It's been threatening to get out of hand for some decades, and it's finally happened: Every news report -- global, national, local, and personal -- is competing for that rarest of all awards, the Golden MacArthur Oscar Genius Emmy Grant Globe Prize in Massive Surreality.
Life is now like being overdosed on an iffy batch of blotter paper acid, spending the day in a Salvador Dali exhibition featuring peyote hors d'oeuvres and really good wine, then moving right on into a Federico Fellini film fest boasting magic mushroom tapas and too many flavors of seat-side, delivered tequilas and mandatory, last-shot worm-eating ultimatums. With curry. And that really hot, yellow Chinese-dragon-mustard that attacks every moist membrane in, on, and around your body.
Yes: The whole Reality business jumped the tracks some time ago, when The Incoming News shot off the rails at the same time as my health track slipped the surly bonds of Earth and took flight, winging me into the uncertainty of the ER wing. Again, some more. One more once.
It all gets jumbled together, as most disaster victims will tell you: There are some inexplicable events, then comes perception and a beginning recounting of horrors -- peripheral and central -- as if everything was experienced in a waking dream...
Somewhere in there, at the end, after therapy involving hand-wringing, chin-scratching, wall-bashing, pillow-scrunching, and quite a bit of Kleenex use, there is a final uncomprehending shrug aimed at the universe at large, and a muttered, superstitious incantation of Hell, I dunno, and then, there is some serious drinking (and/or bathing in) some alcohol to be done.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities,...
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