People continue to serve best as mirrors. From time to time, I remember this. Mostly, I react. But perhaps I get better at slowing down, and looking over the whole play. Realizing that we make each other feel what we feel in order to communicate. Not always knowing it. I do the most good when I do not assume there is an attack that can disable me waiting in the words or gestures of others. To prepare for a fight is to fight. To react to a fight is to fight. To see the best of myself in another...that is to win without bleeding or shedding blood.

Sometimes I remember there is no World of News. This world that comes together when I read one hundred consecutive web pages, each selectively having chosen their words for potential reinforcement of thier agenda, which may be working to aid multiple agendas, directed by many forces. It is not a current collective reality to be found in any one place. Except within me, which is what is intended from such a presentation and collection. This feeling that knits my belly to my throat. It is chosen. It is a carefully-curdled dish. It is a fear-freckled list. Out here—on the oceanic tundra—there are only moments. There is light, and freight, and hand-shaped fate, and there is choice after choice after choice—like waves. Moments, rebirth at any time. And the tides. The power we have at our hand...it is always a matter of horizon, of sight. There is what we see, and what we do not see. There is what we choose to see, and what we choose not to see. And then, there is news.

Unchecked greed of the ruling class...control...."fascism." It happens to many countries. We thought we were immune. It was all those stories in Social Studies. We really thought we were just built of sterner stuff, I guess. We never saw it coming? If an amendment falls in the War on Terror and nobody hears it, which one is next? Ever wanna say whoa HOLDUP, what the fuck and how—exactly—did this whole damn thing happen? from a judicially-installed prezedent to a war we all knew was bullshit when it warn't nuthin' but a twinkle in King Gorgeous' eye? Can we even tell the difference between TV and real life? Is it that the television and marketing in general set us up to be marks to be pitched, to be sold? Without a remote, we just can't shut it off?

This is our mechanism. Because we will buy it. But you better package it up pretty. We're used to good product, Manny. Don't be slippin' us no rusty gulag. We want hi-tech shit, bro. Yeh, we want googlevideomachinegun clips and a nightvision cross that explodes into a frenzy of green and white blips. We want our shadow boogeymen sawn in half across the hips and thirty-second spots of smiling veils and purple fingertips. We want a fistful of P.A.T.R.I.O.T A.C.T. right across our thrice-sealed lips. Butter us up and waterboard us with dire visions of His Dark Majesty Osama Been Forgotten; point your big, gunly, battleships with blazing banners at our cameras. We want glow-in-the-dark green nightscope reporters embedded and rolling over the sands of Baghdad with a shockingly awesome backdrop and a dramatic body count approaching one million after only five years. Wrap it up pretty and slide it under the Afghani poppy wreath. Happy birthday to you and me.

Wanna hear somethin' funny? My mother was a hippie. 18 in 1969, danced at a Janis Joplin concert nine months into her pregnancy with me. I grew up with all her albums. Rubber Soul was my first album at eight years old. I played it on one of those cheap-ass plastic-box record player things that were ubiquitous in the 80s. I watched the household do hookah pipes in the livingroom during my early years. I grew up around some shit. Which is all somewhat off the point but intended to tell you that I was the right age and in the right setting to eventually, at least temporarily, feel like the most important time EVAH was the 60s and 70s. Growing up in the aftermath of Vietnam and the resistance to the Vietnam war...and then in the vacuous, post-disco, post-Blondie era, a social hangover listlessly scored by Foreigner, Kiss, and Bananorama, well. All the synth drums had me feeling that I had missed out. It was to the point that my own aunt said I had been born a few years too late.

