thunder and tarnation

Went out for my bedtime smoke and big old long booming thunder rolled around the heavens for many seconds. Wind whipped up a skosh and then blap, out went the juice... for a moment. This does not bode well for blogging.... So. If I seem stubbornly unresponsive suddenly, well, it's probably the lack of electricity. Probably enough in my head to power this puppy, but I can't figure out how to install a USB port for that... maybe should have gotten Bluetooth.

Earlier, I had taken myself out to dinner. One of my desperate-for-serious-nutrients phases had grabbed me by the throat and shaken me so hard I could no longer ignore it. So I spent at least a month's worth of semi-discretionary funds and had myself something quite like this:...only I had it at an elegant dark wood bar, with a gin and tonic, and a breathtaking view of the surf spotlit not far beyond the window.

At a table were some haughtily bemused hippies, one wearing a Counterpunch t-shirt under his suspenders. At another, a lesbian couple, clearly enthralled with each other, were arching their brows over a mistake in their check. At yet another were various generations of an old local logging family, with sundry of the restaurant staff lounging and drinking at their table. The bartender/waiter attending me was very pleased with the clarity and crispness of my expression vis-à-vis ordering, but utterly at sea upon mention of my desire to overthrow the Burmese junta. Pfeh, all that stuff is pointless: they'd just be replaced with more of the same.

Over the course of my meal, I progressively titrated down the dosage of socio/political awareness until finally hitting upon the correct one. He can so totally hang with the problem of overcoming the not having the spit to stop being a mole thing. Aside from work, says he, he cannot seem to bestir himself further than switching on football. Well, that much had already become abundantly clear.

An inescapable fact of my life is that I am always soothed in ritzy places. The din of human terror and hatred is, finally, nearly completely absent, and I have myself a fairly restful time observing the consciousnesses around me. There is more to being a member of the comfortable than just the greed for things and power. There is comfort, real comfort, a false but very pervasive peace amid the wealthy. Any other restaurant in the entire area would have had about the same number of patrons at this time of year, but the psychic atmosphere would have been, always is, almost completely unbearable. There's really no other way to express it except in terms of noise. It's the same feeling as you get in the vicinity of a colicky baby. The pitch and volume of their relentless screams makes one unable to remain in one's skin, even as one has no choice. I regularly practice. It does not become more bearable. Actually, less... in many ways.

Being in the world feels like being in a house full of inconsolably wailing babies. By dint of the atmosphere at work, the bartender senses this too. It's not that I'm that hyper-sensitive. His solution is tv football.

Mine would be the wherewithal to be more effective.