2003-03-25 11:22 a.m.
it hurts.

There's a lot of death in the air today, and if I don't get some of this out, I'm going to freeze here at my desk, this throbbing in my ribs and frown burned into me for the day.

Bush is realizing that the Iraqis aren't going to just throw down their arms in the face of American opposition, and are fighting back even harder than they did in 1991, holing up in urban centers so it won't be easy for Americans to carpet-bomb them out of trenches. (Who would've thought that they'd defend their homeland like this was a WAR?)

Our soldiers are dying in a conflict that they didn't ask for. We're getting a fight that we never expected. But no one's reconsidering.

I hope Jesse is all right.

A friend of my mom's is fighting cancer desperately. She's gone to an experimental clinic in Texas that's proposing they remove her bladder and rectum in an attempt to halt the progress of the cancer, a 50-50 proposition at best. Mom asked me what I thought of it, and I thought of films like Donnie Darko and Pulse (Kairo), thinking to the idea that everyone dies alone, about the quality of a human life and about what I'd do in that instance.

Mom wanted to know, and I told her: I'd rather she died with dignity at home. D (or her doctor) could keep her stocked with medical weed to fend off the pain, holistic medicine could keep her system as clean as possible, and we'd be there to see her through it with love. We'd drink, tell stories, laugh about the past, and help her go out happy, rather than dying in a hospital, surrounded by machines, subjected to medical tortures that could only serve to help eke out a few more months of poisoned life.

What surprised me is that she agreed with me. Her friend's in a lot of pain, but she's also flailing desperately for any kind of treatment, the fear like some taloned octopus around her, digging into her, holding her tight. No one can help her where she is right now, no one but herself.

Dad seems dead already in some ways. That crushes my heart the most. Who could he be if he'd just walk away from his life?

After the last few talks we've had, I could see him going to Yeshiva and becoming a learned man.

D and I wrote a pitch a few years back about the reincarnation engine of the planet, using a plant-based model, and how war/genocide/natural disaster/etc. corrupted the natural flow of the world.

Today, I feel tapped in, like my circulation's stopping up, pressure's building up in my mind every time forces clash in Iraq, every trigger pulled, every group of people killed on civilian buses by wayward bombs dropped by pilots who didn't look hard enough at a bridge to notice a bus on it.

Make it stop. Someone tell him, tell Bush, make it stop. It's not too late.

I could always drink, smoke up, each Velveeta, feed myself into oblivion like so much else of the world, but I can't. That's what makes this all so hard to take.

Like JMS' 9/11 issue of Spider-Man, R.E.M.'s got the right sentiment and a not-totally-satisfying way of expressing it. Even so, give a listen to The Final Straw.

in my ears:	Tanya Donelly, "Pretty Deep" Jurassic 5, Power in Numbers
in my eyes:	Luc Sante, Low Life a primer on world religions, borrowed from L