Entries from June 2003 ↓

A couple of nights ago, and for the first time since he fumbled onto the national stage, I saw George W Bush looking comfortable and very much at ease in a public setting. No smirking, no desperate confusion, no laughable faux gravitas in his mein. He seemed casual, off-the-cuff, unflummoxed, unworried.

It didn’t take me long to figure out why. He was at a fund-raiser, of course, one of the many many many fundraisers his handlers have set up recently, as part of an ambitious effort to stuff their campaign warchest so full of treature that another Bush “victory” will be — they hope — all but inevitable. And, as I watched him shake hands with one rich, fat, white, business-suited sycophant after another, it dawned on me that he was, at last, in his element. Anne Richardson once famously remarked that George Bush senior was born with a silver foot in his mouth. George Bush the younger was born with an entire shoe tree’s worth of feet protruding from his; but wealth and privilege run through his veins, like molten gold, along with an overriding sense of entitlement that, in his mind and in the minds of many of his adoring fans, trumps and invalidates all of his myriad faults.

The fundraisers afford him an opportunity to escape from the howling masses, those distasteful hordes of poor and middle-class people who are always clamoring for more: more food, more health benefits, more transparency, more fiscal responsibility. The people he’s shaking hands with at these events also want more, of course, but more of the things he can understand, the things he’s comfortable with: more wealth, more power, more privilege. And he’s only too happy to grant it to them, if they’d just drop a couple thousand bills in his coffers. Squid pro go, my friends, he mouthes as he pats them on their padded shoulders. Squid pro go.

The party was already deafening by the time I got there. I could hear it raging through the door, pounding techno over a muffled roar of conversation and the thump of dancing feet. I knocked, waited, banged, waited, opened the door, and poked my head in.

Mayhem. Flailing bodies grinding together in lurid red and green light, floor strewn with spent beer bottles, dorito bags, unconscious revelers. I squeezed in, closed the door behind me, and stood in the corner, waiting for something to happen.

It did, five minutes later. Madeline found me. “You came!” she yelled, over the din. I nodded, smiling stupidly, and said something stupid. My conversational skills, lacking to begin with, are rendered utterly useless when confronted with someone I’m attracted to. Luckily, she didn’t hear me, or I don’t think she did. She nodded and took my hand, opened it, put four pills in my palm, and closed my fingers over them.

“Take these!” she said, and disappeared into the crowd.

I looked at the wall of dancing bodies in front of me, then looked at the pills in my hand. Each was a different color and shape: a blue triangle, a yellow square, an orange circle, and a black pentagon. I swallowed the triangle, and waited.

Nothing happened, at first. I’m not sure what I expected, but I suppose I was hoping I’d just consumed some new experimental social disorder drug that was even now releasing a host of pharmacological agents that would, very quickly, dissolve the hard carapace of shyness and withdrawal that imprisoned the smooth, gregarious, sexual dynamo which lurked beneath.

Nothing continued to happen, however, for quite some time. I was about to turn around and leave when I noticed that everyone’s heads had turned into peaches.

They were all manner of peaches, large and juicy, small and hairy, red and yellow, yellow and red. The heads bobbed spasmodically to the music as their owners flailed and shimmied and shook. I saw one of the dancers pull out the stem rising from the center of his head like an aerial and begin to spank his partner’s proffered ass with it, swinging to the beat of the music. Some of the others were smashing their heads together, rupturing their skin with each collision, squirting peachjuice everywhere.

One of the peach heads came over to me. It was a female, I think. She leaned close to me and shouted something in peachtongue, but I don’t know peachtongue, so I just shook my head and raised my hands. But she wouldn’t go away. She kept talking, and I nodded, politely, trying to figure out what part of her eyeless peach head I should be looking at.

And then, suddenly, I was hungry. Very, very hungry. And the more she stayed, the hungrier I got, until finally I leaned forward and took a bite out of her head.

She screamed and slapped me with such force that I wheeled and collapsed on a chair, and then the chair tipped and dumped me on the floor. She muttered a couple of loud, peach imprecations at me, then spun and sauntered off, her head bobbing uncertainly atop her thin body.

