and then our exile

Needless to say, everyone is hopeful that the situation, which tends to ebb and flow down there, will stay below a certain threshold, and that there's--we have no plans to do anything. By that, I don't mean we have no plans. Obviously, we have plans to do everything in the world that we can think of. But we--there's no intention at the present time, or no reason to believe, that any of the thinking that goes into these things year in and year out would have to be utilized.
--Donald Rumsfeld on Haiti. He isn't incoherent, as you might guess at first blush. Rather, he's terribly, frighteningly coherent--the fact that this man is in position of such death should make us all go mad. In fact, we're *already* all mad, and this world is our asylum. Hello, inmate. Hello, inmatess. Good evening all.

The internal vista struggles on in the mess it's been for the past while, whilst the outside world seems to fall apart. Existentialism, Watson? Okay, so i "joke" (i've learned my lesson about tasting dust/ rusting joints). Ask me about the power of a shamagh (Br.Bilbo's "PLO scarf--tell it like it is") at some point, and i'll tell you a story alternately hilarious and sadistic.
i'm feeling all nostalgic-like, remembering the days of years past when Noor would come to my room and read on the sofa while i wrote and we replayed Babaji's old Van Morrison casettes time and again--hours on end. Who remembers The Travels of Ibn Tabari? Knights Were Just Men Once? And all the cartoons we used to watch! And...and...now is the time i go get a cup of tea and dim the lights and relive scenes of past might and clarity. Lined faces from my past are entering my mind. The day i forget my history is the day i die, whether or not i'm "alive". i am dying.

i think i'm older than i am. i joke about being thirty-nine, and came back from Spain feeling sixty, and Someone has dubbed me the Ageless One, but as for me myself and i...there's some quality there, not of age nor continuity but simply...simply...some variable neutrality of essence not quite describable. Part of it is possibly that i've gazed out onto the Arabian desert and the deepest oceans, walked the streets of Samarqand, Jerusalem and Montreal, hiked in the Himalayas and experienced absolute poverty, but rising beyond these there's something else--something so much a part of me that i can't explain it--nor, i suppose, do i want to.

One thing i realize today: moving back to Canada signified not only the obvious ending of an era but also the watershed of a vacuum--the removal of innocence, if you will. A graduated process, but one which... But no, i'm starting to think about Hamlet too much.

Chemistry. Now. My dreams must wait for later--many assignments remain for this night. Coffee. Pencil. Notebook. Textbook. Go.