fear of trains
I've been away fighting my scanner, mostly. It has gone existential and refuses to scan. So no photo gallery in the immediate future, at least not until Canon tech support gets back to me.
But then mostly this is one of those days where all the bothersome things seem to shrivel into insignificance, leaving me in this flat afternoon with a feeling of adequacy, if not peace. Now I need only repair the horrendous damage I've done to my sleep schedule (up at 4 p.m. today). And get a haircut, if there's time.
Yesterday I met Roberta, who was taking a photograph outside Iowa City's Hillel center. She had propped yesterday's newspaper (big photo of bellicose Bush) against a flowerbed. When I stopped and asked her about it, she explained that the Judeo-Christian tradition was one of our tools to make sense of the current situation—so she had first taken a photograph of Bush by the St. Mary's church and was now doing the Jewish center just as the sun was setting, marking the start of the sabbath. She then explained how on this date in 1979 she had been near a fountain in Rome at sundown, and that year it marked the start of Rosh Hashanah. The idea was synchronic, she said, circumventing linear time. Then she confided her fear at the warmongers in our government. "Bush has been given an absolute mandate," she said, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
