Like mountains hanging above the horizon, I simply am what I am — without apologies, even though it causes a lot of confusion. For months I’ve been out on the road in crazy ways, in the air, seemingly everywhere — just like old times.

A few weeks ago I crossed the Atlantic Ocean four times in as many days. Or was it a few months ago? Whenever; it was for logistical reasons, and I learned the hard way that the human body cannot cross the Atlantic Ocean that often without violent consequences. The dry air of the airplane cabin cracks your lips and sucks all moisture from your pores until there is no water, just oil. Sometime after the first twelve hours your skin starts to smell like cannola and your hair becomes weighed down, thick and disgusting to the touch. In the fun house mirrors of those tiny airplane bathrooms, you realize your facial hair grows at an alarming rate at altitude and that there is no amount of water you can throw on your face to feel awake. So you go back to your seat and ask for another scotch…

Yeah…

At duty free shops across Europe I bought many liters of various whiskeys, running amok and going crazy between New York, Reykjavic, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Dublin, London and then a quick hop to Copenhagen. For reasons no one can explain, they kept sending me back to the Dutch water capital, the one place I’m still trying to leave behind. It was all a matter of finishing the work I owed to a complex client, a hydra of an organization with serious self-identity issues. They never knew who was in charge, and I couldn’t talk to anyone there long enough to figure out just who it was that wanted me there so badly. But they never seem to be satisfied, the word always coming down from above, calling me back.

Idiots.

For months this went on. JFK to Schiphol, and back. Layover in Heathrow. Stop in Iceland. Back. JFK to Schiphol, through Zurich. Through Brussels. A reprieve in Barcelona. In Bruges. A quick drive to Göteborg, and back. Newark. And then back. Jesus. I know it’s because they just don’t know what it is they want, but now that it comes to it, I start to wonder if maybe it’s because I don’t either.

No longer a matter of just direction & purpose, the satisfaction I draw from all this seems once again, bound only to my ability to define why it is that I’m here (or there) well enough to take the right steps and make the right demands. At this juncture I need to convince certain powers to sign the right forms. And I could do it, I think.

But my schedule these days makes me tired just documenting it in my calendar, which is so full it can’t possibly still be accurate. It’s time to consider other, more serious prospects than this Bourne-esque meltdown of a fantasy I’ve been scrambling to maintain. The Job, as it were, is paramount to the continued existence of this lifestyle, but it’s entirely unreliable and every time I accept another assignement it feels like taking another drag from a pipe whose embers have long since gone out.

Meanwhile, deep mysteries of curiosity and doubt stir in dark waters that rise and drop for no apparent reason. I do not trust the tides any more than I trust the sea, and when it seems that all things are floating down the river in a manner most becoming for the passenger, I start to wonder…

Questions of purpose, fate, ethics and other forces creep in; riddles in the dark. Notions of what may be next adorn my lists and notes; most words that I put down, in fact. The blocks are falling into place, I think. I’ve made no arrangement with the powers that be as of yet, but a trip down to Orlando a few months ago took me places I did not intend, and the results were, well, momentous, if nothing else.

For a trip I’d not intended to make, it was fortuitous down to the last leg, where I found a $5 bill in the backseat of the cab.

I have been to these conferences before. I’ve clapped at meaningless statements of teamwork and future success for all. I’ve cheered whatever lame cheer we decided we’d all yell to show our intent to rise and succeed in the coming year. I’ve whooped with sales reps and middle level managers over drinks that their fat expense accounts were paying for. I’ve heard these powerpoint presentations before.

Shit. I think I wrote some of them.

So I wasn’t excited about this latest money-spending fest, even less so because they’d scheduled it around thanksgiving, the busiest travel holiday of the year.

But when I finally got over what my purported duty was at the event and left my executive suite to walk down the hall and play Beirut with some old acquaintances that just happened to be at the same hotel, I was forced to do some serious thinking…

“I tire of this,” I thought. It’s fine to have a life that provides so much time, but that is not freedom. It’s my own signature I really seek, my own approval — I just don’t know which forms to fill out yet.

But you know what I hear is good for learning to fill out forms? Grad School.

…yeah.

And I wish them luck, of course. Writing a story is a daunting task if you want it to be even remotely readable, let alone good. For me, though, the great and all untouchable novel is an animal I’d rather not have to deal with no matter how much coffee I drink. I can’t imagine taking on that amount of work voluntarily.

So they’ll be gone a while. But that doesn’t stop the ugly and the weird from showing up in the world of government, politics and economics. And shit, that’s my turf. So let’s get started.

First of all, I’m not talking about Haiti. I’m certainly not talking about John Edward’s illigitimate child, and god-damn you if that’s what you wanted to read about. You know what’s happening in Haiti by now. You know what the problem is. Poverty. Destitution. Inequity. Unfair extortion from France, and a general disinterest from the rest of the world. A lack of roads from the airport is just a symptom, as are the riotous crowds that form whenever someone tries to distribute supplies or food to those dying from things much worse than crumbling buildings. You don’t need Anderson Cooper showing you these things over and over for ten days; what you need is to know what policies have been in place that supported these conditions, who enacted those policies, who might have benefitted from them and which of these people are still running for re-election? And if they’re appointed, who appointed them or might reappoint them or someone similar? You need to know how you can vote to avoid these kinds of conditions. That’s political free speech, and that’s what runs a Democracy.

In any case, I digress. Or do I? What I really meant to talk about here is how our leaders don’t really work for the left any more than they work for the right. If you don’t see this, you’re probably getting your news from exactly where they want you getting it from. You’re probably watching CNN, or reading without thinking, maybe even wondering where you could possibly find the time to learn about any of these big issues enough to take an intelligent stand on it, assuming you had time to do that.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Look: after what happened this last week in the Unite States Supreme Court I was all ready to vituperate the general voting public. I was nonplussed at first, struck dumb with disbelief at the blatant criminality of what I’d just heard. It can’t be true, I thought, this must be left-wing spin. My sense of irate disgust kicked in and I wanted to set the internet on fire. But I couldn’t get it all down before my reason got the best of me and the next thing I knew I was scouring left and right wing news sites looking for details, as well as noting which sites didn’t mention the damn thing at all.

To be fair, I suppose there are just too many indirect leads into the roots of the causes of this latest bit of very grim news for me to berate everyone but people like Howard Zinn for not seeing this outrage coming…especially given the standards to which I typically hold the general public. This is the Supreme Court we’re talking about, and all you do is vote for the guy who would appoint one or two of them. And they have to be confirmed by…oh, right — the other people you get to vote for. But, man, that’s a lot to consider when all I’m trying to decide is whether this person agrees with me on major issues.

Yes, being a citizen is hard work, eh? But maybe if people who’d voted for a pimp like Bush could’ve considered more than just what he was like to have a beer with, such as what dangerous things might he do in office, we wouldn’t have decisions that endanger the very foundation of what makes a democracy made along a corner of the government that gets almost no attention.

But this is, after all, the year of the Rat. Maybe not on the chinese calendar, but certainly in the US Congress where the scurvy bastards on both sides have been doing nothing but stalling for the better part of a year now, on pretty much everything they touch. No leadership, no leader, and no action. And down the hill at the courthouse, Kennedy, Scalia and Roberts, along with the other two — who I’m daring you to look up yourself right now — are carrying on the pro-business agenda almost in the dark.

I say almost because yes, it is in the papers that the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling overturned about a hundred years of legislation preventing corporations from deciding between them the results of the Amerikan “democracy”. It is in the papers that the court ruled that money is a form of free speech and that corporations too, have a right to it, amazingly. It is in the papers that purely legal entities, while still prohibited from giving directly to candidates to further their own agendas, can now spend unlimited amounts on television ads and radio time, or any other form of public influence. But aside from a couple of pundits here and there that are pointing out how much this limits any individual’s ability to make a voice heard over the billions that oil and insurance companies will certainly pour into campaigns now, there is very little noise made about what this ruling means. The urge of a few people to scream their fiery hearts out into the black empty abyss made wider by corporate money now amounts to a fart in a hurricane.

But this is and always has been the logical progression of things. When the voting public participates in the political process only enough to claim as much, people with actual interests will surely win out the disinterest of the masses, even if they are the majority. And when those few people aren’t people at all but legal entities with all but unlimited cash, the interests of the disinterested won’t go forgotten, or ignored…they’ll simply cease to exist.