How I got disabused of my enchantment with that era finally is another story. At a certain point, I shaved my shoulder-length hair and do what I do. I changed. I moved on. But the funny (funny like a fried leg funny) thing about it was that I always used to lament missing out on that era. I can't tell you...it seems funny...and sad, to me now, thinking back. To wish for anything that even slightly resembles an unjust war, or wartime atrocity....war is atrocity.... But to me, it was about that solidarity and genuine quality of life that existed in the hearts of those who took to the streets, and who turned away from the mainstream of a society-gone-wrong. It was about the spirit of community that rose up in those who saw the current rule as wrongheaded and harmful, and who felt it did not represent them. And I know it is a joke and insult for the oldsters of today to speak disparagingly of "hippies," but fuck these talkers. Who needs their weird judgment and value systems. I embrace all those who speak out and act out against, and who must suffer at the hands of, an oppressive and violent government. But that was then. And this is now. And while in some ways I imagine it must be similar, in some ways it most certainly is not.

And it is one thing to dream back to the days of protest and the Summer of Love, and Hendrix and Jim Morrison (and to listen to the albums as you do), but it is another to watch a war swoop down and pulverize cities, blow up babies, and twist men's minds until they take out their madness on fourteenyearoldgirlsatcheckpoints to shoot families dead in thier own begging tracks, in their own kitchens (and yes, the horrors go on and on, but what do you expect when you normalize mass-murder?); to know your own military inspired this blood-soaked steel-shattering storm of glass and bone that now rains down every day, to know it is raging on and on and on and on with no fucking soundtrack or Oliver Stone cutaway in sight.

There is no joy in watching your government do disastrous, evil, disgusting things on an unimaginable scale. Hearing these talking heads spin cynical, heartless bullshit, invest money in fooling us, wiggle around every law...this fucking ghoulish inhuman cabal, of Amerikaner Power gone berserk and you must know I cannot read it or talk about it every day because I am too skinless, it wraps around my stomach and starves me, it ruins my peace of mind, I'd have to throw myself from a rooftop, it overwhelms to truly be aware of it. I am witnessing utter cruelty and unchecked greed and soulless deception walk the halls of "elected" power. I am watching a vicious, dark, lusty bloodhungry spirit slither and rear here—the likes that I have never before personally witnessed, and riffing through the din of this horror are a billion reasons, of ultra-logical keyboard quackings, of Tony Snow misdirections, glossy teeth like bright-welded windows on a secret prison plane....

In this way, these small men practice their wicked magic. And this runaway spell springs from the lips of he and she and near and far; the madness that eats at George's brain and heart has been loosed and the hate and fear and violence is spreading around the world like contagion. If this were a book, these characters at 1600 Pennsylvania would be Satan and his minions. And the media—the supposed guardians of our truth—they cling to this boat with black sails like barnacles to the belly of a hell-bound whale. O, the silver tongues that sell the people torture and mass murder as their own freedom and ideal of Liberty!

But I have to let it go. I must take these feelings elsewhere. To spend it all in that insatiable maw is to reach into a spinning garbage disposal with open hands, hoping to retrieve...something precious. I cannot personally change this. If only I could. If I could even give my one life to stop it all...I would like to have that chance to make that choice. But when I consider such a thing, I feel it is not sensible. And humankind takes care of her own. As George Carlin said, one day the Earth will "shake us off like a bad case of fleas." Even our deepest, darkest fears will prove utterly egotistical—and yet tiny, given our true potential. You and I pose no threat to creation. We only waste our own time and chances. We choose to muck about down here. To stir up shit and call it champagne. Salut.

Here, on the tropical heartshaped helipad; here in the hard rain of an eternal Spring season, there is only this moment. A moment. And another. Chance for truth. Always the big fight in the little, and they will always bring it to your door. So, great big love to you and yours. Energy to that which frees me and you and anyone else to whom good we can do. Work sometimes, like pushing stones across an ocean floor; as if we make an inch of movement in a month. But heart in the right place. Don't forget your place. Keep moving there. We cannot be everywhere, everything we want. But those places we yearn for, we also make part of ourselves. Become your truth. Every day. Let the papers (dripping dire forecast) crumple, chatter, mutter and fold their night-stained wings, tumble heedless into abandoned alleys. Let the dawn unwrap you, let her fingers pry a war cry from your unbound rebel heart. Let this day be a gift we can barely imagine.

Paz!