What Happened

Sometimes, I wake up with a bad, bad feeling that my letter-of-recommendation writers are going to cause me to miss my deadlines. I hate that feeling. It gives me the all-over willies. Of course, other things give me the willies even more than that.

What's there to say, for example, when a local hero with a wife and kids leaps to his death off a tall building downtown? Or when, for a fistful of dollar bills, a lone highwayman robs 3 convenience stores and murders a cashier in the middle of night? How about when a monster with a butcher knife climbs on top of a lady cop and stabs her over and over in the supermarket you and your family shop at every week? And no, this didn't happen in Newark or NYC or Denver. This has all happened recently in Athens, Georgia. Home of the love shack. What the fuck happened?

Well, let's see...Almost everyone I know is broke and paying through the nose for gas, so they can drive to drive to jobs they can barely stand, to earn a wage that barely supports them. Here in Athens we're the 3rd poorest county in the nation and our nat'l government is shoving hundreds of billions of dollars at a war that makes no sense. From the federal to the local level, social programs have been slashed and burned to the ground. Public school teachers are clipping soup coupons. Cops are living on Wonderbread. And megachurches are on every corner, right down the road from the megamarket and the megamall, telling us to pray for the t.v. babies who are gunning each other down over girlfriends and iPods. Half the world loathes us as a nation, but they can't criticize us too loudly, or we'll fuggin' bomb them where their babies sleep. And all this only 230 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Nice work, pilgrims.

I know those are some cold words I just laid down. This morning I just woke up with the feeling that the whole planet's gone down the crapper. Man, I sure hope that's not true. I hope this feeling passes. And I hope I can contribute something positive to the swirling mad chaos.