This was no good. No good at all. I spat out the little bit of peach I had in my mouth — it was bitter, and tasted of makeup — and took the yellow, square pill out of my pocket and swallowed it, then pulled myself up onto the chair and sat. Immediately, I felt a little light, then a little weightless, and then crushingly heavy, as if I’d suddenly been transported to some high-gravity party planet. When I looked up, the peach heads were gone. They were vagina heads, now.

I blinked once, twice, three times, but it was true: everyone had oversized vaginas mounted vertically on their necks, adding at least three feet to their height. I’d never seen so many vaginas in one place, and I found the sight quite disconcerting. I mean, I’m as much a vagina fan as the next guy, but seeing them all in this context, huge and pink and mounted on everyone’s necks, I felt suddenly ill.

Nearly hyperventilated, now, I felt around in my pocket until I found the orange pill, and popped it in my mouth, and closed my eyes. I was determined that, after I counted to sixty, and took a deep breath, and opened them again, everything would have gone back to normal. At which point I would excuse myself politely and make for the door.

But it was not to be. The buzzing sound began at twenty, grew much louder at forty, and by the time I got to sixty it was everywhere. I cracked an eye open and peered through the slit, and it was exactly as I’d feared. The vagina heads were gone, but now the room was swarming with chainsaw heads: half ovals jutted out of everyone’s necks, surrounded by a ring of nasty iron teeth on belts that raced round and round the circumference of their heads. I saw one of the taller chainsaw heads slice the top of a doorjamb in two as he went into the kitchen for a drink. Another opened a bottle of beer by holding it up to his head and cutting through its neck. There were several unsteady, lurching, inebriated chainsaw heads moving through they crowds, and everyone gave them a wide berth.

It seemed like a recipe for disaster, a whole room packed full of chainsaws. And it was: ten minutes later, a fight broke out.

A male chainsaw head in a seersucker suit, carrying a Molson Light in his hand, had backed a female chainsaw head into the corner, and was in the process of violating her personal space to quite a shocking degree. She seemed uncomfortable, but it was hard to tell, due to her lack of a face — at least the kind of face with which I am familiar. Another chainsaw head, this one in fashionable black leather overalls, came up and tried to pull him away. Seersucker resisted. Overalls persevered. A melee ensued.

At first they just clashed chainsaws, head to head, and it was like some kind of low tech avant garde light saber / lumberjack performance. But then Seersucker ducked an arrant slash and rose in a great, sweeping arc that caught Overalls in the crotch; his head shuddered up through Overalls’ pelvis, his abdominal cavity, his chest, and finally his neck, slicing cleanly through bone and flesh and sinew.

The party fell silent (except for the constant churning sputter of all the other chainsaw heads). And then Overalls fell slowly apart, the two halves of his body slanting away in opposite directions, stretching a web of viscous gore between them like melted cheese. His head clattered to ground, and lay there, disembodied, still mounted in the bloody stump of his neck, and still running.

Seersucker picked up Overalls’ head and swung it around the room, roaring triumph. Someone flew at him, and then someone else, and all at once the crowd disappeared in a cloud of giblets and ichor, a bloody tempest that flung occasional limbs out of its churning core.

I screamed, and tried to push myself into the wall, and groped in my pocket for the last pill, the black one. Make it go away, I murmured, and swallowed it, and instantly lost consciousness.

When I woke up, Melanie was leaning over me. She had a normal head, and her normal head was smiling at me, and it was saying: “Would you like to get some coffee?” She was wearing jeans, now, and a black T-shirt. Morning streamed in through an open window.

I got up, looked around the room. Last night’s revelers lay on and beneath and beside the furniture in various attitudes of repose. They all had people heads. Their bodies seemed whole, and there was no blood anywhere.

“What was in those pills?” I said.

She shrugged. “Nothing. They’re just gummy candies. I thought they’d add an air of mystery to the party, you know? Sort of like Alice in Wonderland. How about that coffee?”

I nodded, rose to my feet, and followed her to the door. But then, for no good reason at all, I glanced back into the room. And that’s when I saw the neat little vertical line cut through the wall over the door to kitchen, as if by a passing chainsaw.

I shuddered, and hurried out.

