Author: Vic Socotra

New Years

The New Year is coming, like it or not. I was sitting in the watch turn-over meeting at the Department yesterday morning. They do it at ten because the Watch Center that coordinates Homeland Security is in the District, and you can’t get there at rush hour. By ten, most people have got themselves sorted […]

Window Shopping

We killed a bunch of kids in Afghanistan yesterday, the second group of youngsters we inadvertently blew away in as many days. The wounded in the bombings at Mosul and Red Square have barely got the stitches in, and off we go again. There is something abroad in the land. The Democrats barely won the […]

Laus Deo

There are bombs in Mosul this morning, dozens of Americans wounded, and some Chechen woman blew herself a a few dozen Russians in Red Square. Al Gore formally endorsed Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination for President. It is way early and I do not know what it means. I cannot begin to write about […]

The Duration

I am discombobulated this morning. Not only is Dan Damon doing a bit on the resurgence of canabalism, made possible by the internet, but I have to be at the guardshack at Nebraska Avenue at 0645. I am late before I begin this morning. The Internet! What an astonishing means to link the darkest desires […]

The Department

I rose in the darkness and screwed around withthe coffee maker and the bacon. I like the baon crisp and as flat as possible, probably a raction to the tangled mass that my Mother used to serve up when we were kids. The rich smells rose from the kitchen and wafted around me as I […]

Flight Following

The President and I had a busy travel week. I was not with him, per se, though I was just as anonymous hurtling northwest in my truck as he had been on Air Force One headed for Baghdad on a surprise holiday visit to the troops. The fact that Senator Clinton and Jack Reid were […]

Syclone in the Pines

It is the Thanksgiving Day weekend. I should be supervising a new position we have established in the Homeland Security Operations Center up on Nebraska Avenue. I was eloquent in our proposal to the Government that I would be a hands-on Project Manager and we won the contract. I should have been there, since the […]

Head on a Swivel

It may be the last morning to get calibrated before the Holiday. I could tell by the news from Europe. The BBC was mostly concerned with the special relationship with France that has suffered so badly over Britain’s relationship across the Atlantic. The politics of the EU are the focus, but of course, the Continent […]

A Little Extra

Maureen Down pissed me off first thing this morning. She accused the President of “putting a clammy hand on the spines” of the American electorate. That is an unsettling image for a Sunday morning when I am filled with the sweet glow of gridiron victory. My spine is quite straight this morning. Michigan beat Ohio […]

Two Hotels and the Oil Ministry

My head hurts, not hung over, just a dull ache from where the trunk lid hit me Wednesday night, lunging for my jacket in the cold dark rain, late for a meeting for which the other guy didn’t show. There is a painful knot there and a cut that is still tender. I am not […]