The sky beneath us was distant. A falling ocean, a waterfall of plumes and sprays, with murderous roars muffled by the thick glass of the airplane windows.

Crazy vibrations in my head, but not from the airwaves. And no, not politics, I’m tired of politics. It’s the Israelis and the Palestinians, and Healthcare and the Republicans putting it down and the Democrats sitting on the sidelines jacking off as they always do…they just took 8 years to replace Clinton with Obama, and the results couldn’t be more similar…no, I don’t want to talk about politics.

The noise coming at me is of a different type, filling me with anxiety and a paralyzing fear. There is possibility on the horizon again; the scent of purpose within my grasp, like the smell of warm apples you can tell are coming from a pie in your oven.

There is the new apartment, of course, a new skyline to call my own, and the city will be my canvas. No strings like bookdeals come attached, but there is whatever potential I can draw from it, I suppose. Lurking around the bend there are also new whispers of employment, direction, maybe even academia again…

That’s enough, I thought. There IS no news, and there will never be any again. It’s time to get back to the project on which I’ve fallen so desperately behind. It’s time to write. And it may take a while.

So be it.

But never mind all that. What we have to deal with now is that ugly little rodent of journalism, gnawing on words like a skunk under your porch. That inconvenient liability that facts are — after all — facts, and that by the last period of any story, nothings stands on its own without them. To wit, the myriad facts presented by Olbermann and Maddow since August of this year have been well-checked, their investigations have been conclusive and relevant and their message has been clear and consistent. Not to mention cohesive and sane, with a touch of intelligence not seen on most other networks.

Mind you — in fact, BEWARE! I make no defense for network news. They are all of them feeble and vapid wastes of time, a sickly portal for information, constipated and obtuse. The 24-hour news cycle does for relevant information what a swollen prostate does to a stream of urine. And nobody likes to get up five times a night to barely squeeze a trickle.

Why the hell do we put up with this shit?

But as we’ve seen with the two-party system in this country — which is really just a one party system that is, before it is anything else, pro-business — facts don’t always go hand in hand with reasonable reactions. And sometimes the strategies on the white board must simply be turned upside down.

It was odd to watch Olbermann, the newsman turned poet writhe and pulse with tones of anger and a menacing darkness about his gaze, filling the airwaves with his own pitch for health care, his own story. It was weird to be moved by a journalist’s pitch, to have his bias slap me in the face like a clown beating a piñata with the small end of a baseball bat. Using his father’s battle with age and infirmaments, he spoke of every one’s fear and resistance to death and pain. Bias be damned, he implied, if I can’t reach you buffoons with the logical progression of facts and guided journalism, by god, I’ll reach into the pits of my own desperation, my own human battles if I have to. And not in a pathetic and phony plea like that idiot, Glenn Beck, who would, if he were any kind of decent, at least take acting lessons before attempting to stir my pity.

And, he continued, if it doesn’t satisfy your need to be entertained, then fuck you, because this is about action, not rhetoric. If the facts won’t stir you, and the poetry won’t touch you, well, then I’ll spell it out for you. And whether mindless viewer or devoted activist, I WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.

And then he did.

A call to action. An honest-to-god initiative by the left, something not seen since Vietnam, and even that might be a little naíve to consider. Hold free health clinics in the states of the 6 or 8 democrat senators who are seemingly siding with republicans on the public option issue of the health bill. Hold those dogs accountable for what you need from them. Show those miserable pro-business miscreants giving advantage to the health-care giants at the cost of human pain that what we want is possible, and that we know it is THEY that stand in our way. And then, goddammit, vote accordingly when the time comes, eh?

And with that, he returned to the regular programming, of filling up the airwaves with another 24 hours of informatioin, and we, the viewers, the citizenry, were left to do with that message what we will. I only mention it because it was weird to remember just how much inane chatter is out there in the ether to spill into our minds if we’re not selective of what we bother wasting our time with.

I was moved by Olberman’s near soliloquy on MSNBC. Well, not on TV, and not that night since I watch and read my news on the internet, when I damn well please, and in a way that I can spend the time to form my own opinions, on my own terms, without having Lexus, Jack Daniels and Boeing commercials splashed at me with ridiculous fervor, without having my thought processes constantly interrupted by by a jangle of clowns. I’m sure that the darkness and the settled air of 8pm prime time generates its own air of propriety for his words, but what the hell? One in the afternoon was good enough for me.

In any case, it stirred me. For a moment I even considered that there might still be cogs within the machine that are acting on behalf of the very principles they claim; our principles — the ones that serve that almost mythical creature, the citizen. It was a weird feeling, to be honest.

…though it fades just as quickly.

Despite the activists, despite the motions, the small contributing calls to action here and there that might have been producing some sort of momentum, when the vote comes down we will hear very little about it, and not because of the mainstream media’s usual complicit tactics with the men on the hill. No, we won’t hear about it because it will no longer be news; there will no longer be any story worth telling as we’ve all known for some time now that this is and has always been the same story we’ve heard before, just with a different illustrator. And in the world of 24-hour news, grief is a very expensive line item.

Of course, it’s not really a vote for or against anything we wanted in the first place, which is the right to not worry about how we, as human beings, will pay for our health. What they’ll be voting on won’t even bother trying to offer single-payer health care. It will feign to be reform in the sense that it will offer a weak and unenforceable version of a mandate that everyone be insured, but all this will really do is provide many new unwitting clients to an industry rolling with the fat of peoples’ suffering.

It will not regulate the prices those fat cats can charge, allowing insurance companies to inflate them as much as they can get away with. And when you’re lying on an operating table with a lump the size of a golf ball in your breast, or a grown man’s finger up your rectum saying, “uh-oh, mister Johnson, it looks like things are about to get uncomfortable for you,” you’ll consider just about any price they start throwing in your direction.

Assuming they’re willing to pay for it at all. Shit, in the light of this mess it’s come out that insurance companies won’t even promise to cover their own emlployees…what chance do you think YOU have?

Instead, the new plan might offer the states the Right to offer a state-level option for health care as a token of show, a shiny hood ornament, or something just as functional. It will be ravaged by the insurance company executives and lobbyists in the much weaker state legislatures which — conveniently — is where the whole process will become easier to ignore, because who the hell is paying attention to state legislatures? Not to mention creating the potential for fifty different health care organizations, all doing more or less the same thing and doubling up on all of the same administrative tasks, wasting more money than necessary and dooming the projects to the critics years before it’s even time to bury the thing.

And when the impotent thing passes — which it will…no politician today can afford the political capital of not passing SOMETHING — we will hear all kinds of applause for a few days before the whole thing vanishes under cloaks of appeals and unsexy subcommittee talks. Nothing for the national press, I’m afraid. Unless I’m much mistaken — and I’ve never wished so badly that I was — we will hear President Obama laud it as his success at bipartisan health reform, just like Clinton did for his own inadequate failure. Democrats will pat each other’s backs and shuffle out the door to discuss “Don’t ask don’t tell”, while Republicans grumble behind the camera and shout on the radio about repealing what the democrats shove through.

And who cares? They’re not going to repeal anything any more than you’d notice if they did. Health care as a topic will fizzle, probably until the next time a “hope and change” candidate runs and we’ll go through the whole futile exercise again. Maybe we’ll still have journalists like Maddow and Olbermann, and we’ll still have lunatics, pimps and jackasses like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck. And we’ll fuck that up too, and move on to the next juicy topic, be it Afghanistan, or gays in the military, or Rush Limbaugh’s failed attempt at buying the St. Louis Rams. Whatever. It’s all been done before.

And in 2010, with Obama’s new Nobel Peace Prize for…something, and the Democrats’ most epic failure since George McGovern’s loss in ‘72, Republicans will slowly gain more and more seats again, until finally, when they’ve found a voice sober enough to silence idiots like Sara Palin and Bobby Jindal, someone with more temporal coherence than Michael Steele to stay on point and lead their party in some kind of direction, the vicious cycle will return us to a Republican President again.

Don’t mistake my anger for pessimism. It’s just that…well, I hope to be halfway to Mars by then.

“$537, actually,” he corrected me. “Direct. Barcelona to JFK, round trip.” His voice was covered in static through the mobile.

“That’s incredible. Truly increíble, man. Did you know a ticket from Amsterdam to Barcelona would cost me just as much?” I didn’t believe it when I was looking for a ticket to go meet up with him, and it still didn’t make any sense, even two days later.

“I know, right? That’s a €50 ticket. It’s extortion!”

“Well, it’d be extortion if there was a rhyme or reason to it. The fact that Jeff flew to Madrid on $200 and you can fly to JFK for 500 while I’m paying $1600 to go to Brasilia is just plain chaos. Who prices these things?”

“Well, use your head. You and your friends fly internationally every week — what’s a typical transatlantic ticket going for these days?” He asked. A reasonable question on the surface, pointed as it was. But even with all my flight time and miles logged, I sure as hell couldn’t come up with an answer.

“Granted, they placed me in business class last week,” I said, remembering the over-rated and definitely over-priced €1500 1A seat I had on that 747. Anyone who says it’s unnecessary but worth it is selling something. “But for me, it varies on any given week from €300 to €900. I’m starting to suspect they have a big wheel-of-fortune prop in a hangar somewhere and every day the airlines take turns placing an iguana on it and spinning it until the thing lands on a number that doesn’t hurt their bottom line.”

“I see,” he said, his voice carrying a sound of concern. One thing is sure — coming up with a reliable number is not as straightforward as it should be.

Air travel has become far, far too complicated. We all know this, of course, and we all love to bitch and wail about our own anecdotes of terrifying and sometimes weird horror. We make a lot of noise about the cramped seats, the shitty food, what they did to us at airport security and so on… experiences that are valid, sure, but small. These are the obvious infringements against our comfort, our timeliness and our privacy and the tales carry with them great weight when told to a friend, or bored co-worker. But look around any discussion board on the internet. Listen over the long term. These are not unique. These stories are common place; boring almost. Change is not effected based on boring statistics, no matter how real or rational they are.

It’s the encroachment into the space lacking common sense that we should be watching. The steps in that direction carry the real danger of the industry, but more importantly, they carry the juicy sweetness that any story needs to properly captivate the public for long enough to make a difference.

And I warn you in advance: if healthcare, a deeply important issue that is central to the self-preservation of the economy, every corporation which employs people and just about every living person — and all of the dying ones — is struggling to keep that attention, I wouldn’t give much hope to anything less ridiculous than Scrubs…

But that’s negativity and we don’t need that. Not here, where we’re about to make a point. Which is important if you’re going to be a writer, or at least if you’re going to be a journalist. Which is, for the record, and definately for the moment, out of my hands.

“Amsterdam to Nice is €30 for the weekend,” he told me over the static. I could tell he was sitting in front of a computer, randomly looking up flights. What the fuck did I care about Nice?

“Which weekend?” I asked. I thought it was important.

“…doesn’t matter,” he said, “You’d have to leave in two hours. But if you go next weekend…” he trailed off, probably waiting for the search to finished running.

“…next weekend…it’s…€320.”

“That’s more than ten times the price!” I yelled at him, though I’m certain he could do the math. “Are you kidding me? In NO OTHER INDUSTRY are prices this elastic. Why do we, as consumers, put up with this?”

There was silence on his end of the phone.

“Are you still there, man?” I proded.

“Yeah, yeah,” he came back, sort of stumbling. “But are you sure that’s the right economic term? I don’t think that means what you think it does.” I could tell he was smiling. “I thought an elastic commodity was something where the demand is reduced by an increase in price.” Some of it was still struggling to get off his face.

“Don’t get all Adam Smith on me, you nervous ape,” I started. “I said the prices are elastic, not the commodity. Damnit, I’m a writer, not an economist. I’m being descriptive, econometrics be damned. Don’t be a douchebag.”

“Really.” He’s an enigma, especially over the phone. “But, yeah, you’re right. I have no idea why we put up with that though, except that I don’t know how else to react.”

“That says something, doesn’t it?” I asked him. “If other inelastic things such as beer, or advil — depending on who you are — fluctuated in price by a factor of ten every week, what would we do? Not nothing, right?

He thought about it for a second. “Is that even the right example?” He asked. Seriously, this time, I could tell. “Really,” he emphasized.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt. “I’m not sure. Maybe not. But what’s the score here, you know?” I pushed it. “What’s this lead to?”

He thought about it, and I could tell I was getting some of my frustration through to him. I continued. “Take, for example, reservations,” I said, leaning into my thought. “The other day I booked a train ticket from Boston to New York. I booked it online, everything done without so much as a conscious human knowing about my purchase but me.”

“…and the CIA,” he said.

“You rotten bastard,” I scowled at him. “You know those pigs monitor international calls coming into the US. You keep mentioning the CIA every time I call you and I’ll be lucky to be allowed back in the country instead of shipped off to some unknown forest in Eastern Europe or Siberia.”

“Get a grip, man. You sound like those paranoid delusionals on FOX News when you talk like that. Besides, they’ll keep you out of the country for much less than that.”

“True enough, eh?” I said, knowing full well that I’ve got other things to worry about. “Anyway, so I had this ticket I’d booked online, and I realized a couple hours later that I’d have to catch a train sooner than that. Like, in the next two hours.”

“So?” He asked.

“So…can you imagine if it’d been a plane ticket? Can you imagine the possibility of changing a reservation like that? Airline reservations are treated like they were more fragile than babies with osteoperosis. You can barely talk about it, and even if you can, you’ll have problems that strike the kind of bureaucracy only found in the real estate industry and hospital adminstration.

“First the new reservation would have to fall under the same category of ticket class. You knew that there are varying kinds of price classes even within First Class and Business, right?”

“Yeah, there’s like, two or three, I think.”

“Well, I’m not sure how many kinds there are for Economy, but they use most of the letters of the alphabet. So the chances are already grim.”

“Yeah,” he said, following my logic.

“Then you’d better hope that the ticket you purchased was flexible, where changes are allowed for a $100 or $200 fee. If not, and most ‘affordable’ ones aren’t, then you can’t change it at all. Sometimes it’s cheaper and less of a headache to just buy another ticket.”

“Are you saying they do this on purpose?” He asked over the mobile line.

“Do I have to?” I exclaimed, throwing my hands into the air and forgetting that one of them held my phone. Or was holding my phone that is, until it flew out of my hands and across the pavement as I walked from my car.

Fuck, I thought, and walked over to fetch it. I bent down to pick it up and my messenger bag slipped off my back onto my side. I hate it when that happens.

Thankfully I’ve always been into sturdy little phones that don’t have all the other bullshit like cameras, GPS, iTunes, and copies of Shakespeare’s entire works. I saw that the call was still live and heard Shane’s faint little voice, as if he were a tiny little man in my stupid phone saying, ‘Hello? Hello? Hey, are you there? Did the call drop?’

“Yes, I’m here,” I said, annoyed that I had to fix my shirt that was now all crumpled onto one side.

“What the hell happened?” He asked.

“Nevermind,” I told him. “It must’ve been the CIA trying to cut my line, you reckless prick. Watch what you say on international calls, damnit. You know better than that.”

“Whatever, get back to your point,” he said, “…you were going somewhere interesting with that.”

“The point, Shane, is that the system makes no sense at all in its current form and yet we foster the status quo without even thinking about it. It’s like health care.”

“Like health care?” he snided. “No. Don’t start giving me another long-winded schpiel about your most recent political moment of insight. Airlines are nothing like healthcare. They have planes.”

That made me smile.

“Hey,” he said, “you know where the problem with healthcare begins?

I humored him. “Where, Shane?”

“Sick people.”

“Jesus, man…” I started to say, but he exhaled loudly and continued his thought.

“…airlines are like health care — what the hell does that mean?”

“Yeah. It’s not a system that exists to do what it should be doing. It exists because that’s how it’s grown. That’s what men — mostly rich, white, powerful men — have wanted it to be. Ripped and patched, sabotaged and staged, the legislation and regulation that defines it is constantly open to make room for more profits for — well, somebody. More and more seemingly ridiculous policies that make a few people very rich are put in place over the years in spite of its customers’ woes.”

“Seems to me like a damn fine business model for these fat white guys you seem to dislike so much…”

“Yeah,” I said, “and it’s better than you think. Because it doesn’t matter that the business is going in the tank…CEO’s never lose money.”

“Huh,” he said, and thought for a second. “Then I’ll tell you what I’m NOT.”

“What?” I humoured him. “A CEO? In the right business? Is the liquor store clerkship not paying huge dividends and bonuses this year?”

