• Mood: melancholy
• Music: Jann Arden - Could I be Your Girl?

Soldier's heart

I'm still feeling too spooked and horrified by the Indian Ocean tsunami to want to do much more than stare and chew my thumb. It's particularly shocking right now, in that I've just been writing this--aftermath of a tremendous disaster--and I was ready to put these feelings of shellshock and horror away.

This is one of the hypothetical efects of global climate change, by the way. I'm not saying that this particular quake was triggered by the melting polar icecaps and the resulting crustal uplift, but the potential for just this sort of disaster is discussed, somewhat, in Worldwired.

It's terrifying to see what you've imagined.

I have to think back to World War II to find a referent for death on this scale. Dresden, Kiev, Hiroshima/Nagasaki--

It hurts to think about. The world is so very powerful, and we are so very frail. They say the death toll may rise to half a million; very roughly speaking, that's like somebody shot every third person in Las Vegas, every seventh person in Toronto, every twentieth person in New York. I've tried to describe carnage on this scale.

Now I'm observing it.

It's still impossible to comprehend.

And in the morning, we still have to get up and slop the pigs. And right now, there's a hell of a lot of pigs that need slopping.

Which leads me to some small personal good news, I suppose; the pig slopping, that is. retrobabble just let me know that Amazon is nearly sold out of Hammered. There are five copies left as of this writing.

Also, I notice that stillsostrange has made herself a very shiny Hammered icon, and I wish I'd thought of it first.


I'm glad I didn't kill that particular darling.

Not being nihilistic_kid, I'm not going to resort to terrorism to sell those last few copies. Although I did contemplate briefly threatening to post pictures of Nick in his undies if I didn't get what I wanted. But somehow, today, what I want isn't really to sell books.

Instead, I want them not to come true.

In any case, my college friends (who will be celebrating the New Year in two short hours) and I have a sort of traditional New Year's toast, which I reproduce here, since I cannot be with them. Traditionally, the joke is that even years are worse than odd years.

We made it through--most of us!
It could have been worse--for most of us!
We'll get through the next one too--most of us!
Here's to 2004: Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way into history, bitch.