I get my hair cut at the Hair Cuttery near my house. I’ve been going there long enough — almost three years now — that I know most of the stylists, and have even settled on one that I like best. Her name is Peri, and she has all the qualities I revere in a cutter of hair: she cuts well, she cuts quickly, and she cuts with a minimum of conversation. She seems to have been aware, from the first, of my sad inability to speak coherently with people I don’t know very well, and has always spared me the embarrassment. She asks a couple of easy questions about vacation plans (in the summer) or work (in the winter), makes some harmless comment about the weather, and then snips quietly away at my head for ten minutes. Then it’s done. I thank her, I pay, I leave. I like Peri a lot.

Sometimes, though, Peri’s not there, and that’s when I go to Plan B. Plan B’s name is Priscilla. Priscilla is a middle-aged Asian woman with a thick accent, a large, friendly smile, and a profound, deep-seated hatred of hair. All hair. Everywhere.

I’ve often wondered why people do the things they do. Why, for example, do hair stylists become hair stylists? I’m sure there are many reasons: long family tradition, a genuine desire to master the art of sculpting hair, dreams of rising through the ranks to become a celebrity stylist and follow your globetrotting clients around the world. Priscilla cuts hair because she hates it, and wants it to die.

I remember the first time I sat down in her chair. She arranged the apron around my neck and looked at me. In the mirror, I could see her do a little double take. Her eyes widened in shock, and then narrowed into slits. Angry, purposeful slits.

Allow me to explain. I’m half Arab, half American. And, although Arabs in today’s world are, arguably, less successful than their Anglo-Saxon brethren, in the tiny but all-important world of genetic determination, they absolutely kick ass. At the moment of conception, my Palestinian genome took one disdainful look at the blonde, blue-eyed, hairless strands of DNA with which it was to spend the rest of its life, let slip a ululating war cry, and fell upon them. Those poor bastards never had a chance.

As a result, I mostly look Arab: I have thick, heavy features, brown eyes, brown hair. Dark brown hair. Lots and lots and lots of dark brown hair.

Priscilla did a turn around my chair, holding a pair of scissors in either hand, surveying. She didn’t say anything, but I could see that the initial shock was gone, had become an unstable admixture of horror, anger, and glee. She snipped at the air one, twice, then darted in and grabbed my head with both hands, wrenched it up, and brought her face close to mine.

“You got dragon eyebrows!” she cried.

“What?” I had expected some comment on the weather, or maybe a question about how my day was going. I didn’t quite know what to say.

“Why you no cut your eyebrows! They dragon eyebrows! Hold still!” She gathered a swath of my left eyebrow between two fingers and snipped it away. The cuttings drifted down past my eyeball, screaming as they fell. She snipped again, and again, then released me, and stood there, surveying her conquest.

“Better!” She seized my head again, tilted it the other way. “Hold still!” she said, and dealt with the second eyebrow, then pounced back again, the scissors quivering in her hand. “Much better! Now!” She flung her scissors aside and picked up a pair of clippers. “You want clipper cut?”

I nodded, numb.

“Number 1?” Number 1 is the shortest setting for clippers, just one tiny step above bald.

I shook my head. “Number 2, please.”

She frowned. “Number 1, right?”

I swallowed. Number 1 was out of the question. I’m going to have the last thirty years of my life, at least, to be bald. I want to flaunt the hair I have, while I have it. But I certainly didn’t want to anger Priscilla. I decided to compromise. “How about a number 1 at the bottom, and then sort of fade into a number 2 at the top?”

“That stupid!” screamed Priscilla. “Make no sense!”

I looked around for help, but there was no one else in the shop. I looked down at the remains of my eyebrows, quivering in their death spasms in the lap of my apron. I looked up at Priscilla.

“Number 2,” I said, again, then added. “Please.” Tears quivered in my eyes.

“Fine, number 2,” she said, and clipped on the attachment, and began to take slow, vigorous swipes at my head, which jerked sharply to the side with each swipe, as if she was swinging a sledgehammer against it. Finally, she reached the back of my neck, and paused. A preternatural silence. A slow intake of breath. A long exhalation.

“You want trim back of neck?” She said this almost reverentially, as if she was asking if she could proffer the lamb for slaughter.

“Yes please.”

