The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Turn On My VCR, Same One I've Had for Years - 9/10/04

Friday, September 10, 2004

Today was a beautiful day by any barometer: open blue sky, temperature not too hot, and everyone (except weekend slaves, mind you) rejoicing in the Fridayness. And yet I sank right into a foul mood. See, I think I’ve figured out why I had such a bad premonition the other day.

The world is about to break. 

Don’t you feel it too?

I've been looking at the newspapers too much. Listening to the talking heads and visiting the CNN website far too often. I know there's always going to be wretched things playing out on the global stage—historically, this is just the way they roll. But these past couple of weeks have seen some truly awful catastrophes… tragedies… is there some word that doesn’t trivialize these things the instant it’s spoken? If there is such a word, I haven’t found it.

You have been following the news, haven't you? 

One thousand soldiers have been killed in our adventure in Iraq since it began. A thousand people! There can't be enough time in the world to grieve for so many dead. 

Two hurricanes have ripped through Florida, wreaking millions of dollars of damage and leaving countless people homeless. A third hurricane might be on its way. 

Hundreds of children were killed in a Russian school by Chechen rebels in a botched standoff with the Russian military. I saw the nightmarish pictures, seven-year-olds cowering together on floors streaked with blood. 

And there's still time for plenty of individual tragedies. A girl looked for refuge at a fraternity house after getting into a car accident nearby, I think this was in Texas but I could be wrong, and she was found dead in the frat living room more than a day later by someone giving a tour of the house. Nobody noticed her corpse, in the middle of their house, for at least twenty-four hours. 

And, closer to home, a grad student at a D.C. university fell out of an eight-story window a couple days ago. She was twenty-four, my age.

These have got to be signs. That the world is collapsing in on itself... or at least the world that we know. On every level—individual, regional, national, international—death in all its flavors is flaunting itself... reminding us that the shell of Ordinary Life that we’ve built around ourselves is so fucking thin. It could crack at any moment. And what kind of terrible things would we see through that crack?

Does Kerry care? Does Bush care? Would it even matter what the most powerful human in the world cares, if the shell breaks?

This afternoon at the Divide I walked by Dale's office and heard him singing an old Police song to himself, softly: "When the world is running down / You make the best of what's still around." 

Now there’s an appropriate song. I don't know how to make the best of any of this. But beer sounds like a good start. It's never too late at night to raid the Miller in the fridge.

posted by Mark Huntley @ 11:38 PM

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