Starting Now

I am at my mothers house in Virginia, no one is around except the squirrels and the birds. Its post autumn weather but not quite winter. This morning the sun broke through but its gone now and the leaves on the forest floor and the trees and the sky are all slipping into steady gray. I left NYC at rush hour yesterday, the bus raced when it could but there were long periods of stoppage, and occasionally I felt the weight of exhausted commuter patience all around me, the coping....I guess people learn to live with that day after day but I would go crazy because to me almost nothing feels like a bigger waste of life than a traffic jam. On the other hand I did start drifting off into the other part of my brain and though I can't remember anything that happened there I am sure it was somehow worthwhile.

Anyway its Christmas almost, or at least the so called Christmas season. Things seem relatively low key so far. Its certainly a far cry from the outrageous steroidal overblow we got used to seeing before the "recession". But maybe there is something a little weirder going on now-- I don't know about you but I am having a harder and harder time getting a clear fix on anything, I trawl around the internet, read the paper, listen to the radio but I have no idea what the hell is going on.

Its not that the news is any worse than it has been for years, or that anything is dramatically more dramatic- its more that there appears to be no spinal column in our culture anymore, nothing seems to be holding it up, the trajectory is wobbly, the core values (if there ever
were any) are compromised.... and we have almost no ability to distinguish one thing from another--Oprah leaving network television occupies the same level of importance as the United States involvement in Afghanistan... food crises in our cities ranks with Lady Gaga's latest confection...Do we have a filtration problem?

It reminds me of those alien movies where a surprise guest of the planet learns to speak English standing in front of a bank of televisions--lets just say alien #1 is probably not learning the subtler science of deduction or discernment.... I"m a bit at a loss myself, and am not entirely sure how to decipher what I see happening in front of me. Lets just say this space is where I will dedicate myself to doing so, with you, over the coming months.