The word sounds a little like some drug you might take to get over something. “Post” meaning “after,” and “Lude” one of those things coming over the former border in backpacks. The dictionary says it actually refers to a musical interlude, normally on the organ, played at the end of a church service as a concluding piece to sum up the itent of the work as a whole. Taken by the Writer’s Circle, it is used as a final chapter or phase to mark conclusions and what comes from them.

One of the first acts of a ‘normal’ new day is a check for what is to come while putting aside the past. We ran the second installment of a tale from the Coastal Empire this morning as a balance to what millions of us on the Eastern Seaboard experienced over the last week. We ducked anything except two days o drenching rain. And a rhyming word, referring to those who suffer from the aches of age: “Pain.” The humidity is down, and there was a patch of blue sky observed at the morning weather check-in with other Salts from Square States far away. “47 and 56 later,” went the short note. “With a bar saying two gale periods before 1400 this afternoon.”

Those would be the last gasps of Hurricane Ian, lighter bands of wind and possible moisture passing over the Piedmont. And the lower humidity makes the tortured limbs move a little easier. Marlow gave us a taste of storms from the old days, the ones back when kinetic conflict enmeshed our world. With the passing of a great storm in our current day, we are back to something similar.

There was talk of the use of weapons of mass destruction associated with a Europe- or a Western World- that seems committed to some sort of decisive act of self immolation. After the declaration by a former Superpower that nuclear weapons might be necessary to resolve an act of aggression. You can fill in the identity of the Bad Actor in that line of discussion, but since it has been 75 years since the last use of weapons that changed our world, it got the attention of all of us don at the Fire Ring. With the natural storm’s passing, we noticed the Postlude includes otherwise rational folks discussing how atomic weapons might be used as something they are calling “demonstrations.” That would, we think, be a sort of demonstrative act to remind us of the horror of vaporizing large urban areas, or using them from the sea to cause Tsunamis that could obliderate a shoreline.

Someday, this will be termed one of those “historic periods” subject to study on the nature of our species. The question now is whether it will be a major or minor event with its own Postlude. With the clouds of the last now passing, we can turn back to the anticipation. One of the subjects this morning was the implication of a blast at a place called “Novaya Zemlya.” It is an island controlled by Russia, and not under dispute. We are universally opposed to anyone blowing up atomic bombs, whether for warlike or demonstration purposes. Some of us have seen them, the ones normally kept deep in the armory. Another pal flew missions to test their “shapes” for the packaging that enabled more precision use of the horrors. They were described as sleek and shapely, quite a contrast to containers for the fires of Hades.

Others recalled the complex and unforgiving system designed to ensure that no mistakes were permitted in a decision to move the weapons from their safe spaces to the platforms that would carry them to their designated mission. What has those with joints still creaking from a moderately severe storm is that we have leapt over the old line about the “possibility” of using those weapons to the “most effective” means of using them without untoward damage.

So, the Postlude to Ian’s natural wrath is a return to the human version. The European war in progress reflects a global alteration in how our spinning planet balances. We just sent a satellite into space to impact an approaching celestial body to determine if we could alter it’s course in space. It was a demonstration, of a sort. We will see if we have another one by someone else. And that will involve another Postlude, won’t it? We are hoping this one makes the arthritis have less pain.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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