The years rolled slowly past ...

By now you have probably figured out the punchline. Unfortunately, its not a joke. Everything you thought turned out to be the opposite and now, here we are, once again reminded if you want to know something, you have to teach yourself. This is the lesson, each of us the student.
Do take a minute to visit the Archdruid Report. I'll still be here when you get back.

... This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people’s hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all. ...

This isn't the kind of thing you can just discuss openly, speech is free up to a point. Rather, you instinctively know or you don't. If you suspected, there is no longer any reason to doubt your own senses. Feeling crazy, depressed, insecure or anxious and experiencing stress manifesting in paranoia are all issues of the human being failing to trust his own judgment.

Time is speeding up because the jig, for the most part, is up. It will go on however. In slow motion, the divide opens into an impassable chasm with more desperate events packed into days, now hours and segments of hours. The wheel seems slow on the outside, the closer to the center, the faster it spins. Today Karma is having its way with a horrific snowstorm over the mid-Atlantic region not seen since 1922. No Dinnergate crashers tonight. Good thing Maliki isn't in town or he'd be veering into hypothermia waiting in the First Vegetable Garden.

Cruising the news is very much like holding a mirror over the page. You get different stories. Like Charlie Sheen and his stolen SUV. What are we seeing? Balloon Boy, Tiger Woods, John Edwards, now Sheen. These little smut mentions have in common a tale with open-ended punchlines. Suddenly, they burst upon us and remain with us like mosquitoes at sundown in the swamp. Do we have to wait to be spoon fed truth? Stupid is easy, but stupid and force feeding twenty four hours a day is something else, it will trip you up because stupid is a primary weapon in the war against the human spirit. Its easy to to minimize the signs, but you might have noticed the vehicles are having a few issues. And there is a little problem, nothing serious, with misspeaking and retractions, oh, nothing to get excited about ... who is controlling these gaps in reality? Who exactly determines where and when retractions are necessary? And the criteria is?
I get the idea health reform is cooked. Can they do nothing else but war? Does there have to always be a winner and a loser? Can they do anything right? Can they do anything wrong, right?

I don't know how this will play out over time. Predictions are dire, as you know, but meaningless in that all we have is now and now is uncharted territory.

... The years rolled slowly past
And I found myself alone
Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends
I found myself further and further from my home
And I guess I lost my way
There were oh so many roads
I was living to run and running to live
Never worried about paying or even how much I owed
Moving eight miles a minute for months at a time
Breaking all of the rules that would bend
I began to find myself searching
Searching for shelter again and again

Against the wind
A little something against the wind
I found myself seeking shelter against the wind

Well those drifter's days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out

Against the wind
I'm still runnin' against the wind ...
Bob Seger