There is No Pain, You Are Receding

What makes reality fluid is that one will see whatever one wishes to see. What one wishes to see or what one thinks one is seeing will color, alter and shape the current perception. Later, one has the option of changing one's mind and the view changes again. One can attach whatever emotion one desires and change the experience. Serious, dramatic or traumatic experiences are much more difficult to alter, of course. Combatants returning from Iraq and Afghanistan bear witness.

Home of the Brave, Hurt Locker, The Valley of Elah are motion pictures depicting the changing realities of people christened by battle in gratuitous American wars beset with mind-numbing ambiguity.

The posts here are snapshots of realities different from those in the popular press, attempting to illustrate how complex are those realities. After all, what do any of us know? What we think we see is bound up in belief structure. The reality becomes fluid and changes as we gaze about the landscape and focus on one snapshot or another. Most of us remain focused on that one snapshot and experience, that one reality, believing it to be the only relevant or commanding point of view, unable to see the picture from another perspective.

I tried to explain to people that, as I went about my information gathering chores, I ran across all kinds of fixed realities that are difficult to reconcile. The work here represents a safety valve for excess angst shouldered in the process of looking about. It's an effort to channel the rage into reasonably polite language when the overwhelming desire is to shout obscenity and put a bullet into the offensive character. I realize I have no currency in the public realm, no cachet, so my words have little credibility for most people. Some disingenuous influences in my circle of acquaintances have revealed themselves. That's always beneficial, regardless how painful the letting go or difficult the release of any lingering resentment.

I have covered the gamut of the failure of reason in the post-modern era as it has presented itself in the last week or so, if to the point of obsession. I could keep it up, but it would become a never-ending lament in the wilderness. The lack of fluidity is that I have started to become this weblog reality, much as I would like to think it might make some difference in the world. Never mind that America appears to be retreating into a Dark Age, substituting rationality for reason, democracy becoming the latest version of despotism, naturally enough.

So, in order to maintain my own fluidity, I am done. Oh, one last tidbit. Henri Paul, security chief at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, used his passkey to gather information on hotel guests and sell it to the paparazzi. Particularly valuable was the intinerary of Lady Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. And Henri was drunk most of the time.

There is no pain you are receding,

A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.

You are only coming through in waves.

When I was a child I had a fever.

Now I've got that feeling once again

I can't explain, you would not understand.

The child is grown, the dream is gone.

I could have become comfortably numb.

Nobody sings it like Van Morrison. Copyright, I'm sure, Pink Fred. Don't know if I can read much more Cormac McCarthy right now.

Bring our men and women home, dammit!