Waiting For Thunder

My cousin's gall bladder bursts, my wife has a surgery which may or may not help with her daily life in the house of pain, friends lose their wonderful little dog, Chile Boy, and a best buddy discovers his wife has tumors in her lung and brain... Is all of this from the recent solar flare electrical bursts of the sun? Or just an odd collection of midsummer's fresh chaos in my own personal life flow that all got piled into the last two weeks?

It seems a lot of us are going through changes with jobs, relatives, lives. Is there some pattern to all of this? Are we doomed to the gloom of 2012 horror-scopes? Are we even more alone in our netflixed and facebooked worlds? It's a disconnected "connected" world. Moscow is suffocating in rancid smog and the smoke from fires there will affect global weather patterns for months to come. As we mark the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, Castro claims the USA will soon nuke Iran. The folks at wikiLeaky-TikiTavi have more secrets to be revealed shortly and it seems like there ain't nuttin' to do 'bout that. Folks are now naming babies after Twilight vampires and vampirettes. And thank god, we have survived another Shark Week. There is some true and rapid change happening and in the end we each deal with it in our own ways.

Politically, the yelling, screaming, tea-bagging, and inevitable swamp that results even had Jon Stewart last week saying, "I GIVE UP." On both sides of the giant fences we have built, there is a feeling that we are not being heard. That we are fairly powerless to do much. Recycling plastic bottles while buying new cars doesn't help. If you are jobless, then you might not give too much of a ding-blat about recycling in the first place. We can only work on our own backyard sometimes and seeing the results of our work on a larger scale is not always possible in the short run.

The oil spill is plugged now with mud and concrete. The oil itself is left to cover the ocean floor where no one yet sees the damage it has, is, and will cause. Better unseen than in our faces? It's our way of life, our style to avoid looking at the darkness, preferring the oh-so-pretty-lightness of things. As our earth turns, there is night and day. No one can change that.

It's not ok in the good olde USA to be sad about things. We don't "do" sad. We are good at doing mad and scared. We feed each day off the scary local national and international news. It is a pablum of adrenalin and finger-pointing that seems to help our moods. But sadness is untouchable. Much better to be angry than sad. Even the word itself is kind of sad and sibilant.

Maybe this is just that time when our sails go slack as we turn our sailing ships toward a new season and fresh breezes. Our boats have come to a calm in the water as the boom slowly spills over to the other side of the boat and we wait to "come about" and refill our sails with the season of football and falling leaves. Maybe it's in the calm that things float to the surface.