“…going to get my knee surgery paid for.” There was no mirth in his voice; he sounded serious. “The insurance my parents had bought when I came back to the United States after losing my job in the Netherlands says it was an old sports injury and therefore a pre-existing condition. Fifteen thousand dollars.” I didn’t know what to say. “And if you’re right about airlines that are out to fuck us while barely serving us peanuts, I don’t think I have any hope of nursing my knee back to health without forgoing the next ten years of expenses.”

The line was quiet for a second. One of us swallowed.

“Wait, are you serious?” I asked him.

“Yeah.” He said.

“Really?” I asked him.

“Really.”

Nothing behaves as irrationally as a cornered beast. Believe me, I know. At the moment, I am one of them.

There are few things as dangerous as a mammal that has lost all other options and is faced with no choice other than the grim and vaguely disturbing idea of fanatically hopping a four-hour train along the coast of New England at two in the morning. To do so after twenty hours of no sleep and going the next 72 on less than three — well, there are people that would say that’s just plain stupid. And I would agree with them, if there had been any element of choice in the matter whatsoever.

It was one of those calls that you hate to get, especially late in the day after ten or twelve of those very focused hours of work where you get up and are dizzy just from rejoining reality and feeling almost human again.

I need you need to be in the office in New York at two in the morning so we can get started here in Europe on time.

Fuck. I was still in Boston at the time.

And after the four-hour train ride, and after another full bore, ten-hour work day, I still had to catch a flight to Europe.

I am now completely out of my mind. To make matters worse, the drink cart on the flight across the Atlantic has just rolled down the aisle. The New York red-eye to Amsterdam is normally packed with Dutch men and grungy boys, which means they overload on Heineken and almost nothing else. Tonight, for some inexplicable reason it’s been filled to the brim with noisy Italians and free scotch. You can see where this might go, right?

Awry.

Italian men are noisy on their own, and love nothing more than to fucking talk. Pair them up with the gambit of Slovenian women that were going to Amsterdam and the place goes all to pieces. The Italian man in the seat in front of me was singing on about what must have been futbol to the pretty blond next to him. A dude, I think, but Italians are all very pretty.

At the rate that Michelangelo or whatever was talking, the other guy might have litterally had an anyurisim had he not been Italian himself. His eyes might have swollen up with the build-up of blood from the ruptured vessel in his brain, just behind the sockets, and the veins in his neck would’ve started sinking in, pulling the skin tight around the adam’s apple and exposing the grainy texture of the malnourished cartilage. Other things happen too, and I’ve even heard of bursting capilaries at the fingertips and in and around the oral cavity. Had he been of any other nationality, things might have gotten that ugly, but thankfully Italians can ingest quite the wordcount per minute.

On the other side of the plane, about five rows back, seven or eight hollering whoops exploded when the drink cart rattled by. They went crazy on the whiskey, begging the flight attendant for more. When she tried to tell them they could only have one each they went berzerk, climbing over seats, taking the microwaved ziti marinara from the other passengers, screaming about their mothers and proposing marriage in sonnet form to random Slovenian women right in front of their husbands. It was awful. When one of the younger kids went for his football I watched as the flight attendant scurried down the aisle towards first class, covering her head and neck with her arms and screaming for mercy from the degenerates. The Slovenian girl at the window seat next to them, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, had her feet up on the seet, her arms clutching her knees at her chest in a fetal position, rocking back and forth and mumbling something no one could hear.

Things didn’t quiet down until we passed the tropical storm we were flying over, and then they all seemed to run out of electricity and pass out. I can only stipulate that the electrical disturbances below the plane had something to do with it but that’s not based on anything other than highly skewed empirical evidence.

I missed more than half of what the Italians said, of course, but not even the blind deaf can miss the sheer volume of word output these guys produce. The levels of noise pollution alone are cause for local statutes to be put in place where severe noise disturbances can have drastic consequences. I bet no Italian man has ever heard the little safety schpiel early in the flight, which probably explains the alarmingly high statistic put out earlier this year by the FAA, wherein it was shown that 48% of deaths in airline accidents are Italian men, or men of Italian decendancy. It went on to say that the majority of Italian men who perish on flights are found in positions that suggest they were desperately trying to undue their seat-belt buckle or else leaning over to the seat next to them with their own oxygen mask in hand, either asking to put it on or else discussing the latest fashion show in Milan.

Thaese numbers are true. I absolutely did NOT make them up*. Would I lie to you?

—

And, yeah, I had plenty of scotch too, but that’s not what I’m getting at or why I’m out of my mind. I wish my craziness was due to something fun like the electrical problems of the Italians, endorphins, philosophical astrophysics, rum, or mescaline. Even scotch. But alas, it’s just rage. Pure, disgusting, over-the-top, angry, furious, unreasonable rage.

Bear with me — I started this whole thing meaning to get political but like the Italians, things got a little out of hand. Trust me, it’s better than many of the alternatives. House bill 3200: allow me — ’cause, you know, I’ve read it…

What? It was a long flight and I felt like reading some law…

First it was the town hall meetings, those already ridiculous stages wherein members or the ruling class, with the media’s help, get to look like they give two hoots of a damn about what YOU think. More on this later.

Then the town halls started getting nuts. And not, you know, normal nuts like Michelle Bachman or Orin Hatch nuts. Not Sarah Palin nuts or even Robert Bork nuts. I’m talking about people showing up at Presidential rallies armed with automatic assault weapons with shirts that indicated quite clearly what their intentions might have been and the secret service just standing there as if they had been cupcakes on parade. I’m talking about people showing up at meetings where the agenda is health care while brandishing their second amendment rights like that’s what was at stake. I’m talking about a new path being walked by the insane, the uneducated, the misinformed and the stupid of this country, and they’re being led by the same evil jerks that keep trying to bring you such debocles as the flat tax and the privatization of social security.

Now we’re seeing that there is little coincedence in all of this madness. Indeed, there is little chance of chance at all, seeing as unreasonableness has been the plan all along. Thanks to reporters and journalists who are doing real work instead of catering to the American portrait of the stupid and the lazy jackass in an easy chair listening to Fox News trash, we’ve now had painted for us a chart connecting the dots, laying the truth out in front of us as graphically as it gets. Never mind that Rachel Maddow and Keith Olberman ask questions that cater to their leftist agenda using the same formula that Bill O’Reilly uses to show his condescending and insane version of reality. Never mind that their network is indeed the left-leaning MSNBC, responsible for their own sets of idiotic stunts and ventures.

They’re still right.

See, we’re now finally dealing with FACTS, and it’ll come out in the public’s eye soon enough. It better, or the way things are going someone might get shot first. But for the first time since I can remember, it’s not just obvious — it’s provable that our society is not having a discussion about differing opinions but rather one of differing realities. Facts themselves are being debated right in front of philosophers’ eyes as they stare on in disbelief.

This is not Newtonian physics. At least half of this debate is WRONG.

And that’s important to remember when the shit hits the fan, because someone’s going to be responsible. And I don’t want to have to fish out records saying it wasn’t me, or I told you so or anything else that crass.

—

Speaking of crass, what’s her name, Betsy McCaughey, that ideology pimp who started the whole Death Panels discussion with a flick of her inarticulate tongue and a nod of her ugly face, finally found a wide-reaching audience. Again, never mind that it took a host guaranteed to be making fun of her, that was the only venue she could find that wouldn’t already be packed full of crazies and unthinking, guilt-plagued jackasses. It was all she could get at this stage in the game. On the Daily Show, trying desperately to convince anyone in the studio audience who would look at her that she had a point, Jon Stewart litterally tore her evidence from her as he tore up the rest of her argument as sheer nonsense to the applause of millions. That must have been a good day to get those free tickets, eh?

But the people in the studio didn’t have to watch the ironic Yoplait commercial at the break, the one where strawberries are dropped into the thick splash of the creamy yogurt substance, and then bounce off of it when it’s frozen. The sexy voice comes on to say their new (new? really?) yogurt can be had both ways: in the fridge as a mousse, or in the freezer as a…frozen treat. They didn’t know, I guess, what to call it. Frankly, I don’t either.

And then I realized why the whole debate is so aggrevating. Anyone who reasons at a five-year-old level can see the obvious; you just have to be paying attention in order to see it.

