What to say? I see nothing but rainclouds from where I sit. My teeth chatter and my feather bed is as drenched as a Slip n' Slide. I staggered outdoors once today, to throw my uneaten lamb lunch to my stable of tame guard foxes. The air smelled like mercury, hot and dense, like a thunderstorm was in the offing. And so it was coming, and we are the poorer for it.

My malarial state is a memento from a different time and distant place (Ghana was not as receptive to my generic version of the Slinky as I might have hoped) and yet I carry this sickness inside me, still. It will even outlive me, as mosquitoes endlessly spawn and swarm, as they have since creation and will continue long after I've decayed into a lump of dust.

I am very tired, and have a great fear of falling as I lurch back to bed. Three days, three thunderbolts. I could feel the first buffets, the first chills, and I took to bed, knowing the squall to come. It was journalistic in nature. Michael Hastings, who had defied the bilious crowd of tastemakers and fluffers called the press corps, died. The only journalist of his generation to hate war, name names, and strike back is dead, burnt in a fireball after his car collided with a palm tree. Hastings had held the radical notion that few other "respectable" journalists would ever possess, a concept of reporting so simple and self-explanatory, that it is almost never practiced: like Hunter S. Thompson, he wrote what he saw. Big Stan McChrystal must have been dumbfounded to see a reporter accurately describe what he and his staff had said in front of a reporter, amidst the savage, pointless dead draw of a bloodbath called the "Afghan surge." 

Finally, one of us evened the score with these killers and psychopaths running our country.

My symptoms were acute then, bone-shaking. I slept the sleep of a half-dead man, only to awake to compounding pain. Now it was cultural, an even bleaker landscape than that of American journalism. James Gandolfini, the character actor who was never supposed to be a star but was, in the role of a lifetime, on a show that will be looked back upon as the greatest portrait not of the mafia, but of suburban, dead-end life in the years when America began to reverse course, and then drift. The anomie of Tony Soprano, the ursine, sentimental brute, can only be found in America, the place that makes these men. Unlike the rest of us, the squalor of Tony's existence was the knowledge that it would end in either murder or imprisonment - a damnation the rest of us aren't even lucky enough to receive, drifting through the rest of life.

Ah, what's the point? Even bread and circuses won't help this kind of heartache, not when it's the Heat that wins the silly games.

I'll take my sickbed. It's the world outside that's deadly to anything resembling decency.

General Gandhi

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