October Light

It is very cold this morning. My windshield was a Picasso-like mosaic of frost that expressed the exhausted, lonely horror I've endured for the last six years. Horror. Horror at the lack of empathy, the soul-deadening numbness of apathy and indifference, that has allowed corrupted and flawed human beings like George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney to ascend from the cess pool that spawns such creatures, that lends them a default legitimacy.

The fall colors are beautiful. At my workplace, pin leaf maples shed leaves the color of young pumpkins or dying embers. The world seems tired. And I'm tired: tired of being the lunatic standing on the corner with the tin foil hat. For six years, I raged and railed against the Bush administration, alienating friends and coworkers and causing members of my own family to question my stability, confounded by the thick attitudes of people that simply would not listen. I make no claims to my own virtue; I know my own sins and short-comings better than any other save God. But I never believed them; I never believed the neo-conservative propaganda machine, never for one second imagined that they were motivated by any love of country or mankind. That, at least, I can carry with me.

When it is cold like this, when your breath forms plumes of mist in the clear light of an October morning, you know that winter is coming. The trees will sleep soon. And so, now that those same people that frowned while I raved and raged are clear-eyed and awake, I find myself wanting to sleep, to curl up under a blanket, and forsake consciousness while the whole mess gets worked out.

It's bonfire season. Now that the public writ large is finally aware of the scam that has been played on them, and now that it is angry, a bonfire has been lit. I like to imagine that I helped start it, in my own small way. But we need a cleansing bonfire in this country, not a quaint little fire that you warm your hands by while you bemoan the cold. We need a raging conflagration that burns so hot that you can't stand close to it for more than a few minutes at a time.

So, I guess I won't be hibernating this winter, and not for some time to come. Instead, I'll do what I can to help collect the firewood.

Lunatic