soma anyone?

1) alas another day in winterwonderland. i have ocular migraines, which are - as the name indicates - painful incidents during which unrelenting pressure builds up behind the
pupils and gives the world a shimmering look to it, especially in the lower corners of
your field of vision. Everything oscillates, and so if you look out at a field of snow in
the early morning sunlight and stare at it for awhile, listening to the pathetic robins
opine about the absurdity of their situation, the hallucinatory effect is disquieting and
grand, too, in its own way. The snow sparkles, and it seems like the sparkles are
vibrating against each other to create a kind of unified kinetic field of light playing off
itself.

2) Pundits continue to frame their punditry about Iraq in terms of winning and losing.
Are they still in a K-hole? Iraq is off the chain. It's one of those metastasizing outbreaks,
feral and unpredictable and disrespectful of whatever rhetorical categories you use to try
to tether it down. What would constitute "winning?" Not that most Americans really
give a shit. I'm beginning to think that our collective madness only exists in the aggregate
and subsists on a mixture of ignorance and puerile fascination with whatever artifact the publicity machine happens to have emitted at the time. On the other hand, it's hard not to
resent the chattering class conviction that leaving the country we've effectively immiserated is the only way to go.