—

And now again, as always, the Democrats seem desperate once more because the brain tumor that took Ted Kennedy’s life might make the sixty seat majority irrelevant for another 5 months. Assuming they don’t do what the Republicans want and make it an 85 vote requirement just because, you know, they want it that way now that they’re not a barely-fifty-one majority. Not that any news outlet still making a profit even remembers the health care debate, spending a third of the day covering the location of Ted Kennedy’s body, much like Michael Jackson’s a few weeks ago. Maybe they’ll make a diamond out of his hair too, though I bet someone will find a way to make something more fitting out of Ted Kennedy. Maybe they can regrow Winston Churchill from his pubes.

What? None of that now, eh? It’s way too soon for something that ugly and I’d hate to see it derail the very thing that the old Lion stood most for, besides booze and sailing, which, as a matter of record and disclosure, I’m all for. I mean, talk about conflicting agendas, right? Here you have MSNBC, dying to promote universal health care in any way possible, going to such lenghts as actually investigating and actually reporting the evil conflicts of interest in the parties rallying against the most common-sense initiative since they repealled prohibition with the 21st amendment. And the man that fought most ardently for it, whose whole 47-year-career revolved around it, the guy whose last efforts as a senator a few days before his death included an attempt to immediately replace himself with an appointment by the Democratic Governor in order to ensure action on health care while it still has a dying breath left in it…

But, well, they’ve got to have their ratings, so forget the forged letters to government from Insurance and Coal companies purporting to be from average citizens. Never mind hidden and private funding into anti-health care initiatives coming from the very people who would lose power and wealth were such an initiative to pass…

It’s off to the hearse we go. Talk about pulling the plug on grandma, eh?

—

Christ. I still haven’t really gotten to the point of mentioning how Olberman and Maddow are right. I really did start this thing meaning to get there, to discuss the recent study done on viewership of major news stations. Fox News, whose viewers are over 90% republican and can’t find Iraq on a map or hear the insanity coming out of their own asses came in at more than MSNBC and CNN combined.

Shit. No wonder we’re in such a… ah, you finish it.

* I might have made that up.

But for whiskey to feel that way you have to drink it right. And it’s complicated. Draw half a breath, and then take a sip. And remember, it works best with the middle to low tiers of whiskies, or any scotch younger than ten years. Twelve is too old, too smooth for the right effect. You need the harsh stuff for the right kind of burning. When the liquor is in your mouth, swirl it a bit, but not too much. It’s not wine, dammit, and isn’t activated by oxygen, but rather by settling into itself. So swirl it in your mouth just enough to coat the interior of your oral cavity with the liquid gold and then open your lips and take another slight breath, stopping just before it burns to the point where your cough instinct takes over. Don’t let that happen — that’s bad form and you’ll look like a freshman jackass, so avoid it at all costs.

As soon as you feel yourself reach that burning point, stop inhaling and begin slowly letting the air out. If you can, simultaneously begin swallowing the whiskey, or rather, letting it fall down your throat. You’ll think of the sun on your skin right away, and you’ll know what I mean.

You’ll feel hairs tingling as your skin cells expand from the sudden warmth. Comfort will set in on your exposed arms first, and then your face. As the warmth penetrates your clothes, your core will begin to equalize, and if it’s summer in Amsterdam, you can go from chilly to too hot as quickly as a cloud can roll past the sun in high wind. It’s a frightening show of how fickle and dependant our bodies can be on the planet. But for those first five or ten seconds, it also feels damn good.

Which is how I felt in that morning warmth, just before it got too hot and my back started sweating against the courtyard cushions. I’d been sitting there for a while, drinking ice water while I waited for 10:30 to come. That’s when Vera, my agent and lead in Amsterdam, had agreed to meet me. She preferred that kind of setting, an open courtyard in a classy hotel in the chic part of town by her office, where you can have a fresh morning drink to interrupt your work and “feel as if you’re abroad,” as she put it. Or maybe she’d meant ‘a broad’, which is accurate too, I guess, for her.

Me, I prefer dark old pubs and bars with aged oak railings that carry the names of their proprietors’ grandfathers. Places where the floor sticks if you don’t step in the right places and where coffee is served only to water down the bourbon.

But I guess at 10:30 in the morning, this place was more appropriate — yeah, I can see that.

Unmistakable, whether from a distance or from across a few empty tables on a Friday morning, Vera loves to wear yellow. From brights to dulls, she has yellow blouses, skirts, shoes, gold bracelets, pendants, earings, purse, car and on colder days, leggings. She loves it. Even her credit card is yellow. She wears a grey scarf and red sunglasses, which disturbs me in terms of continuity, but suffice it to say, I didn’t miss seeing her in that empty gravel courtyard and waving her down towards my table.

I’m not a fan of that kind of attention, of course, and I prefer for my leads to be slightly more conspicuous. Those of you who know me know that my profile is kept low for reasons that involve contact identity protection issues, statute of limitations in certain countries and a general sense of paranoia which, despite its social inconveniences, has kept me in business all these years. So keep your comments to yourselves.

We started off with the usual chit chat about the Dutch and our mutual dislikes for some of their habits, such as waiting tables and actually bringing you what you ordered. See, Vera is no more Dutch than I am, and atheist Israelis of Polish heritage have a warmth about them that I just can’t ignore, and actually identify with. As if she were the Jewish Grandmother I never had, only younger. Our common distaste for the often obtuse mannerisms and cold tact of the Dutch had brought us closer together than either of our companies had meant for us to be. It was supposed to be all business. But there we were, a year after our last official dealing had gone down, two friends just meeting for old times sake and a fix for caffeine.

But instinctively, we gravitated towards our most common aim — Politics.

“What’s this deal I’m hearing about MSNBC and FOX news?” she asked me, after our chatter had subsided. “I’m hearing all kinds of gibberish from ThinkProgress about some kind of truce between those two networks. As if that can be good for anybody.”

“ThinkProgress?” I chuckled. “Why the hell do you still read that stinking hippie tripe?”

“Oscar, are you drunk? It’s 10:30 in the morning. Are you not sleeping enough?” She asked me, with a very straight face.

“I never sleep enough,” I told her. “You know that.”

“You also drink too much, and I’d put an end to that too, if I didn’t think it’d affect your writing negatively,” she said. “I swear you get off on it.”

I didn’t respond, except with a tight-lipped shrug of the shoulders.

“Hippie tripe…” she trailed off, and then snapped at me from across the glass of water I’d been drinking. “ThinkProgress is just about the most reliable way to get a lead into a story the main press will likely ignore these days. Where do you think I get half my ideas for followups?” I stared into the ice in my water.

“Christ, I’m glad I got out when I did, then,” I said.

“Got out?” She asked. “What, ‘got out’? You didn’t get out. You’re neck deep in this nightmare, probably worse than me.”

I sighed after she’d finished. “Tell me about it,” I said, leaning back on the cusion in my woven bamboo chair. “No — I mean, got out of this local scandal shit and into the global scene,” I said, pausing, “you know, business dealings in Africa, socialist policies in the EU, Labor conditions in the MercoSul, humanitarian issues in China, real ground conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and who’s profitting from it…that kind of thing. The real news.”

She grinned at me with tightly pursed lips and then burst out into a hearty laughter, a heartfelt glee I hadn’t witnessed in quite some time. She belly laughed for a quarter minute or so before she became coherent enough to stammer a reply.

“You’re daft!” She chuckled, raising her hand and waving down the waiter. “‘the real news…’ — listen to yourself. You know who you sound like? You sound like those tikes from Rolling Stone, idealistic as if they still wrote for their school newspapers.” She put her hand on her chest and recovered, “Oh…my,” she sighed.

“What?” I protested. “You’d rather I be wasting my time covering what Rupert Murdoch wants me to spread about MSNBC and FOX news being civilized to each other?” I drew a breath.

“First of all, like you said, it’s gibberish. More importantly, it’s self-serving. Who benefits from that? People who like drama’s who. There’s no drama as good as quarreling lovers, and a peace accord is just a sign of a larger battle to come. Who knows…maybe Murdoch is planning on buying MSNBC as well. It doesn’t server the people at all.”

She was still laughing. I accepted it, and toned down my rhetoric.

“But who cares, right?” I said, sort of giving in. “Nothing does anyway… but that’s not news, it’s theatrics. That’s show business.” I thought about it for another moment. “And what’s wrong with being serious about journalism for a change?” I asked her, still feeling somewhat challenged.

“No,” she said, “It’s politics.” She took a deep breath. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with writing it, I guess,” she finished chuckling. “Just keep your expectations of your readers low. Nobody reads that stuff, Oscar. Nobody cares.”

