Ideas about Liberation, Pt. I

I just finished watching the excellent documentary Control Room about media coverage of the Iraqi (choose one: liberation, occupation, constipation, war cough crime) particularly as covered by Al-Jazeera. Sometimes I feel like the current global situation is utterly and completely hopeless. There are too many atrocities, environmental catastrophes, economic collapses, people sleeping in the streets, and religious, ethnic, gender, and sexual intolerances for the human race to tarry on this planet much longer. Other days I am filled with an unbridled faith and optimism that something will save us from ourselves—some divine intervention, alien invasion, self-transcendence, or simply the swing of the pendulum. At those times I am nearly feverish—as if everything is in technicolor. Perhaps then, the best place of all is what I consider the warped and twisted happy medium—that space in which I find everything perversely, hysterically funny. After all, we’re quite amusing. Besides, when you can't laugh at yourself

then comes the realization that some people are expendable
and that you may be one of them
and in trying to evaluate yourself honestly, openly on such terms
while recognizing the inherent subjectivity of it all
the way your brain is wired this one moment
which is nothing given all the many moments
compounded daily in your portfolio of you
you’re befuddled as you walk around feeling
fragile as an eggshell, tragic as a ghost, tainted as Fox Creek
vulnerable as a baby bird on the first of its many flights to nowhere
you are a shell, a husk when yesterday you were flesh
a transformation you missed
though you tossed and turned acrobatically awake all night
fit to be tied but the sleeves weren’t long enough on this jacket

Currently on the nightstand: Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann.