Dark, Dark, Amid the Blaze of Noon

It has rained for forty days and forty nights. There is no blaze of noon, no sun, no moon. In the metaphor of the world events, and sports, things are dark, echoing the disasters in pathetic fallacy. The Yankees self-destructed, along with the Red Sox, so there's no intense interest in baseball in these parts until next spring. A woman knocks a pregnant young mother out, drives her unconscious into the woods and carves open her abdomen with a razor knife so that she can kidnap the child and call it her own; a teenage passer-by interupts the murder/kidnap. In the breadbasket of the world, Iraqis keep blowing themselves and Americans up on a daily basis. The President's interviews are staged, even scripted--qule surprise! Bird influenza is spreading this way. White police in New Orleans beat the bloody hell out of a middle aged, docile Black man on the street. Hurricanes in Lousiana, Mississippi, Florida and Central America, flooding in New Hampshire, earthquakes in Pakistan, landslides in Guatemala. There are lots of good things, I know. Most of these are only in the papers or on television, glimpsed from afar, impersonally. But these are horrible events for tens upon tens of thousands of people. These are the times that try man's souls. "Some say the world will end in fire, and others say in ice..." Yes, Mr. Robert Frost. But if you had asked me, and I know you didn't, I would say it will be neither: it will be water, and that is my advice!