“Fuck caring,” I snapped, “they just need to know. Then they’ll care.”

“Sure,” she said, “why not? But in the meantime they’re too comfortable in their routines to be outraged by ‘the real news’, as you so astutely put it. Enough of them haven’t been near enough to real oppression for some time now, I’d say since — oh, I don’t know…Carter?” She looked at me as she flagged down the waiter again. “I thought you’d have learned that by now.”

“Carter?” I coughed. “Why Carter?”

“Well, I’d say Clinton, because he didn’t do anything, but then I’d be tempted to go back to Bush Sr., since he got away with that ridiculous war in the Gulf on the same repeated premise of Vietnam, not to mention Panama and his involvement with Reagan in the Contra affair. But then I have to go back to Reagan since he got away with much more than the Contras, like Nicaragua and Guatemala and the effective elimination of taxes for the upper classes, pretty much dooming everyone into the world we have today by creating the conditions for the drug war the US has with Central America and the Religious war the US has with the Middle East.”

I was eying her hard now.

“From there I have to bounce back to Carter, who needed to flex his muscles for the business world as the new Democrat. Did you know that in spite of running on the Demoractic platform, he actually raised military spending from what Nixon and Ford had set during their regime, as has every administration since, regardless of the need or mandate?”

Now I was just impressed at her reservoir of deplorable historical knowledge and smiled coyly at her. “No Vera, I did not know that.” I loved how pointed she could be with her facts, which is, of course, why she was my main lead for stories on this kind of issue.

“So I’m tempted to go back to Ford and Nixon, but that seems not only obvious since they were republicans in the middle of the Vietnam War but they also got their share of protesting in that day and age, when people still had it in them. So I bounce back on Carter, who had the chance to change it all, to bring real democracy to that land of yours and instead kept the same old system that serves the rich by means of many avenues, most pointedly, the military industrial complex, while keeping the population from rebelling, revolting, protesting or even just paying attention simply by giving them enough crumbs to keep them more interested in solving their petty problems while ignoring the larger ones that cause everything else in the first place.”

“Fascinating,” I said to her, smiling.

“My point, Oscar, in all seriousness, is this: no reporter, newspaper, network or any other agency has been able to break through the public’s disillusionment with the establishment for well over thirty years. And even disillusionment is not enough to cause revolution…”

“Just a coup, probably,” I interrupted.

“Right. For a revolution you also need outrage, which comes from desperation, from passion, from the inhibition of the human condition. The desire to break free. If enough people have enough desires satisfied, or at least, enough of what they think are desires satisfied, then you’ve crumbled that people’s ability to rise together, where their numbers matter, where their opinion counts for something. The civilized world of the US has lost its ability to outrage,” she eyed me, glaringly now.

It made me a little uneasy.

“So tell me, world traveler; what the hell do you mean by ‘real news’?” She asked me. “Get a grip, man.”

The waiter finally came over and took our orders. Vera ordered a triple espresso, to which I raised an eyebrow before deciding to make it two. Fuck it, I thought. It’s business as usual, I guess.

“So what else did ThinkProgress say?”

—

Several hours later, in business class seat 1A of the 747 bound for JFK, I smiled as I thought of what we’d said. With Amsterdam safely behind me and all caught up with the latest headlines from my several sources, I sipped my scotch and coffee, without mixing the two. That’s another trick I’ve learned about staying focused when you need it. Irish coffee, which is fun and comes at you easily and curvacious the way the continental shelf around Ireland does from 40,000 ft, is not a drink for focus. You have to keep the coffee and whiskey separate, much like your style and objective.

And if we can have both style AND objective, there would seem to be no limit to what we can reach when we drink enough whiskey and then put pen to paper.

No wonder I’m pissed.

—

In a split-second I couldn’t control, my feet exploded against the floor, throwing my torso into the air. My throat grunted a war whoop, my hands grabbed my PC and heaved it clear across the room, smashing it against the wall with a violent garble of plastic and metal being shoved against each other and uncomfortable angles. The hard plastic around the case cracked in one sharp snap that sounded like a femur splitting in two. I stood at my desk, breathing heavily, my sleeves rolled up and my top two buttons on my shirt already undone. I bared my teeth, totally out of control. A coworker was looking at me for obvious reasons and in a rage of animalistic rage I pointed at him aggressively.

“What the fuck are YOU looking at?” He and I work for the same company and I know his shitty equipment has had days of poor performance like this. “Don’t pretend like you’ve never wanted to do that with this stinking equipment they fucking give us. It’s a travesty,” I filled in the silence. The bewildered Dutch man kept looking at me silently. Dutch people don’t like scenes and it makes them uncomfortable to be thrust in the middle of one. And I’d never acted like so like the mos American person in the room.

“Besides, it’s YOUR fault,” I shouted, and pointed to the one across the table from him. “And YOUR fault, and YOUR fault,” I shouted indiscriminately, pointing to everyone in the room and making angry faces at the frightened bunch. “YOU - miserable twats put up with discomfort and wretched computer equipment and bad processes and retarded policies all because YOU don’t want to stick your neck out! YOU don’t want to be the one to make a wake, to change the color in this grey world. YOU frightened lizards that duck and stare empty-faced at every obvious conflict thrown at us from anyone higher than us. You SUCK!”

I waited a second for it to sink in, looking around the room and eyeing the door.

“YOU fucking useless inanimate objects,” I finished, throwing my hands up in a wild craze. “React, Goddamnit! Say something away from the fucking coffee machines!”

Nothing. I looked at the fattest one of the bunch and threw my mouse at the fat rolling over his waist but he recoiled like a mole. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran into the woods outside the building. The mouse bounced onto the floor.

—

I was furious that night when I went out for a run. Which I do when I can’t handle some of the things I hear. I’d heard of a little political story that was being kept quiet by Murdoch’s empire of media and then some, and I couldn’t find Dylan to get it off my chest. So it festered.

I’d already been losing it on the tube, in my car, even at the pub. Things were getting weird in a way you only expect during election season. The always important but continuous loser of politics, health care, was being ousted from the media waves by a combination of republican affairs scandals,  the typical scurry of the appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of Klowns and some inane tripe of fabricated batshit about Obama’s birth certificate that for some reason even Rachel Maddow was talking incessantly about. The intellectual property trial against a mother and student had, individually awarded record companies upwards of half a million dollars for downloading thirty-something songs. This was with a judge and jury. And everytime I re-read the article about Alberto Gonzalez and the continuing decadence of the Justice Department it struck that cord of dissonance that wishes death to those in the establishment as the only solution to getting out of this maddness that’s settling in over us.

In retrospect, I guess I should’ve known that just blowing the largest spores clean off the fungus that is our DOJ wouldn’t have done shit to stop the decay of the thing. But I just couldn’t get over it. The thick mucus of resentment that builds up in my mind when I hear enough bullshit sometimes constricts my breathing, or at least my ability to think straight. When I can’t wrap my mind around the absurdity I see and hear I tend to collapse into myself and that’s when other things, more extroverted in me, come out and the shit hits the fan.

That’s probably not what led to the the aforementioned work-related disaster but it wasn’t helping things either. Running violently into whatever jungles I happen to be inhabiting is just about the only thing I can do in times like that and I think that if it wasn’t for all the whisky, I’d be in amazing shape.

Earlier in the day I’d gotten beligerent, and yes, done horrible things to company property in front of my clients and coworkers. But so what? Let them sit in stale offices drink horse tranquilizers in the middle of the woods and slobbering figureless numbers onto their keyboards if they like, but they know I was right.

Besides, that shit felt good.

—

Later, back in my tiny hotel room I calmed down by closing the curtains, running the shower at full blast as hot as it goes and closing the bathroom door. I stripped naked and lay on the cold tile, feeling the steam of fifty degrees celcius build up in the enclosed space and fall on my face. My iPod sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and wailed a bunch of Muddy Waters and my blood pressure dropped to its normal levels of 140/90.

But that was all work stuff, the very same bullshit I usually avoid mentioning here because, well, shit, you don’t care. What made it relevant enough today was not so much the fact that I’d flipped my Compaq clear across the room and just high enough to miss giving two very tall Germans very clear USB marks across their temples, though I knew at the time that scene would make for some good theatrics. What made it significant was the why of the matter — the raison d’être; I’d finally seen the invisible hand of Adam Smith at work and it was jerking off my corporate employer while the other one slapped around some very good friends of mine.

