Future Plans

Jets boom overhead. Cloudy night sky masks their lights, but you can feel them. Another bombing run. We're getting used to this. Running to shelter is less chaotic. More courtesy before the shrapnel flies. Maybe being bombed out of imperialism is indeed civilizing. Worked for Japan. Who knew it would translate stateside?

Then again, I'm Mr. Glass Half Full. Being an apathetic people addicted to violence, it naturally takes violence to shake us from apathy. But I see it from an urban angle. I suspect suburbanites aren't as philosophically adaptive as city dwellers seem. The bombing may fuck with their rural heads the same way US B-52s shook Khmer Rouge minds. I hope not. Should average Americans lock, load and hunt, aerial assaults will be the least of our worries.

Sitting on the crowded Lex Line Spring St. platform, sipping water, looking around. Scattered nerves, but everyone's resigned to another round. The subway's held up remarkably well. I hear the lines in outer Brooklyn and Queens have minimal damage. Manhattan's the main target. Yet our tormentors have been very selective in their bombing.

They've spared the older buildings, the Empire State still standing. But they relish shattering the new glass towers. Reprisal and critique in one stroke. However, their razing of Times Square was pointless and brutal. Scratch that as a future tourist trap. Somehow the Paper of Record survived. Collaborators or cockroaches?

"Hey Perrin!"

Walls shake. Concrete dust falls from the ceiling.

"Perrin!"

A comic I know waves above cowered heads.

"What do you want?"

"You doing The Lantern next week?"

Massive vibration. Falling chunks.

"I'm on the list."

Several heads spring up, look at me critically.

"OK. Stand by."

Gotta dry clean this jacket.