A quick word to the folks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, (and surrounding areas) who were hit by Hurricane Kyle this evening – I hope everyone’s okay and that the damage is minimal.

Thankfully the category 1 hurricane has now been downgraded to a tropical storm. That said; the Maritimes is still expected to get pounded by rain over the next few days, with reports that in some places 100 millimeters could fall in a just a few hours.

It has snowed for the first time in living memory in Baghdad. It didn’t stick, but it didn’t need to. For a city that has been beset by violence for so long, even something as simple as snowfall can have a profoundly positive affect.

Residents of the city wandered out into the streets to watch it. Were everything like the wonder of snowfall in the desert, what a paradise we might make of this world.

It’s raining, dark; the streets empty and the doorways filled. On the streets you have to wait it out, try to stay dry, try to find somewhere sheltered from it so that maybe you can catch a few hours of sleep in the hopes that it will have stopped.

I needed laundry detergent yesterday. I went around corner to the store. In Blood Alley something was happening; three squad cars, two officers pulling shot guns out of their trunks. No idea what it was about, but there was a huge construction crane in the alley so maybe something had transpired between the alley’s usual inhabitants and the construction crew. Could have been a drug bust, there could have been an assault; it could have been about a few of the ill-tempered dogs that have been roaming around back there recently.

Things are obviously calmer down here in the winter. No summer tourists to be herded away from, to be pushed by security companies into back alleys so as to protect the illusion of old-world charm. It’s been unseasonably warm though, so at least that’s something. Even with the rain, it’s not as biting as it usually is this time of year. If there’s an upside to global warming in this neck of the woods it’s that if you live outdoors things aren’t as condemnable. At least that’s something.

Drugs and booze. Two steadfast allies of the dispossessed. They make you forget, time machines that offer unconscious passage into the future so that you can lose a day, or three, not having to deal with the reality of where you’ve ended up. Ten blocks uptown the city’s well-to-do scoff at it all while they hit the bars on the weekends and drink themselves silly, press lips to bongs, snort cocaine in the bathrooms of the city’s finer nightspots. The difference is that they have beds to break their falls at the end of the night. The difference is that they do it because it’s a socially accepted ritualistic endeavor. Escape is escape though, and ultimately everyone’s trying to escape something in the end. Admit it or not.

At the very least, if you’re waiting for the rain to stop, you’ve got something truly pressing to escape - the reality that when it does, very little will have changed besides the weather.

Irony For Friday, January 4th, 2008

Chinatown is two blocks over. It’s been there since the 1880’s. It’s filled with countless restaurants. None of them deliver.

I’m not kidding.

Toasters

When I was a kid we used to make toast on an electric heater in the basement. It was one of those long floor heaters, the sort with the metal grill on the front. We would put pieces of bread on it and wait a while, turn them over, and then butter them.

We used to not lock our doors at night as well though. Things change.

Covered In Blood

I was thinking last night on the career of William Tecumseh Sherman, his complexities and hypocrisies, his characterizations of warfare in its purest form, especially those penned during his campaign to take Atlanta and later his march to Savannah, and something that he wrote in his memoirs that I have always found extremely telling…

“I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers … it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

For some reason that always reminds me of the words of Vassilis Epaminondou…

“If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero.”