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I have been in some fairly huge storms in my day. The power of nature is so awesome. I think living in Northern California has actually spared me knowledge of the worst of it, but it has been pretty bad out there a few times before now.
I don't remember it ever lasting this long.
I remember it rained forty days straight when I was 19, but not around the clock and it was just your basic rain. Wet. A drag to commute in.
I think it's been just about two weeks of almost unremitting downpour. Punctuated by terrifying wind. There are redwoods out my window. Not a forest. Not a grove. Just a lonely line of redwoods probably only about my age. From my bed I can see them battered. The wind pinning back all the foliage in long bursts. A giant twisting your arm behind your back and you are screaming in pain. My heart is squeezing and I'm closing my eyes and doing this thing like I'm a toddler wanting perfection, going tight in a full body prayer to existence itself. Make this stop. Give peace and grace to the trees.
It makes me glad to be sleeping all day. The only consolation. Not being pinned to the agonies of the trees. Not obsessing on ways to get them the nutrients to withstand this. Not wishing for a dome of enforced spring. Just gone to the lethal elements. Sound asleep.
...
When it is dark out I can think of other things. Last night I was thinking of what in the world might account for a man of good will making up saviors and broadcasting to the world. I was thinking of how Ben could be making it up AND acting in accord with beauty and truth. I am not just sticking to since-he's-not-lying-it-has-to-be-true. I'm considering it every way I can.
It occurred to me he might be trying to make it true, that he's been working full time for five years to call this resistance into being, to give the people in positions of some usefulness to the task the idea that they can fix this, to buck the sickening resignation to our doom.
I'm hoping everyone is examining their thoughts and feelings on this matter, on Ben's Thing. If nothing else, it is a fantastic exercise for our poor brutalized psyches, highlighting it all, throwing the klieg lamps on our mental processes. We really do seem to be stuck in the thing about dissing the snot out of the endlessly villainous mainstream one minute, and then citing it as gospel the next. I mean, John just came out and stated that he's not going to believe any of it until he sees it in the mainstream... even though we all know the mainstream will go down before issuing a peep that would codify it.
Even so, Rolling Stone just did make a peep. Through, of course, TAIBBI. It might seem too oblique to some of you, but... well... excuse me... the FED coming out against too-big-to-fail? Are you kidding me? As Danny would say, "That's HUGE." That is huger than huge. That's parsecs huger than huge. Still, it will have an almost insurmountable problem penetrating this consciousness-of-doom, won't it?
It will.
I am begging everyone on earth to think more deeply than ever before. Don't settle for the confines of your own mentality, no matter how many decades you've put in relying on it. It is not up to the task. Leave it for a few moments. Free associate for a few minutes as though you never existed, as though you are just air molecules nowhere in particular. Try to see the whole mindscape instead of just your little dollop of it. Just for a minute or two.
And do let me know if you come up with some new information, a new idea, a fresh take....
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