Another long pause. “All of it?”

“Yes,” I said, in a very, very small voice.

I heard her remove the clipper’s attachment. I heard it clatter to the floor. I heard the clippers roar to life, with a sound like an outboard motor. And then I felt cold steel bite into the back of my neck, and I screamed.

“Almost done!” she shouted over the whir of the rotors, grinding the blades into my neck. The hair flew away like grass before a weedwacker, followed by the first layer of skin, and then the second. “Almost done!” she said again, and began to move the clippers in a deep, circular pattern. Thankfully, the nerve endings in the back of my neck had already been shredded to confetti, so I felt this only as a dull grinding.

Finally, she was done. She stepped away, surveyed. “How much you want cut on top?”

I cast my mind back to college, and then high school, trying to recall the smallest unit of measure I’d been taught. Micrometer? Nanometer? Should I ask for ten nanometers? No. She’d take that as a taunt, as a challenge. Better to just play this straight.

“Not very much at all,” I said. “Just a very little.” I held up my thumb and forefinger, and pressed them tightly together. “That much, but a little less.”

“Ok. We see.” She picked up her scissors and brandished them like sabers, swiped them through the air a couple of times, opening and closing their blades so quickly that they blurred. I shut my eyes.

Five minutes later, the sound of snipping ringing in my ears, it was over. I opened my eyes, looked in the mirror. Priscilla was pulling off my apron, brushing hair off the exposed muscle tissue on the back of my neck. “All done,” she said. “Thank you.”

I looked in the mirror, surprised. The haircut wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was pretty good. I got up, went to the front, paid, then came back to give Priscilla her tip. “Thanks,” I said. “This is a pretty good –”

“Cut your eyebrows!” she said, then smiled. I nodded, handed her the money, and left.

I’ve been taking very good care of my eyebrows ever since.

Here’s a really excellent article by Michael Kinsley on the whole WMD flap, and on the sometimes nonexistent divide between opinion and fact in the collective Mind of the masses. My favorite passage:

Cynical, but refreshingly direct. In my opinion.

“I believe that the Prime Minister must have concluded that it was honourable and desirable to back the US in going for military action in Iraq and therefore it was honourable for him to persuade us through various ruses and ways to get us there - so for him I think it was an honourable deception.”

– Clare Short, former UK Internal Development Secretary

“Dr. Norman Doidge, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has identified among the telltale symptoms of fanatics: an intolerance of dissent, a doctrine that is riddled with contradictions, the belief that one’s cause has been blessed or even commanded by God, and the use of reinforcement techniques such as repetition to spread one’s message.”

– Ariana Huffington

“Like so many other pathalogical personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impluse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.

And let that sort of behavior in the era of big brains be taken as a capsule history of the war I had the honor to fight in, which was the Vietnam War.”

– Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

It was a fairly uneventful weekend, as these things go. My DNA was accidentally spliced with a badger’s in a freak blender accident, and I’ve been digging a complex network of underground tunnels beneath my cube ever since, and spend about an hour every morning filing down my massive canines.

I was visited by emissaries of the God of Pencil Erasers on Saturday and told I was to be His Messiah, and so I have dedicated my life to His cause, wandering into holy places and using one of the erasers on the back of the 3000 #2 pencils I carry wherever I go to erase whatever scripture I find and write in the doctrine of the eraser deity instead, which is: [      ].

I decided to just bite the bullet and embark on that three-month exploratory expedition I’ve been planning to the Tahiti Rhombus, which is sort of like the Bermuda Triangle except it has four sides, and whoever strays within its confines forgets one random fact every hour, so that if you stay long enough you forget pretty much everything that’s ever happened to you, good bad or indifferent, and are left with only your feelings.

I married a Kodiak bear on Sunday, but during the ceremony it ripped off my arm and tried to club me to death with it. We haven’t spoken since. I’m waiting for her to make the first move.

I watched Sixty Minutes. That Andy Rooney. He’s a riot.

