Sweltering in the dark room of my fading life

Whew! Sounds depressing eh? Well, hell, it is and that's a fact. But such is life and who cares anyway? We live in a nation whose time has reached a crossroads. Which road will we choose?

Will we follow the Bushmeister over the cliff of bloody warfare in the name of god? Or will we find another way to alter the seemingly inexorable fall from grace that America is experiencing?

Don't know. Well think about it. If you don't, who will? This is the time and the place. This is the moment and it will never come again.

We're turning over Iraq to the Iraqi's yet we're keeping the 130,000 or so troops in place to keep the peace. And yet, the Iraqi people are supposed to believe that they've attained sovereignty? What a friggin joke! What a sad, shabby charade.

Bush started this war in the name of 9/11 and he had no post-war plan outside the rosy predictions his pal Wolfowitz presented in a paper he wrote in 1997. What a knuckle-headed decision and, yet, there it is. We're gambling on the lives of all those soldiers, not to mention the Iraqis, just because Bush wanted to flex his presidential muscles and push his value system down the throats of a Middle East nation? Crazy!

No one seems to know what's to come of this transition of power, not even the Iraqis themselves. The adminstration crows about the poll that shows the U.N.-picked interim government has a 70-80 percent approval rating among Iraqis. But how long will that last once it becomes apparent that Alawi is going to resemble Saddam Hussein in his brutality, which he will justify in the name of fighting the insurgent groups who're trying to topple the U.S. presence in Iraq?

Ah well. What the hell. It's not your kid, right? And so what if our grandchildren's grandchildren will still be paying for this Bush doctrine well beyond 2050 – hell, that's the price of freedom, right?

Freedom? Oh yea, forgot to mention, you're going to have to give up most of the Constitionally guaranteed freedoms in order to empower the police state that's been tasked with protecting Americans in America and American interests elsewhere in the world. So what are our soldiers fighting for again? I forget?

What a crummy week!

Well, with a title like that it's easy to tell this won't be an uplifting entry, eh? Yea, I had a fall-off-a-cliff, bust my ass on a rock, tumble down a well kind of week, and it's not over yet!

All day, for the past three days, I've been battling to cope with a toothache that just won't let up. I've gone through three tubes of Orajel, a 20-percent benzocaine salve that I squirt into the cavernous hole in my lower left molar and which numbs the agony for a few minutes. But the damned thing is causing me headaches and even when the tooth pain is numbed, the headaches go on.

It makes work very difficult. And on the subject of work, I f*^#@! up on Friday when – for the first time in months – took a dinner break. I didn't think about the fact that the editor was waiting for the final pages of the section so she could approve them and she got pissed (I'm told) when she learned I had left.

I expect Tuesday will be a thrilling reception when I return to the grind.

C'est la vie.

Well, I'm off to see my baby. Unfortunately she too is suffering miserably, only she has MULTIPLE cavities in her mouth, so her pain reaches heights that I can only imagine with a shiver.

Ah well. So much for this bunch of babble. I'm hot, sweaty and tired and I don't feel like much of anything except crap. So I'm out.

Here's wishing you happy trails.

I've got me gecko and me blue-tongued lizard, but still I'm unhappy. So what's up with that?

Yea, it's true, I'm not able to get no satisfaction and my fingers get tired doing the walking in this land of plenty. I'm in a dizzy spinning, out of control mode that seems to be my lot in life and I'm not entirely sure that's the way it's supposed to be. Is it?

Who knows?

But I've got to run because, per usual, my lady is in waiting and I'll get reamed out but good if I'm much later than I am already.

No comments from the peanut gallery, thank you very much!

At any rate, GW, it appears, is vulnerable and that's a good thing in my book.

And so it goes.