World News Update

 

1. NASA defends it’s next-generation moon rocket plans.
2. Iran just can’t seem to help itself when it comes to toeing the oppressive police-state line as armed government forces descend on a public mourning for the victims of the post-election violence.
3. Recently discovered Mac flaw could leak scrambled data.
4. Saudi man forced into hiding after talking about using Bluetooth to pick up chicks in Jeddah on live TV.
5. Red Sox’s World Series victories could be tainted by Ortiz/Ramierez perfomance-enhancing drug use.
6. Nanotechnology succesfully kills ovarian cancer in mice. Human trials may be less than a year away.
7. Senators threaten to reduce federal highway funding to states that do not ban texting and driving. iPhone and Blackberry users in a spectacular show of solidarity rapidly tweet protests and complaints while driving with one knee down the interstate.
8. Hugo Chavez, everyone’s favorite demon-sniffing* South American socialist president, pulls his ambassador from neighboring Colombia over a weapons dispute.
9. A girl, from her mother’s wombe untimely ripp’d*, discovered alive by NH police. (PS: Holy shit.)
10. Pelosi accuses insurance companies of trying to kill a government run health plan, calls insurance companies “villains” and says they’ve been “immoral all along.”
11. Men at Work face plagarism case and no, it’s not for the phrase “and men chunder.”

I, Icarus. [reflections on the crash]

I don’t like to proclaim I live life in the fast lane but as we approached 100 miles per hour it was brought into question. But I’m not in the car yet. I’m on the upper deck of a third story apartment building I’ve never been in down the street from my place, we’re listening to a wandering gypsy cover Paul Simon ["Sometimes life's like a G chord," he tells me with a grin and passes me the Evan Williams.] I’m sitting alone in the Whiteheart drinking Evan Williams waiting for my friends to finish smoking and mustering up the courage to shout to the single lady a seat away from me [she was with somebody else too.] I’m walking down the breakdown lane of I-95 just outside of Gray calculating if I could make it to Portland by daybreak, or at least noon [and maybe I still could have.] That was certainly not the fast lane. It was for breaking down. But nothing was stopping.

An antique store in Rye, New Hampshire is selling a metal tin plate, old and rusted but decorated, and pierced, hanging in the center from two wires attached to my worn edges hangs a metal tin heart, painted in the center in simple but delicate letters it reminds me to “Be.” The art cost eight dollars. “Life is short, but art is long,” Hippocrates instructs me [from beyond the grave in the program for Grease in Prescott Park.] Sitting on the wood stool, beside the last embers of a fireplace, in the ancient ruins of a house’s chimney, I gaze across a serene lake in Waterford, Maine cradling a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and ask myself what I’m doing with my life. I later answer my own question.

Later, but not that later, I’m telling a beautiful Russian woman she is beautiful in Russian. I’m drinking merrily as if I’m filling myself up to the brim with nectar, then I teeter and spill and laugh and laugh. A week after, I walk down the wet and incandescent streets of Portsmouth with a man almost just like me, and today he turned 62. I can barely recall even getting in the car [I do recall thanking the driver, a trusted friend.] The next day I gently glide down the wrong side of Congress Street, I can still hear the rain falling in Portsmouth, pitter-pattering me to sleep. On our rocky coast at Wolf’s Neck, sitting upon boulders that call to me to naturally to leap and bound upon them, I rest instead and stare at the island, up to the osprey’s nest where he stands a sentinel [I'm speechless.]

Hurdling down unpaved closed-country roads in the backwoods of Maine is quite dangerous and common, thus dangerously common, I spent many greener years recklessly testing myself with my equally adolescent peers. It seems so long ago now, but so does everything, the constant flux, the winds of life fill my wax sails and I let go of the sheet and rudder. These events I’ve been listing are out of place, falling like grains through God’s fingers at random, but still landing in the shape of pyramids. I can hardly even remember the crash, just the instant calm understanding, [the "I have to get out the car right now."] Once safe, I turned back to survey the incident, the silver shell lifted at a 45 degree angle over the devastated stone wall, the sails melted and leaking out underneath onto the pine needles. The trees on either side silently loomed over us, judging his poor, poor decision. I can still feel their power, and hear his heart slip under reality’s cold and unforgiving waves. Neither the undesignated driver, nor I, nor Aaron, nor the Russian were injured.

So, needless to say, I’ve been pretty fucked up the past few days.