Rolling Thunder

Vibrations are turning sinister.  First, a bad run-in over bad music and then a disproportionate outburst from the Boss at work.  It could only be some disturbance in the force, and I refuse to chalk all this vile nonsense up to the storms that are making their way toward the suburbs.  Hell no.  It's true that people begin to act strangely when there is a sudden drop in barometric pressure accompanied by thickening of the electromagnetic field--a combination of their homeostasis being thrown out of whack and a rigid anticipation like that which overtakes a person standing on the very edge of the Grand Canyon.  By all rights, the view from the Eastern Rim is more apt to fill a person with convulsive fear, but when you're talking about falling thousands of feet into the Colorado River, location and the corresponding sensations become almost meaningless.  Semantic.

So yes.  We can't simply pass these emotional lava flows off as byproducts of natural conditions.  Something must be playing at the tender underbelly of human interactions, which are already guarded and half-assed as it is.  There are evil wiles to be dealt with here, and it remains the wisest thing to tread cautiously where unnecessary accusations could quite possibly turn building pressures into a firestorm of immense proportions.  Casualties would be unbearable.  The fallout, crippling.  The spiritual economy would crash, and the only solution would be to start up another round of ill-conceived Ideology Wars to buffer our collapse.

But let's not get bogged down in issues that might see me placed in front of a firing line.  Those goddamn death squads things are more painful than they most likely seem to the majority of people.  One would conceivably rather be pumped full of lead from every gun on the line, thus maximizing the chances of a bullet obliterating the brain and making the whole thing seem very painless and humane.  At very least, a body with seven holes in it will probably die a helluva lot quicker than a body with one hole in it.

That's not the way it works, though.  In order to protect the fragile psyches of the gunmen, only one firearm is loaded with a bullet and the rest with dummies.  Each member is, presumably, a highly-trained marksman--unlikely to miss by more than an inch from fifty paces away with a military-issue rifle.  Thus, when the prisoner is offed, no member of the firing squad is quite sure who fired the fatal shot.  No doubt, forensics could easily determine the source of the live round, but why would anyone sacrifice the luxury of anonymity?

Silly question.

Plenty of things to grapple with as I fight my way through this thunderstorm that appears to be sneaking up on us quicker than the meteorologists predicted, and that barrel of diesel gas is still sitting outside the building.  It's been two weeks now, and I hate--as I always do--to consider the metaphorical implications of such a thing.  The fucker is a mistake waiting to happen.  A stray cigarette butt.  The ricochet of a bullet off the brick.  Who knows?  But something is going to blow the thing up, and my suspicions are that this conflagration will be cosmically coupled by another unfortunate incendiary accident.

Whom any of this involves, I know not.  I've just been stricken with an odd desire to self-preserve, though, and I am obligated to think this unfamiliar sensation must be a dark omen from the Scavenger Bird.

Or perhaps I'm just being ridiculous.