a few quick comments...

The rain is steady to drenching tonight, and will be for the next couple days at least. Another hurricane down the East Coast so it must be almost autumn.

Today I started getting ready for school again, threw out a lot of stuff, looked out the window and thought about how little has changed over the summer. Room 648 gleamed, wide open spaces and bright but grayed light. My desk is clean and the rows are arranged in a neat semi-circle, the duel rows even. Summer is over.

There was a war in the middle, pointless, destroying thousands of lives, killing at least a thousand people, meanwhile in Iraq thousands and thousands continued to die and no real answer emerged as to why this suffering was necessary.

We could get existential or Dostoevskian and wonder aloud if the reason for suffering needs an answer save what is God's or what is our own understanding of it, but the fact is, there were no weapons of mass destruction and there is no democracy in a society where violence, murder and terror punctuate every call to prayer. But the same things continue in the same way. In Lebanon the question of who is a terrorist, really has become a meaningless one, just as in Iraq. Credibility, lost with imperialism so long ago, is not even an illusion that the West can create for itself anymore, much less these others.

This is why the horserace of politics receives such press I don't wonder, because we are so hungry for something different to happen that we cover the nuances and vagueries of the powerful and wealthy as they scrap to see who will have the most power to dole out the most wealth to who. It's easier than questioning actual policy or the lack of it, easier than looking into the consequences of things and easier than studying alternatives to the way of things now. The press has let us down, and our failure of the imagination and our demands to keep entertained have allowed the atrocities of ignorant fools, so what else is there to say? I've been thinking about that.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is about how predictable ideologies are, and therefore movements and, in a way, policies (which are like ideologies in a way) and countries as well. There are fewer subtleties to make the actions of large things confusing, as there are with individuals. The large unweildy responses of ideology and policy to individual lives are so abstract from the experience of life as to make all this truly absurd. But we all desire the oracle's touch to tell us how we are connected to these things which have no real meaning for us.

My thinking is becoming muddled because I'm so tired. But I wanted to write something as it has been too long. Perhaps in here, there is the reason for my writing to have been infrequent as of late.