2003 has been the year of Shock And Awe, and for this, I’m glad to see it gone.

It was a year of smallness, amplified. All the souls in leadership, wallowing in their painfully finite perspective, waging war and cheering the war on.

It was a year of bigness, too. The new Second Superpower exerted itself around the world, protesting US foreign policy. This second superpower is the flip-side of corporate globalism: It’s a social globalism which enables people from all walks of life all over the world to find out what’s going on, and also to do something about it, acting on their conscience. This is an important step for the causes of humanity and peace, and while the tail-end of 2001 saw this transglobal collective expressing grief around the world, in 2003 it came pretty close to stopping a war. That’s big, and it will only get bigger.

The stock and job markets were bears, as were the Love, Compassion, and Peace markets. Indexes dropped staggeringly. Ignorance was up, and Being Led Around By The Nose was at an all-time high. Cultural and economic indicators paint a picture of bellicose, self-absorbed America ready to implode, while it films itself with a hand-held digicam for sale in the overseas entertainment market. The problem being that our wacky shenanigans aren’t seen as entertaining any more.

But I’m not cynical about the future. I think we’ll figure out how to quit acting like teenagers (in a collective sense), before our own version of Rome burns. Our nation is going to shape up in the next election cycle. We’re going to start talking about what’s really wrong around here, and we’re going to see some action along the lines of not only fixing those problems, but creating the framework for a new future.

I seriously believe this will happen, or at least, will start to happen. I think we’ll be infused with vision. As a nation we’ll start to remember what it means to be wise, and in that moment we’ll also start to remember what it means to be humble. I think we’ll learn to forgive ourselves for the hurt we’ve done the world, rather than continuing to try and justify it.

I think the current dire spiritual state of this nation will be, for lack of a better word, healed. It won’t feel good, but it will happen.

Finished ‘Quicksilver’ this morning. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

Since it’s a three-volume set, and it advertises this fact prominently, it can logically be forgiven it’s long descent into petering-out at the end, but dayum! I read 900+ pages, and this is the only satisfaction I get? The twin images of Eliza giving birth and Daniel having his operation was a clever (but not ‘ingenious,’ har!) device, but hardly enough to end on. About half way through the third section, I realized that Stephenson was getting bored with this premise, himself. He needed a break. So he wrote Eliza’s story as letters to Leibniz and described a Protestant revolution in England formented by one of the main characters of the story in passing, as if Waterhouse had attended a tedious dinner party that wasn’t worth describing.

And where the hell was Jack Shaftoe for the last third of the book? Sheesh. Shaftoe’s hallucinations and general unreality were the glue that held the more tedious parts of the story together, but for the last interminably tedious couple-hundred pages we don’t hear a peep from him.

Neal, next time you’re bored with the project, just stop writing. Make it four 600-page books instead of three 900-page books. Capiche?

I’m still with the Cycle, but the next book better rock my world.

I lied. No pics of Leavenworth. I got there too late to take any decent ones, and I spent my time in a bookstore.

It was a lovely drive, though. There must have been a snow storm in the early AM hours, because the snow was still happy and fluffy through all the higher elevations. The stretch between Gold Bar and Skykomish was especially noteworthy, with the sideways late-afternoon sun putting the snow-covered trees in deep relief.

The road was icy, but no biggie, except that espresso-and-heavy-metal-fueled type-A ski kids from the city kept tailgating me coming down through Stevens Pass in the dark, on the return trip. Ok, YOU have the 4WD SUV with the snowboard rack and the Thule photon torpedo locker and the retina-burning fog lamps. I’M in a front wheel drive station wagon… do ya MIND??

I would like to have a 4WD, though, if for no other reason than the road off to the north from Index was closed, but if I’d taken it anyway there’d be some spectacular pictures of that spectacular valley on this ‘blog. People live back there, even during the winter, so the road has to be at least passable…

Anyway. The forecast is that the temp won’t go above freezing until tomorrow afternoon. This counts as a freak of nature in the temperate Puget sound region…

Trippy web toy du jour:

tinygrow

Thanks to the goodwill of my friend M., there’s now a new battery in my car.