And we’ll leave it at that. There’s no way to go further into it without getting into some very thick and ugly mud and right now I just can’t find the hours in the day to get into.

Because I’d calmed down from the work thing. I wasn’t belligerent anymore, yelling things at the radio or debating healthcare policy with my TV, though I was getting there. See, politics had come on the iDesk, one of the only good shows put out by CNN, and as if it wasn’t enough that the tentacles of Alberto Gonzalez hadn’t dried up after leaving the DOJ in shame and shambles, the goddamn things were still manipulating, twisting and otherwise creeping things out.

Anyway, the story was that after months of not finding work ahead of the trail of destruction he left behind in his former job, homeschool finally landed at Texas Tech in northern Lubbock.

Yeah, I know. Imagine that — Lubbock, TX. One more for the file of “Duh”, eh?

And I tried to get over the fact that he’s going to be getting a salary of 100K (when regular full-time proffessors with real PhDs and actual experience who teach more than 15 students a semester often get half that). I tried to get over the fact that students formed groups and petitions and even facebook efforts of getting rid of this taint on their education, all of which went ignored (help ‘em out, by the way — how’d you like it if you walked into class and Richard Milhous Nixon was your teacher? Same thing. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114577517744).

I tried to get over the silence of the faculty, and later their own ineffective actions when 45 of them signed petitions that will certainly fall on deaf ears of administrators who “don’t make decisions based on petitions”.

Of course not. Not when it’s not fun for the people who pay you to play nice with them.

I even tried to get over the fact that the school’s Chancellor, Kent Hance — who considers Gonzales a “good friend” — said that he received a “substantial number” of supportive e-mails about the hire, and just nine critical ones, and then added that “he wasn’t dwelling on the negative ones because they didn’t come from loyal university donors.”

I mean, shit. I tried. But the shithead that runs that ill-fated school didn’t even bother trying to mask the ugliness of his cronyism. And it’s fucking with education. That’s where I draw the line.

————————————————————————

There.

But it’s been a bad time for idealism. It’s been a bad time for hope and optimism, at least when it comes to government and life within this system based loosely on something that was once referred to as democracy. You know, back when we didn’t know any better. Or maybe we did. They did, anyway.

So yeah, I tried. But I was already on the verge of completely freaking out, so I did the only thing that has a documented track record of success in these situations — which is not, by the way, throwing laptops. That kind of lunatic behavior is revolutionary radicalism and you should be very aware of your surroundings if you even want to think of trying that on as ‘therapy’. Besides, I’ve only tried it once so I’m not sure of the scientific soundness of the theory.

But I was furious, my reason twisted like theirs and I needed to go for a violent run. It was raining hard too, and the lightning had gone wild, which is perfect.

Yes, I’m aware of the dangers of running in lightning. I went anyway.

Trees flew past my face like spiderwebs and I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The green faded to black, the explosion of the summer woods veiled by the night. With my hands outstretched I felt like I was floating through the leaves, and who knows where I imagined I was?

The wet rubber of my soles against the smooth pavement squeaked and gripped until it warmed up, until the steps themselves molded with their environment. My feet were marching drums in synch with themselves. I could almost hear the trumpets of war over the heavy shield of the thick trees, over the hills that approached but never arrived until they were right underfoot. A steady rumble in the dark clouds above was in consonance with the heavy drops that already splashed over my cheeks, blurring my vision as I ran. I shook my head and the water drained from my face only to build up again in a few seconds.

But I ran.

My pace quickened, the steps growing louder. The path ahead of me was hard to see in the dark but it seemed to stretch to a point at infinity. It excited the hell out of me and I ran wildly into that green blackness. I thought I was alone but between what I thought were drums in the distance there seemed to be cars. The dim semblance of approaching headlights would appear between the bushes ahead and I turned away, onto another path. I tried to run deeper into the thick dark, avoiding as much knowledge as I could of the world outside myself, outside those woods, that rain.

But the deeper I ran, the more often came the headlights in the distance, the more of them there were; the closer they seemed. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but no thinning of that evil-tempered traffic could I find. They were coming from all sides, at all speeds, violently stripping the forrest of its solitude, of its haven. I stopped running.

I just stood there, and marveled at the traffic I could not escape.

—

I feel you don’t really know a city until you’ve run it in the rain, and this I’ve done in many places. Brooklyn, Geneva, Brasilia, Amsterdam, Oslo, London, Vienna — in the rain, through empty streets, void of the bullshit and other distractions there is more intimacy with a place. In the wet dark of a violent storm, there are thoughts you dare to think that normally would stay shut away in twisted crevaces of the mind, untampered with. You notice things you’d otherwise miss, like the echo under a stone bridge while your trainers seem muffled underfoot. You run into things that would otherwise not be there, like the lit up eyes of stray dogs, giving you looks full of evil and insanity, quite aware.

Fields of fireflys aglow in the downpour, flexing god-knows-which-muscles. It seems a lie.

No, I haven’t hit the rum yet. But maybe I should. Rum’s good.

Speaking of which, I’m glad I enjoyed that last bottle of Jack Daniels, because it’ll be my last. No, no, I haven’t quit drinking or found Jesus or anything crazy like that…it’s just that I recently heard they donated over twenty million dollars to the Bush campaign. Sure, I heard that from an English comedian in New York, and yes, the entire liquor industry probably leans toward “Republican Leanings”. And though the Dems aren’t any better when it comes to being friendly to business before being responsible and accountable to the people, it’s silly to base a political opinion on this little — oh, what the hell, let’s call it a fact — everyone else does it.

But this whole rant has been about cognitive dissonance, hasn’t it? And just to illustrate the point of how well esconsced in the matter we are, I’ll be giving up that particular Tennesee Whiskey. And I’ll be getting my inspirations elsewhere, thanks.

Isn’t that just the bitch about the truth? It comes out in the end, doesn’t it? It may be late, it may be stretched thin and pale from being hidden in deep places inside the human-sized safes in old men’s closets and offices. But it comes out.

And you’d think cognitive dissonance would be unpleasant enough to be a deterrent, or obvious enough to be a detergent, but no. The evolutionary abilities of men with power based in the establishment to rise above that most basic and inconvenient of human traits is quite incredible.

Don’t get me wrong, you know — Dutch people and I have a lot of things in common and I esteem their practicality and straightforwardness. It’s just that, hell — I needed a fucking break from the freaks of blunt.

And for that I was thankful. In that pillow-covered hole of wall to wall carpeting and blue and green and yellow and red neon floating on the ceiling there were no Dutch people. Not even the barkeep, who alternates on different nights from being a beautiful and petite Thai girl and a chunky English douchebbag.

Worlds, man.

The music there is usually a mellow kind of Jazz remix that seems to have engaged in acts of coitus with punk rock and steel drums. The chilled out clientele — overeager Erasmus young’ns, dreadlocked white guys, hippie chicks and Israeli stoners — always in character. They’re all straight off the train, backpacks and all. Haven’t even found their hostels yet.

I watched Oscar blow elegant smoke rings from the shisha pipe we shared. The man’s been everywhere and when he says he learned to blow smoke rings in the Middle East, motherfucker means Mecca, man. Or, at least as close to it as non-Muslims can get.

“Jeddah is the coastal port on the Red Sea, just outside of Mecca,” he informed me after seeing the blank stare on my face. He seemed surprised by my ignorance and I snapped out of it.

“I know where it fucking IS, Oscar. I’m just contemplating what a fucking cool job you have that by the sheer will of the mind, you can, on certain weekends, decide to just hop on a plane into the port of Jeddah and smoke enough shishas alone on the edge of the Red Sea until you learn to blow smooth smoke rings that smash calmly into the ceiling.”

He dragged the pipe a bit, and still took a second deep breath, exhaling slowly, as if his soul was leaving his body through his mouth. “You know, man, this job…it’s great. But it’s not as great as you think.”

“How do you know what I think, Oscar,” I said, with a spritzy tone in my voice that I hadn’t intended. He wasn’t annoyed.

“I’m telling you that this job has its curses and isn’t for everybody. Especially if you have specific needs.” I nodded, my head in my hands, showing him how bored I was with that topic I’d heard so often, so many times before.

Still, the man has been everywhere, it seems. But I knew that there are two roads to Mecca: one that actually goes to the city and one that goes around it, for foreigners or non-Muslims that think they can see Mecca just because they’ve traveled for god-knows-how-long? Nope, they’ll put you back in your blistering car and send you off. Everyone has their own problems.