The apartment smelled musty and abandoned. I elbowed the door shut, dropped my suitcase. Something was pounding in my head, demanding my attention. It had started during the funeral, while the reverend was droning through his cant, a dull ache that escalated over the next several days into an angry, thudding migraine. I’d been expecting its arrival, but not its longevity. It had lasted through the following week’s vigil at my mother’s house, and the flight back home, and the taxi ride to the apartment. None of the usual medications were working, and the pain was closer to intolerable than it had been in a long time.

I crossed to the window and twisted the blinds open and stood for a moment in the slatted light, looking out at my little corner of the city. The proprietor of the failing video rental place across the street was sitting outside his shop, peeling an orange with the careful precision of an expert orange peeler. The skin trailed down toward the sidewalk like an unraveling corkscrew, descending kinked and pendulous. When it fell, the video store man put down his knife and stared at the naked orange in his hand. I couldn’t make out his expression at this distance, and I had never spoken to the man, but he seemed unsatisfied to me: as if the orange wasn’t what he’d expected, after all.

I waited, watching, but he just sat there, looking at his orange, utterly still. A minute, five minutes, an hour went by. My legs ached, and my eyes were dry with the strain of staring, but the longer I stood there, the more he didn’t move. And it wasn’t just him: nothing moved, anywhere. Cars stood motionless in the street, their drivers visible through the windshields, their hands wrapped around their steering wheels or hanging out of their windows. A woman pushing a baby carriage was frozen in the act of stepping into the street, looking off to her right at the still traffic. Birds perched on the powerlines like ornaments.

I knew what was happening, of course. I’d been expecting it. The world was finally starting its change. The man on the sidewalk had become a wax figure. The woman was wax too, as was her child, and the people sitting in their cars, and the birds, and the homeless man huddled in a doorway, and the suit hailing a taxi. But this wasn’t a transformation, really: it was more of an unveiling, the unreality at the core of the world finally revealing itself.

And, as I watched, it all began to melt. The video store man became slick, ill-defined, and his features ran down his face, and his face ran down his shirt. He sagged, folding into himself, and spilled off his chair in slow rivulets, and gathered into a pink and brown puddle at its base. The birds dripped off the powerlines; the woman poured herself into the baby carriage, and merged with the viscous remains of her child.

The phone rang. I drew a sharp breath, blinked. It was dark outside now. Cars streaked by below, their headlights carving yellow cones into the night. The video store guy was gone, his shop shuttered for the night. I looked at my watch: almost ten o’clock. I blinked again, swallowed, crossed to the phone.

Hello, I said, but it came out as a hoarse whisper, barely audible. I cleared my throat, and tried again. Hello?

Jack? It’s Mom.

Hi Mom.

Just wanted to make sure you got in ok.

Yeah. Fine.

How was the flight?

It was good.

Not late at all?

No. Just a little.

Good.

Silence. I felt like I should ask her how she was doing, whether she needed anything. But I couldn’t muster the words. They fluttered just outside my reach, like a clutch of frightened doves.

Well, she said, finally. Just checking in on you. Keep in touch, ok?

Ok, Mom. I will.

She hung up, and I waited a moment, then put the phone back in its cradle. It settled in with a faint click. I went back to the window, and watched the night creep darkly by.

Went to a pool hall this evening. Stood under glaring lights in a pall of cigarette smoke and sent colored balls careening off felt bumpers in a sort of macroscopic demonstration of brownian motion, except a little bit more random. We successfully managed to avoid losing any of our balls to those nefarious little holes on the sides of the table, a breathtaking display of incompetence that required a level of no skill heretofore unseen in that pool hall or any other.

I don’t know why I find this game so difficult. When you think about, it’s completely deterministic. If Ball A hits Ball B at angle C, then Ball B will move in direction D at velocity E. Simple enough. But my mind can’t seem to handle the geometry, and my hands just absolutely refuse to correctly execute the flawed instructions they’re getting. I crouch over the table, legs splayed, eye steely, glaring down the length of my cue at the white ball. The white ball looks back at me. Go straight, I say. Hit the blue ball head on. Do you understand? The white ball nods. Head on, I say. Not at an angle. Head on. The white ball nods. I nod. I strike it. The ball careens left and glances off the blue ball, almost as an afterthought, and the blue ball shoots right and looses itself among a mass of its striped brethren. I shake my head, glare at the white ball. It looks back sheepishly.

