A Powerful Funk

Settled on my brow this evening. It was one of those infamous Grey Days in Pittsburgh, when no rain fell, no sun shone, and the wind was just cold enough to remind you that summer has ended. My professor for history writing has serious doubts about my ability to pull enough research for my term paper, and I know that he is justified. As a part of my reasearch on cold war era SAM silos I watched the documentary "Fog of War" about Rob MacNamera, and it was useless for my topic but tragically fascinating for my inner Historian. He sat in front of the camera and with almost reptilian calm discussed the war that we never fought, the one in which 58,000 Americans died because of a lack of understanding, and it made me depressed and fearful because we are so obviously repeating the same mistakes all over again.

I told my friend Wonko that the neat thing about history is that you can tell who's learned from it. The unfortunate corollary is that you can tell pretty damned easy who has not learned from it, and this would include just about everyone in politics today. We're living through a massive tragedy that never had to happen.

The walk home always gets me down too. There are too many people, for one, and almost no human beings. Cigarette smoke gets puffed at you, sluts yell insult-greetings across the crowded streets, crazy people mumble at ghosts and ask you for change. You have to detour around half-dried vomit-splatters.

I took a route through a hospital parking lot, following a pair of flighty dancers chatting about who did this and who said that. We all pass a mother and two children sobbing on a sidewalk corner, yelling No! and Oh my God... I felt the same tears in my eyes, and suddenly all the desires I had for relaxing the rest of the night seem selfish in the face of whatever loss they'd suffered. I didn't know them, but I loved them.

Then I walked through a gang of thuggish teenagers on a street corner just outside my house and it made me want to tear and rend the world. Don't they know people are suffering?

As I walked up to my door I saw that my Netflix DVDs had arrived, three red bundles of fantasy. So I could spend the rest of the night escaping.