Its alright, we're only bleeding

"... Every day, every night, someone's blood is being offered up on the imperial altars. That's what empire is. That's what empire does.

See Rome

While you were dreaming
While you wrapped your mind in silks
Bronze Steel Stone
Did their work

While you breathed the fumes
Of the oracle's fissure
Deranged the senses
Settled in soft beds

Rome
Sent agents into the streets
Hard men pinched men
Bronze Steel Stone

To eliminate execute
Discredit and destroy

See Rome

While you stood in the forum
Declaimed high words
Filled temples with fragrant smoke
Scrawled millions of learned disquisitions

Rome marched
Somewhere, in your name
Fired the village
In your name
Put steel to the belly

While you were wrapped in silks
While you grubbed
While you drank degraded waters
Drank dark, brilliant wine
While you sang, while you dreamed

Rome was
Rome hammered the real

Your silks
Your songs
Are dreams

See Rome ..."
Chris Floyd | Empire Burlesque

In this dream of the everyday, while our heightened senses speak in conundrum, one event becomes many and a portrait is born. I alluded to this portrait last summer bearing a title in part selected for historical comparison: Red Planet Blue. We are past that now, the plateau in our daydream stretching into infinity, a more permanent firmament. It seems recent, relatively, but time is moving faster, something wants to release itself, something that is tired of its show of patience. It is sad in the way one might feel to have married their perfect soul mate and be told he keeps several mistresses and all of them are coming to live with you. Or worse, not be told and they come to live with you anyway so you are forced to figure it out a little bit at a time because you were under a different impression, a created impression. For months, in some cases many years, you argue with yourself often convinced what you are seeing is not really what it appears to be. Surely, you were somehow deficient in your perceptions, if in fact your wildest fantasies have any credibility and you catch yourself and put it away, it brings you down, you remove yourself from your manifest paranoia and re-enter the dream of the everyday.

It takes about, oh, an hour before you are reminded again and the cycle repeats. Is there a problem? Your problem is very simple, easily resolved, you are merely contending against reality. That's okay, you're not alone. Everyone does it and everyone does it differently. We have a variety of choices we can make, its making a choice at all that is hard because our hearts are in one place and our minds are literally in another. Perhaps by procrastinating on choice we arrive where we need to be anyway, on autopilot, going with the flow until the flow becomes a river of lifestyle and you are floating along with the current, gazing at the sky from your raft, listening to Nature's concerto, just you, nothing to impede your bliss and suddenly the word bliss acts as a hypnotist snapping his fingers, Wake up now. See Rome.

It is a huge exercise in imagination to look into the near future. Some will scoff, but scoffers are not imagining hard enough. Start over, look again. Read the tea leaves. See those satellites? Billboards of tomorrow, advertising yesterday, an annoyance at best, but legal. They have rights, they have personhood. They are normal. Everything that is happening to our world is normal. Is it normal to lose a nuke? If you don't think it is, you are not thinking hard enough. The guards fell asleep or maybe the inventory was incorrect, "how" is not as important as it being normal. How normal is a 7.0 earthquake demolishing the poorest nation in the western hemisphere? Its growing more normal every day. So normal, we now have other recent catastrophic disasters followed by catastrophic marathon telethons to align with it all in the same sentence. Why this is just like ___, and ____, and wasn't there something on that scale in ____? ...

It is time we got on with our lives. Make some kind of serious commitment to God. If you can create your own personal salvation scenario, it will stick, you will need it and rely on it, not if but when you slip. We'll need it to keep going, the avalanche is breaking, its rugged granite all the way down and you will need a life jacket. I found God outdoors, overlooking clouds below where I stood, spreading into a distant valley, mule deer grazing unafraid, honey yellow, lapis lazuli , lavender wildflowers cascading into the wash far below the wooden bench someone unknown put there for just such a purpose. Tiny Oaks in full bloom made a green carpet up and down the scene, Ravens played above waiting on a thermal. People gravitate to God, the little people, the good and innocent and courteous little people, because everything else will hurt you and what you think about when you think about God will not leave you and is not, by your own design, designed to fail you.

I didn't see the telethon. They are Orwellian now in their commonality. Just as all else now, the filler up? attendant who actually performed a service was erased. He was helpful, but a drain on the Exxon bottom line. You have to fill the tank yourself if you want to see anything go right and even then there are plenty of grey areas where it could go wrong. And there is always that possibility going wrong will have exponentially wrong after-effects. Instead, I tended the fire for a few minutes until the movie unfolding on HBO sucked me in. Revolutionary Road. There were a few cheesy moments, an intentional flashback to Titanic's sex scene on the auto deck, but beyond that worst of the cheesy moments the situation the protagonists find themselves in is one you are probably familiar with, concerning choice, concerning the way things are and how they might continue if they continued further. One of them chooses life and fails, the other chooses death because he was already dead.

The film would like to tell us that everyone has within them a breaking point, but that is not true according to the nightmare of the everyday dream. It drones on. And on. There is one thing to remember, for the nightmare makers to sleep with, everything changes completely every few hundred thousand years or so. That fabulous tweakers' multi-unit development overlooking billion dollar 360 degree views of Lotus hammock paradise as far as the eye can behold will someday be another Atlantis. See Rome.

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One last item, windows 7 is vista updated in lockstep with the way things are, yet another bailout to yet another industry. That means less art, less photography, less visual stimulation, more hype, more baloney tech reviews, more disappointing faux journalism, more gouging, more drag, less movement. If you have not crashed your XP yet, you might underestimate what I am saying, but it is guaranteed not too far from today you will be introduced to the truth. You will be crushed, but its alright, you're only bleeding.