At least you only play this game in two dimensions. I envision a day, after gravity has been conquered, when 3D pool will be all the rage. You’ll play it in a sort of cube / corral, with pockets at each corner of the cube and along all the sides. The technology of the cube will work gravity out of the equation, so that every time you hit a ball, it will move in the direction you hit it without falling, and will slow down and stop and hang there according to various calculations that mimic the frictional stresses that would have been placed on it if it were rolling along a carpet of green felt, rather than simply moving through space. You’ll play it wearing an anti-grav suit, using a sort of modified racketball racket as a cue. It’ll be the most popular game in the world, subsuming and obviating both 2D pool and golf.

And I will suck at it, mark my words. I will suck at it.

Bushspeak is that odd perversion of the English language that are president uses to communicate with others, and I’ve been hearing a lot more of it on the news lately. With various shitstorms beginning to bear down on his administration (the continually worsening economy, no WMDs in Iraq, allegations of intelligence tampering, a return to massacres in Israel, etc), it seem like Karl Rove has decided that our Commander in Chief needs to be dangled in front of the cameras a little bit more, so that he can wax extemporaneous about his concern, his resolve, his steadfast desire and deep personal blah blah blah.

The problem is that Bush doesn’t do extemporaneous. I’ve heard various reports on how warm and friendly a conversationalist he is in person, and I have no reason to doubt them. But, really, so what? His ability to successfully shoot the shit with his buddies off-camera does nothing to leaven the shock and awe of seeing him, the leader of the free world, the possessor of the biggest, baddest bully pulpit history has every known, fumbling awkwardly with the strange words that spill haphazardly out of his mouth whenever he has to speak without the aid of a teleprompter. You can see it in his face, the sort of panicked, perplexed look of a cowboy whose steers are running amuck, barreling hither and yon in a sort of antic approximation of a herd.

I don’t think he’s dumb. I really don’t. I used to, but he’s proven me — and many others — wrong over the past three years. There’s a Machiavelian ruthlessness behind that confused expression, and the burning righteous certitude of a born-again conservative ideologue. And he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of smart, savagely efficient people with a similar temperament. It’s quite dangerous — it’s been ruinously dangerous — to underestimate the man. But you can’t deny the near aphasia of his various unscripted public pronouncements.

However: his speaking has gotten better of late, and I think I know why. There’s a hint of what’s going on in his phrasing: the odd silences, the pregnant pauses, the misplaced stresses. He tries to carry these verbal ticks off as rhetorical techniques, but I know better. Those pauses aren’t for emphasis. They’re for data access.

Because think about it: the modus operandi of the Bush administration has always been to take up a cause and pursue it with a kind of myopic, hellbent, stultifying single-mindedness that is almost impossible to counter through the standard techniques of rational discourse and quiet debate. His people are on message with a vengeance. Whenever they’re out peddling their latest outrage — a second tax cut for the very rich, our need to despoil Alaskan wildlife in order to sustain our SUV culture, the imminent danger of attack from Iraq’s nuclear juggernaut — they do so relentlessly, all of them, The George and Donald and Condie and Ari and Colin Show, a perfectly synchronized sleight-of-tongue performance guaranteed to pull the wool over the staring eyes of a disaffected nation. They appear on all the major networks, on the radio, in print, saying the same thing (often with the same phrasing) over and over and over again until you go to bed with words like “dividend tax cuts help the poor” and “Saddam could poison my child’s Cheerios at any time” playing endlessly through your drowsy mind, elbowing sheep aside and barging into your dreams like malicious gatecrashers.

So here’s my theory. Because his administration talks a lot but says very little, his advisors have been able to program Bush with a limited series of lines, buzzwords, policy statements, outrageous and unprovable facts, etc, all of which dwell uneasily in his mind, sliding past each other like exotic tropical fish in a drab little aquarium, until they’re called to action by some need for unscripted speech. Then they mass together and jump out of the water and splat onto the ground, twisting and spluttering toward each other, gasping for air.

