Two-thirty, I thought. That is too damn early for anything interesting.

I could not get back down. My brain started churning through what the eager-beaver Realtor was talking about, and getting the unit spruced up for sale. “Thin things out,” he said. “Replace the vanities in the bathrooms. Otherwise, you are pretty much good to go.”

In the back bedroom he looked at the contents of the bookcases. “You have interesting stuff,” he said, a bit quizzically. “But you might want to get some of it out of here before showing it.”

I took his point. I live in a quirky personal universe that is part Steam Punk and strange art out-of-time, dragons and fish and surreal scenes and the décor might not appeal to everyone. So the notion of going through everything in preparation for down-sizing.

But that is too daunting to contemplate for long, except with the Moon peaks out from the corner of the West Tower of Big Pink and the bedroom is lit in brilliant silver.

Getting rid of stuff will be liberating, right?

I shrugged in bed and surrendered to the inevitable. I made the coffee before 0400, and logged onto the company system to see if the input to the proposal had arrived while I tossing. It had, and I began to revise it on-screen.

The most powerful human urge is not procreation, by the way. It is the compulsion to change other people’s copy. I spent an hour or so adding drama and urgency, or at least the words that signify that sort of thing, and moved on to crafting a Small Business participation plan for something else that will happen after a review of several dozen resumes later in the morning, assuming I am not face down at the keyboard at the office.

Somewhere along the way the BBC informed me that Syria had probably used chemical weapons against their own people, even after the President was very stern with them and drew what he called a Red Line in the sand, or the dirt, or whatever about the matter.

I am not quite sure what he can do, without committing us to support the insurgents, who appear to be backed by the Iranians and led by Islamists who will impose Sharia Law if they eventually succeed. Nice. This is even better than running around suburban Iraq looking for evidence to justify the invasion, with the benefit that we are supporting people who would just as soon blow us up.

I was getting a little disoriented. I had been figuring on a variety of contingencies over the last few weeks. I think it was North Korea last, right? Weren’t they going to nuke us or something? And Iran before that, with another set of Red Lines.
After the adventure in Iraq, it is of more than passing interest on how they get- or manage to avoid getting- the truth.

I looked at the clock. Crap. Only two working days until Monday.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com