(Sabrina the Gypsy Fortune-teller behind the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. Photo Socotra).

I was hunched over the computer yesterday, in bunny slippers, as the day slowly crept along. I never made it into work clothes, nor to the Willow, as I listened to the gathering storm hitting New York City and points north to the epicenter in Boston. I just looked at a traffic camera from a place quaintly named Piety Corner on the Rt. 128 high-tech corridor around battered Beantown and it is dead white and silent.

Sort of like the modern GOP.

But in this case, dramatic action has been taken. Traffic has been banned, the ferries shut down, and people admonished to stay in their homes so they “don’t slip and fall,” according to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

I would expect nothing less from the center of the storm. Stand by for more global warming-climate-change-OMG-humans-are-bad-OpEds. We dodged the bullet here in Washington as far as the white stuff, though the winds are gusting to 45 knots, but there is no snow.

Thank the Goddess. Anyway, the weekend arrived with the uncertainty that surrounded the arrival of the storm. The airlines gradually shut down, the trains north out of Union Station were cancelled in the early afternoon, and an air of resignation emanated from the local NPR station through the long afternoon of anticipation.

You know these essays veer as wildly in mood and subject as the sunken cruise ship Costa Concordia, and often wind up with precisely the same results.

My personal challenges naturally form the basis of the soap bubble exercise of early morning.  Naturally they are derived from issues on the national stage, which is not unexpected in a place where the local reporting often constitutes the national news.

To a degree, these issues can be of general interest, though certainly not all. One reader in Michigan suggested that I not be so goddamn obnubilate in the stories, and I was delighted to search for the meaning of the term:

ob·nu·bi·late
/äbˈn(y)o͞obəˌlāt/
Verb
Darken or cover with or as if with a cloud; obscure.

I nodded my head, wincing at the kink in my neck, but in complete agreement. In feeble defense, I have an increasing challenge in that my demographic base is rooted in the Boomers who are inceasingly left with more time on their hands than is good for anyone. I engage in active correspondence with a few comrades who have had the luxury to retire. Being military or bureaucrat by training, they rise early and attack issues with stinging gusto.

This morning the issue de jour was the curious testimony of Mr. Panetta and General Dempsey about the lack of Presidential interest in l’affaire de Benghazi.

That segued into a discussion of gun rights and gun porn at the Nation’s Gun Show this weekend out at the Dulles Expo Center, and from there lurched into a discussion of the buying binge by the Feds last summer that depleted available stocks of ammunition just when the public began to panic about the twin issues of public slaughter and Gun Control legislation.

Anyway, that is the equivalent of three stories to get out the door in the morning- the first two of which are far less temperate than the tone I attempt to project in the Socotra stream. Hence the obnubilation.

Yesterday’s outing about liquid methane exploration and the application of technology to the challenges of deep-water extraction. I was interested, but was admonished by a correspondent who said “high technology is fine, but we want more detail on Sabrina’s cleavage.”

I take his point. We are going to concentrate on more traditional values from here out. Sex sells, they say, and that is part of the core traditional values I want to support. It is only right.

And it is much more fun.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com