notebook of a revolutionary jaded

Here we go into Winter. Again. One day it was too hot and today we're sliding down the thermometer - overnight. I am disturbed the Juncos have not shown up, I record their arrival annually and they are weeks overdue. They are my control group for Climate change. Meanwhile, the war drums are growing loud enough for silencer earphones, some sentinel warning siren grinds into the Eustachian tubes burrowing into the deep mind so we are never really settled, always on the brink of disaster somewhere, maybe here, maybe not. If you live in Nevada you would know the drone of Predators send you to sleep, wake you before sunrise, you would have seen the glazed eyes skilled in war games hanging out in the casino, feeding the paycheck into the slots as if ... as if it were all about the joystick. Do you think victims of joystick mania have any idea what is really happening when the drones start humming?

We were driving through a tight canyon sandwiched between semis when a couple of F22's took a detour overhead, low buzzing the lanes. By the time we gathered words of exclamation, they were gone. In that brief second, we were shown how fast death clears the landscape ... maybe families were gathering water, hanging laundry, an ordinary day, a vanilla sky and then nothing.

What accident of birth has us reading here today while Indonesia is swamped? Isn't this a question that has no answer? The western world demands answers for everything, flirting into WW3 where they have yet to understand some people and places will never be understood. The best we can do is observe the irony.

There are some words I detest. My grammar school principal used to close the day over a cloth-covered loudspeaker beamed into each classroom. She had a sense of humor that even 5th graders got. "Wagons Ho" meant the busses arrived. Her most hated word was Harsh. We loved her for that since everyone easily identified with a subconscious harsh reality even if we didn't understand it. My hated word is Urgent. Thus when I see the western world claim urgent action is "required" (also hated) against Iran, my skin crawls. When I see people encouraging one another into WW3, I know they really don't know, they have not been there, they are mouthing opinion without a basis in reality. They have never whispered inside a mosque in Isfahan and listened to their whisper bounce off a trillion tiny pieces of gleaming colored clay set perfectly in place centuries before a western world existed.

I read the small details in news stories, the minimized denial that what you are seeing is not what you see. You could actually read, digest and miss those details, put there for balance, "required" you might say. Those details are the sirens going off, we'd like to make it stop, it hurts, it grinds. Three months it warns and you can't blame us this time. Sounds like we'll make war for Christmas. It can and does happen just like that. Everyone remembers waking up to the nightlights, bombs bursting in air over Iraq.

By an accident of birth, winter finds us continuing our standoff with propane heat delivery, the fatted, gloating truck rolling up and down hairpin turns servicing the underemployed, out of credit, out of luck who convince themselves life is hell on Earth and there is no other way especially when the easy way stares them down. Livity asks we remove our personal survival from pipelineistan. We're ready all but for the chimney cap going into place this week. The primary woodpile is huge with extra piles scattered wherever there is room. The Fireteacher lives up to his name and I am cast in the role of carrier, all-weather assistance, snow, sleet and hail. Out comes the wheelbarrow, on comes the rain, then drizzle, then flakes fall and we are transformed into a fairytale. Today's soliloquy wraps with the last line from The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock: ... Till human voices wake us and we drown.