you, me, time, space, life, death, love, hope...  I am called to transcend my existence as a mere speck in an enormous abstract stain, to knit from these tenderly intimate, yet infinitely distant parts a coherence of god.  I am called to reclaim from the surface of this canvas, a whole truth, to draw up out of the accidental randomness of that flat reality a real, honest-to-goodness multi-dimensional creation which will be my contribution to the ultimate reassembly of everything into One. 

Wallowing in the balm of self-abuse.  Bomb.  Sometimes only it soothes.  I let reams and reams of words float through my brain, through the day, words like lost waifs that beg with poignant eyes and broken-hearted hope for recognition, or acknowledgement, or even just for some evidence that their existence is not totally and completely superfluous to the world.  Words.  Were. 

Like throwing pennies away.  It's wrong.  It's a waste.  I discard the most precious thing that could ever come this way, and I feel powerful -- like the five year old who threw the Sunday roast on the kitchen floor.  I want to feel powerful, senselessly powerful in the way a drowning man in desperate panic attacks his rescuer.  I do what I don't want to do; because I don't want to die, and I don't like to cry, and I do not want the responsibility of these precious things, words. 

So I throw them away.  Oh, if you only knew the words from today, the stories they told, the fictions they wove more true than any fact.  Characters with breaking-blooming hearts, plots of universal significance, songs of hoping-eyes brightened, of unlived lives brought to glorious joyous life...  I trash them all.  Then in tears I go back, as now, to recover, reclaim, retrieve; to regain some fragment of that which I discard as the result of trantrums so very infantile -- as the result of agonies all too mature.

I must post this -- whatever this is -- before my electricity is shut off for the night (Mass Electric is doing upgrades in the neighborhood), and before I lose my fickle Internet connection.  The anxiety of the end is always the last reason to start.  Sometimes it is the only reason.