He tightened his lips and thought for a moment, eventually saying, “Yeah. That was an interesting weekend. What a fucking shit country, that is, though.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, reaching for my pint of Heineken. “You told me you went from an air-conditioned Marriott — with a pool, which you swam in quite enjoyably, to hear you tell it — to a beach-side restaurant to smoke and watch the sunset and then the next day you took a drive to the sandy penninsula to search for a boat and ended up meeting a bunch of Dutch guys on the docks…”

“First of all, exactly. I went to Saudi-fucking-Arabia and who do I meet there, as if I didn’t have enough of that around this town of lunatics? The Dutch. I don’t see what you see in these people, honestly.”

“In my defense, I’m not all that happy with them either,” I said, looking around and smiling. I’m pretty sure I let that little gem slip every now and again. You should pay more attention.” He hesitated.

“Anyway,” he said, “it was shit. The town lists TGIFriday’s, Chilli’s and Pizza Hut among their top ten restaurants. People who go there return with pictures of their standard rooms at the Hilton, of unimpressive statues, some sunsets and occasionally, sidewalks.”

“I can picture,” I said, “the kind of people that take pictures of their hotel rooms at the Hilton. Clear as day, right?”

He furrowed his brow at me and took a deep drag of the pipe. “You mean people from the midwest?” he asked, holding it in. Then he blew another elegant masterpiece that grazed my left ear.

“Never mind,” I mumbled, grinning.

He went on. “And did I tell you that when I was about to sit at the restaurant where I smoked that shisha — by the way, it wasn’t beach-side, it was water-side; they don’t have beaches in Jeddah. There are some stretches by the highway that hug the water that are lined with large rocks to muffle the waves, but definitely no beaches.”

“ANYways…” I said, suggestively.

“Right. Did I tell you that at that restaurant I had to sit on the second floor, away from the water because the section — the empty section, I should say — of seats by the water is reserved for family seating? No single men allowed.” He seemed happy to have gotten that off his chest.

“Really?” I asked. I knew that Saudis segregated their men and women, but I figured there was space to move or something.

“Single men,” he repeated, “are the lowest fucking rungs on their social ladder.” He folded his arms and leaned back into his chair, his long, curly black hair bouncing on his head. I was surprised no one in Saudi had ever suspected he was Jewish. In any case, he was very satisfied with himself for that story.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I remember when you told me of those boys on that lawn in Riyadh one time and how the police chased them down…”

“But they let me go,” he reminded me, “when the bell boy came out to explain I was a foreigner in the hotel.”

“An expensive hotel?” I asked him.

“The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever stayed in,” he said, which is saying a lot. “In the Egyptian Marble shower I could lie flat on my back and roll away from the showerhead, rolling five times before I hit the other wall. I know this for a fact. I had enough space to do cartwheels in that suite.”

“That explains why the guard didn’t give you a hard time then, right?” I offered.

“Right,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that single men, especially young ones, are scum, the lowest class.”

“Why do you think that is,” I asked, suddenly kind of seriously pondering the reason.

“Honestly? I think it’s society’s way of projecting their own self-hatred onto something. I mean, I just can’t reason with the notion that separating men and woment results in anything other than repressed sexual urges. Just look at the Catholic Church.”

“Mmmm,” I nodded, and it felt like he was on a roll, so I didn’t say anything.

“I think that somewhere deep within them where human needs can’t be touched by silly rules, religious or otherwise, there is at least the faintest whisp of a wish that those men didn’t need for marriage to be their highest priority in order to escape the social hell it puts them all in. A kind of a obtuse logic: single men cannot be in the presence of or seen with a woman to whom they are not related. Deep within people must find this repressing and wish it weren’t so. And if all single men were married, they would not have this problem. Therefore, single men are frowned on.”

I looked at him in awe. “Oscar, that was, by far, the craziest thing you’ve said tonight. And that’s following your story of rolling on the floor in the shower in your hotel room in in Riyadh.”

“I know,” he said, half-ignoring me, sort of beside himself for nailing a thought like that down. And then his face lit up. “And what about the Catch-22 of how a boys meets a girl?” he asked excitedly. “Have I told you about that?”

I shook my head no and reached for my beer.

“I had been wondering –” he explained, “after being in that country for 2 months with no alcohol, cheap gas and nothing but sand and flat land around me, how it was that people could, in the 21st century, still go along with the notion of arranged marriages.”

I nodded again, and sipped my beer. He dragged the pipe again and let the smoke pour out of his mouth slowly, like a waterfall. That fucking guy.

“So I did what I normally do when I want a straight answer,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He smiled, and blew the dense smoke off the table in front of him. “I ask a cab driver,” he said, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows. Fucking Oscar.

“And?” I demanded.

“And…” he dragged it out, “he told me that when parents won’t look away or pretend that they don’t know what’s going on, what the kids do is go down to the shopping mall with their mobile phones…”

“Mobile phones?” I interrupted.

“Yeah. He said what they do is set the Bluetooth receiver on the phone to be discoverable and when they find a phone they like they start texting and chatting with them. If the kids hit it off, they agree on a meeting place and a way to feign either marriage or relations for long enough to be seen in public before they become engaged.”

I was stunned. “Was he lying?” I asked, only half-kidding.

“No,” Oscar said. “I did this in a mall in Riyadh once and used my Bluetooth thingy to search for other discoverable devices. What came up was sort of sad.” I tried to sip my beer, realizing that I was sipping an almost totally empty glass. “A list of at least 30 or more phones came up. Their names were mostly illegible, but there were some with names like ‘Sexy, Sixteen and Single’ and ‘Ready for love, boy’.”

“Yikes.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Look, the pool was nice and all, but talk about a vast emptiness… I mean — who pays for all that gold trim?” he asked. I shrugged in agreement. He continued.

“In Jeddah, after wandering around the immediate neighborhood and finding nothing to do I finally found someone who understood enough English to be cajoled into telling me something, even if it was to give up hope. Those are the stakes.”

“Yeah?” I asked. I was partly distracted by the young Israeli kid rolling a joint of hash next to us.

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “This young Jordanian manager at the Marriott, when I badgered him enough about WHAT TO DO there he sort of lowered his voice and lowered his shoulders, leaning in to talk to me. He said, ‘listen, I’m a foreigner trapped here too. None of them will tell you but I’ve been here for two years and all there is to do is go to the mall.”

“I wonder why,” I said out loud, with a grin.

“‘Nonesense,’ I said to him, sort of startled by his honesty. ‘There must be a café where you can go read a book by the sea, right? These people are pious to a fault but they can’t be averse to a good life.’ I decided. He cast a look that told me he was not getting through to me.

‘It’s worse than you think,’ he said.

‘It can’t be,’ I countered. He smiled.

‘You’ve been to Riyadh?’ he asked me.

‘I’ve just come from there,’ I told him. ‘I’m here for the weekend’.

‘What do you think of Riyadh?’ he asked.

‘It sucks,’ I told him. ‘That’s why I came here. At least there is ocean here, right?’ I have him a smile. He smiled back but it was more wishful than it was agreement.

‘Look, the only thing the ocean adds to in Saudi Arabia is humidity.’

My heart sank for a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re telling me that there is nothing to do in Jeddah except either pay $250 for an hour for a wave runner or else drink tea in the hotel lobby all afternoon by yourself? Why are there even hotels in this place? Why are you people here?’

He adjusted in his seat and a grave feeling dripped all over his face. ‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. I think I understand what you want. You won’t find it here.’”

—

“And that,” Oscar said, “was the greatest reaction I’d gotten there, by far. By FAR.

—

His circles of smoke glided over the pages I was reading in the dim light, casting strange shadows and faint shapes over HST’s words. I struggled with my crude attempts at such cool manufacturings and eventually just gave up, sucking it all down and expelling it forcefully towards the dark blue ceiling.

It tasted like apples.

—

A long-haired blonde down the bar continued to throw suggestive glances at Oscar while shaking her shoulders in time with the mad noise the DJ was making. He glanced up from his writing  every now and again to return them. I got the unshakable feeling he was playing some kind of game but I wasn’t a part of it.

He was deep in thought and I had just taken a deep inhale of the pipe when I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, get off her barstool looking over in our direction. I panicked and looked across the street at the signed bolted to the next building. It read, fortuitously, “Obstakel“. I knew exactly what it meant.