But here’s the thing: Rove et al have engineering these phrases so that, no matter what configuration they finally assume, they come out making some semblance of sense. Call them SynaBites, synergistic sound bites. Take Bush’s recent comments on the horrible rash of killings in Palestine and Israel yesterday:

There was a long, very long silence between “strongly” and “condemn”, during which Bush glared squinty-eyed at his questioners, as if he was pausing to let some elemental truth sink in. Of course, there’s not much truth to mine from the phrase “I strongly”, so I can only assume that he was in the process of pulling together a bunch of his stock phrases, sort of at random, and trying to work them into some coherent whole before they plunged out of his mouth and onto the public stage. And what followed was coherent enough, though it didn’t make much actual sense. Who’s he calling on, exactly? Who else but us has any say at all in what happens in Israel?

No matter. It sounded not bad, vaguely presidential and peace-loving, and it at least obeyed the basic rules of grammar. Quite a feat, when you think about it. It’s like taking a bunch of canned phrases, throwing them into a yahtzee cup, shaking them around and spilling them out and getting a halfway coherent statement every time. I can imagine scores of MIT programmers and language scholars working late into the night, creating these little bits of message and painstakingly fitting them together to make sure they’re compatible with all the other little bits of message, then downloading them into the presidential head the next morning.

The question is, how long is he going to be able to get by with these squishy cookiecutter abstractions? If the economy continues to go sour, then maybe not much longer. Otherwise, I think we’re in for five more years of squinty looks, pregnant pauses, and lots of vaguely correct, completely vacuous statements.

Looking out the window at rain, rain, rain. Can’t believe it’s the middle of June. This is definitely ark weather. Driving home today, I found myself just constantly hydroplaning, skimming across the surface of 270 like I was on skis. Is this global warming? El Nino? The god of rain, answering our prayers a little too enthusiastically?

This summer reminds me of the legend of Cataract, the god of sorrow. Cataract was an unhappy god, and he wept constantly, and his tears fell on the land of the People and washed away their crops, and stripped the topsoil from their farms, and swelled their rivers, and drowned their children. It rained for many hundreds of years: rain in the morning, rain in the afternoon, rain in the evening, rain without end, and the People soon found themselves mired in the same doldrums that so burdened their maker.

But one day, their leaders gathered together in what has come to be known as the Confabulation of Joy, and there vowed that they would hereafter endeavor to reject the sadness that held sway over their lives and the lives of their people, and seek happiness instead, even in the midst of the world’s despair.

And so it came to to pass that, every morning, the women of the People emerged from their homes and stood in the rain and looked up into the grey, sunless sky, and sang sweet, joyful songs, full of cheer and good humor. The men set about their hopeless work with a spring in their step, smiling and joking as they toiled in the rain. The children played shivering in the mud, and their laughter echoed musically across the Land. And, every Sunday, the People celebrated the week’s end with the Seventh Day Festival, and the dancing, and the singing, and the music-making lasted long into the night.

Cataract, the god of sorrow, looked down on their joy, and felt his mood lighten; and, slowly, his sorrow became melancholy, and his melancholy became contentment, and his contentment became happiness. And, soon, the rain began to slacken, and the clouds dispersed, and the sky appeared, and the sun shone down on the Land for this first time in many, many years.

In this way did the People of the Land become the masters of their own destiny: not by succumbing to it, nor by railing against it; rather, by recognizing its true nature, and working tirelessly to change it. Because a man’s destiny is not the purview of the gods, nor has it ever been; it is the story of the People, and the People are both its subject and its author.

And now the happiness they had struggled to maintain for so many years came effortlessly. They have been a joyful people ever since, singing and dancing and laughing, year after year, for they know that if they allow themselves even the slightest bit of melancholy, their sad god will return to his sadness, and his sadness will beget theirs, and theirs will beget his, until the rains begin again, and the world is washed away in a flood of despair.

I’m happy to report that I’m writing this entry from a Border’s bookstore. T-Mobile’s offering a free day pass for their wireless service, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I must say, it’s very cool to be logged on from someplace other than work or home. A little decadent, actually. Also a little scary. Their wireless network is completely insecure, so anyone with the desire and the equipment could make himself aware of everything I’m doing. Oh well. Security, like privacy, is rapidly becoming an illusion outside of the highest echelons of first-world governments, so I might as well get used to it.

Anyway. Time to go make my sacrifice to the god of drought.