These thoughts hit me hardest as I sat directly on a 1/2 inch push pin while changing my shoes at the bath house. A flyer had fallen off the board above the bench on which I parked myself heavily. It was an ad for a dance. Later that day, I witnessed a teenager on a motorized scooter accidentally mow down another teen, bark at him for getting in the way, and then zoom away, hit and run style. Hours later I watched the tiniest Chihuahua take on a 6'5", 300 lb. man who had merely been strolling along the same sidewalk. Then I caught a bus and sat next to a woman stroking her pet rat. I came home and couldn't write a word. My mind spun in too many directions. I couldn't even tackle personal problems.

You'll perhaps excuse me then, if my thoughts aren't quite linear. Somehow I take all of the above and come up with the notion that we are the both the perpetrators and the victims--victims of our own technology, victims of our own mad fantasies, victims of our own attitudes and beliefs. Maybe our whole culture is a destructive suicide cult. Take the death of a city (see Detroit) or a school system (Oakland) or a nation state (Iraq ... or the U.S.). It flabbergasts me how social progress is always steps back before forward and seemingly never enough to make up for the regression. I'm guessing the cow didn't know the ramifications of standing ground on the rail; and maybe some people would have refrained from a swan dive if they'd known they were being taped. When a state has to take a city or school district into receivership or when a country decides to run another one's business, I wonder about the A to Z.

As I wonder, I wander--call it mental masturbation, a process that usually happens on a good day. Believe it or not, these mismatched thoughts are usually part of a good train of thought because they don't upset me. I wonder because I'm convinced that somehow every anomaly and every happenstance and every state of being is interconnected. Like Einstein, I need to believe in one unifying theme. But I'm no Albert. I only know that when I stop wondering I will experience death from the other side.

It's winter, a time when things die or appear dead, often to spring to back to (new) life as the days get longer. This winter I've really felt the season, becoming a recluse--home bound by choice and by circumstance. Grappling with emotional stuff related to the job-then-joblessness-now-new-job; continuing to sort out the loss of my mother; trying to absorb the roller coaster of a challenging intimate relationship that has brought unexpected pleasure and pain; worrying about the various traumas being experienced by other friends and family; trying to stay warm and dry; battling my hair--these are all areas in which I've felt like both victim and perp, sometimes both simultaneously. It struck me this way last year: