B: 3/28/03

Work Diary, 3/28/03

We had a blizzard last week, and then several days of sunshine. The
plow trucks pushed the snow into miniature mountains all over the
parking lot. They've melted down now into tiny icebergs, stagnant on
the watery gray asphalt. It's a sad scene. I'd like to be an ant for
just a few moments to get a different perspective.

For two-and-a-half days I was stuck in a friend's apartment.
Fortunately he lives across the street from my office, so I wasn't
forced to make the dangerous trek home. We watched horrible daytime
television and smoked too many cigarettes. On Wednesday night, during
the elimination round of "American Idol," the network cut in with news
of the war, slicing off the last fifteen minutes of the show. This
meant we missed watching the poor sap who was being sent home, and for
a while we grumbled about why the network couldn't wait fifteen minutes
to start broadcasting the carnage. Later, thank goodness, we recognized
the absurdity in our lack of priorities and got down to the more
serious business of "shock and awe" and "friendly fire."

Still, how strange to watch the reporters as they face the camera,
their skin a dirty green from the night-vision lenses while bombs burst
in the air behind them. I'd like to think they're a brave bunch,
traveling with the soldiers like that, but in the end the cynic in me
puts it all down to ratings and Pulitzers. And why should journalists
be any different in that regard? Business is booming, so to speak.
Invest while you can.

In my front yard, left over from last summer, are several piles of
dirt. We'd meant to turn them into flowerbeds, but then a drought
struck and the work stopped. I can't say I was disappointed; I was
tired of shoveling dirt in the hot sun. For Halloween, I noticed the
dirt piles resembled little graves, so I decorated them with some
plastic skulls that lit up. Very cute, very thematic - the neighbors
loved it. Now, since the start of the war, I have a "NO IRAQ WAR" stuck
into the dirt piles, and it's no longer very cute. The neighbors seem
to have forgotten the little skulls, and with no sense of irony
whatsoever, have performed tiny acts of vandalism to my house. One
morning we found the outside water tap running, as it had been all
night, a violation of the drought-driven watering restrictions. Last
night we found the metal rocker flung off the front porch, onto the
dirt piles. I considered removing the anti-war sign, worried that the
vandalism might escalate, but I am, after all, an American. If I can't
say what I want without fear of reprisal, why - according to my own
president - are my fellow citizens in Iraq?

I'm more afraid for my sister, who is in the National Guard but who
hasn't been activated (I love that term, "activated". It's as if the
soldiers are robots just waiting to be switched on, which I suppose
they are, in a way). But besides her status in the reserves, my sister
has moved in with her new boyfriend, an Iranian doctor. "Persian," he
calls himself, to lessen the blow, and I don't blame him.
Iranian?Iraqi?it's often the same to a population that prides itself in
being a great melting pot while force-feeding homogenized milk to the
masses. And while my sister's boyfriend speaks with an educated Texan
accent (if you can imagine such a thing, given our current president),
I'm still waiting for the call in the middle of the night, the report
of a beating or shooting. My sister is trained to break a man's arm in
four different ways, but not even that can protect her - or her
boyfriend - against current public sentiment.

So, tonight on my way home I will stop by the mega-video-mart and pick
up a couple of movies, maybe even some ice cream, which comes
hermetically sealed against tampering. I'll be driving my imported car,
of course, the one that runs on relatively cheap gas. Before I pull
something out of the freezer for dinner, I'll run through the
two-hundred or so channels I have on both of my televisions, or I might
play on one of the three computers I have. I'll unload the dishwasher
eventually, and wait for my partner to arrive in his also-imported late
model vehicle (I can always tell he's home by the sound of the
automated garage door). We'll sit under the awning of our porch, which
overlooks our neighbors' homes, drinking French bottled water and
discussing our upcoming trip to Mexico. We've almost decided on which
resort to visit.

And we'll try very, very hard to ignore that somewhere, somehow, our
way of life is being guaranteed.