Wikipedia has a little box on their website where they report the news, and consequently I am sometimes drawn against my better judgement down a bread crumb trail in the internet to the Real News. While dabbling in the Real News I dwell on such teeth-gnashing inevitabilities of the past week as the 2,000 casualty mark, the increasingly alarming evidence of climate change, the Harriet Miers withdrawl, and the indictments of the various criminals in our corrupt Moron Puppet Government of Evil.

Each of these simple facts of what is Going On in America Today--incipient, pre-dawn Today--is at turns absurd, ironic, obvious and infuriating. I am not the first to notice this. I am simply noticing it Today.

I follow the trail long enough and arrive at the web site of a British newspaper. While reading one recent article, I notice a headline that says, "Wake-up call for US 'Climate Loonies'" at the bottom of the page. Thinking that this might be the reassurance I'm looking for, that this is an article about how the doomsayers who say that the hurricane season is evidence of escalating climate change are getting ahead of themselves, I begin to flood with relief (no pun intended). I hadn't even realized I was so truly, terribly worried about it. No such luck. I've forgotten that this was England, where they do not subscribe to the American journalistic ethics of transposition of meaning (radical = fanatic, fascist = elected official) but actually call a loony a loony. The loonies they are referring to are the Bush Administration officials themselves, and the wake-up call is in fact the hurricane season, calling to tell us that you can suppress as many scientific reports as you want to, Mother Nature don't play.

The 2000th casualty earlier this week left me shrugging my shoulders. Of course we would have a war. Of course thousands and thousands of people would die. That's what people do in wars, when hit with flaming shards of metal moving through the air at thousands of feet per second. They die. When the metal rips through their skin and shreds a vital organ and it bleeds until it has no more oxygen and can't function anymore, they die. When they are blown into multiple pieces, they die. A human body, it seems, can only continue to house a human soul when whole and intact.

So this is in the news. When hit with flaming shards of metal moving through the air at thousands of feet per second, 2,000 young men and women have died, not to protect our freedom (we are in more danger than ever as our country's presence and ineptitude grows in the Middle East), not to make citizens of dictatorial subjects (now they are subjects of the dictatorship of American imperialism), not to bring us cheap oil (since the oil is still expensive and the environmental costs do not fluctuate due to the supply currently on the global market), but to put money in the bank accounts of a very few people.

Are we supposed to grieve these distant, meaningless deaths, more violent and untimely than we hope our own will be? Not if we truly understand the nature of this empire. If you do not understand that one life can be worth many times the value of another, that one person's wealth can be worth the death not of two, nor of two thousand, but of two hundred thousand people, then you do not understand the world you live in.

You live in a world where it is news that 2,000 Americans have died in a war in which ten times as many Iraqis have died. What are we meant to understand from these numbers? That the life of one American is worth that of ten Iraqis? That a full tank of one S.U.V is worth some small but quantifiable fraction of the life of an Iraqi? That a fat contract for Halliburton has a price in human lives, about 32,000 of them and counting?

At least the Founding Fathers were effiicient enough to reduce the brown people of the world to a specific number. Every slave is three-fifths of a man. Well-meaning liberals and moderates often say the Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves today. They certainly would be. Imagine an America too disorganized to even quanitfy just how many brown people equals one real American.

Holly returned from six weeks in the Far East and the Pacific Northwest. In my excitement over her return and subsequent digital photo slideshow, I drank three martinis on an empty stomach and confirmed once and for all that my body's ability to process alcohol is not what it used to be. We were talking about the dramas of middle-school aged girls, and we realized all heterosexual women live in exile, refugees from our own personal islands of Lesbos where for the period of years before we become interested in boys all of our dramas and passions are played out in the realm of other women. That was the last thing I thought and said before, "I'm think I'm going to be sick."

While Holly was in town, we saw the perfect show. The set list was perfect. The lighting was perfect. The songs sounded even better live. Neko Case's voice sounded even better live. Neko Case was dressed like Stevie Nicks, who Holly loves. Not only was Neko Case dressed like Stevie Nicks, but as a joke the band spontaneously played an entire Fleetwood Mac song and Neko Case sang it, waving the lemon-yellow wings of her chiffon dress in the air.

The amount of people in the crowd and their management of personal space was perfect. I was warm and surrounded but not crushed. People danced and bounced but didn't push and shove. They were nice people, fine-looking people, good people. They seemed neither more nor less angry or depressed than anyone else. They had an ease about them. They were interesting as individuals and complemented each other well as a group defined not by any common goal or subculture but simply by their not-at-all coincidental presence at the New Pornographers show this rainy evening. They were not hostile to the band performing and only one of them drunkenly yelled "Freebird" when the band offered to take requests.

Even retrieving my coat from the coat check was perfect. The line was long and snaked around the basement and up the stairs of Webster Hall. It seemed like a line you could wait in for a very long time, but I struck up a converstion with my neighbor. He was the perfect neighbor in a long coat-check line in which it seemed like you could wait for a very long time. He, too, thought the show was perfect. He was cherubic and foreign. It turned out he was an El Salvadoran pediatrician. Moving to New York on his own had been hard at first, but now he loved it. Being a pediatrician had been hard at first, and yes, he had been sick continuously the first winter, but now he seemed to have built up some immunity and he loved his job at a clinic in the South Bronx. Wasn't it sad and outrageous how entwined health and wealth are? Wasn't it a relief to hear about other countries where the terrible farce of American politics held no sway and everyone agreed that the Moron Puppet of Evil was a murderous lunatic and United States was not a nation concerned with spreading democracy but rather a global capitalist empire?

It really was.

Holly went to Peru, where her boyfriend is digging up the remains of another empire that was vanquished by yet another empire. At home at the center of our empire, I feared death within the week by suicide bomb on the subway. I feared death within the decade by the avian flu.

At home at the center of our empire, I feared death.

I read Joan Didion's beautiful new book and feared the death of a spouse I might one day have. I read the review of her beautiful new book and feared the death of a child I might one day have.

I realized that in my systematic watching of every episode of M*A*S*H in broadcast order, I was nearing the episode where Colonel Blake is killed on his way home from Korea.

I feared the death of Colonel Blake.

It rained for nine straight days and I feared extreme weather due to climate change and the havoc that it has wrought and might still wreak. I feared depression, dull, gray, sluggish, sludgy, damp, stale, mildewed depression.

I rode the bus and as it came into New York late Sunday night I peered into all the windows, so many neighborhoods in rapid succession. My glimpses into the mansions on Fifth Avenue, of wood paneling so dark and chandeliers so large, reminded me of perversions and alcoholism. The bus slowed but didn't quite stop outside a parking garage, and in the cramped, cinderblock office on the second level of the building there was a black suit still in its dry-cleaner plastic, hanging on the wall next to a girlie calendar. The parking garage attendant who worked in the office wasn't there, and yet anyone who looked in the window could see two essential things about him, could know him better perhaps than someone who actually met him and spoke to him. Or maybe that was just the delusion of a bored person on a bus.

My computer ceased to make sounds. My printer ceased to print black or blue. The screen on my cell phone ceased to function entirely and with horror, I began answering phone calls with no idea who was on the other end. I nearly broke my toe. Or rather, I broke it, but many times in many tiny places all over the bone instead of just one place in a particular part of the bone. I broke the bone at the cellular level, explained the lanky orthopedist who came in to read the X-ray. It might hurt for a while, but in this case, he said, I shouldn't worry about masking the pain with Advil. It didn't much matter if I rested it or exerted it, the toe would heal and there was nothing I could really do to affect it either way.