Thanks to the goodwill of whoever makes the weather do what it does, it’s a clear cold blue day.

When you put these two things together, that means it’s time to drive across the mountains to Leavenworth and see the Christmas decorations, instead of spending the day doing laundry. Pictures on return.

I think I’m not going to get to Las Vegas for New Year’s Eve.

Warren Ellis’ Die Puny Humans has an interesting set of mini-essays on the coming year, by various underground (and not so underground) luminaries, writers, artists, futurists, so forth.

Worth looking at.

Ok, so through bloggerheads I get a link to Satan’s Laundromat, which in turn links me to In Passing, which is quite amusing and hi-larious.

Now, if In Passing linked to bloggerheads, we’d have an infinite loop.

I haven’t had much to say of late. I feel a general psychic bedragglement, a sort of apathy that comes from isolation.

It’s all part of the yin and yang of being me. Too much stimulation leads to a psychic overwhelm, and too little stimulation leads to bedragglement. The balance point in the middle is very difficult to maintain, so we’re stuck with a see-saw pattern.

I’m not really attached to it, either. I try not to be attached to the overwhelming feelings when I feel them, but they’re kind of, you know… overwhelming. Certainly, though, I’ve developed the ability to have a relatively quick recovery time, and I’m more able to modulate the causes in the first place, so the out-of-control-ness factor isn’t quite as big as it used to be. But I’m also not attached to being depressed. I mean, try to understand how that works, ye my neurologically-typical readers.

The liberating thing about being depressed is that you finally reach a point of not really caring that you’re depressed, and then you’re free to pursue whatever is that you need to pursue. Right now, I need to pursue Las Vegas, Nevada, where a certain friend of mine has a really excellent performance gig that I want to support. I also need to pursue images of snow in the Utah desert at five megapixels per. (Mapquest tells me it’s a much shorter drive if I go via Idaho and Utah, rather than Oregon and California. I’d much rather see California, so maybe on the way back.)

Josh Marshall sez, among other things:

Is it really reasonable to expect that the values which undergird liberal democracy in America will be effectively spread abroad by the most illiberal people in America? It’s a good question. Think about it.

About five years ago or so, when I had moved to Berkeley, the winter solstice came.

Now, if you’re someone with religious and spiritual and philosophical proclivities such as myself, and you’re in Berkeley on the solstice day, you’re going to do what I did:

Your friend comes and knocks on your door and wakes you up before sunrise, and you get in a tiny car with three other people you don’t really know all that well. You navigate your way through the huge houses on the west side of the Berkeley hills, getting lost a couple times in the process. Finally you find that state park the name of which I forget, and you drive through it. You try not to cringe too much on the winding hillside road, peering out the tiny rear window of this two-door econobox.

And finally you come to a place on a hillside called Inspiration Point. And there, on the hillside, is a parking area and some picnic tables. And crowding the parking area and picnic tables, are hundreds of people. A ruffian band of neopagans, wiccans, spiritualists, new age wanderers, drum circle people, bondage people, tribal self-modification people, and people generally wearing black and denying that they live in the twentieth century. And some hapless joggers who just came there to run along the firebreak.

There’s a band of morris dancers, wearing their finery. There’s a Green Man, covered head-to-toe with tiny foot-long tassles of green fabric, who the dancers insist is invisible. The dancers are trying to make a space in which to dance, because, well, that’s what this is really all about. They’re going to dance in the new sun.

The sky is brightening. When you first got there, the crowded throng was engulfed in twilight mystery. Now, however, the world looks much more solar, open. Much less claustrophobic. The sun still hasn’t risen, however. Directly to the east is another range of hills, and from this vantage point, the sun won’t have risen until it pokes up from behind the very tallest peak in the range. Inspiration Point is, by accident, a solar observatory.

People are drinking coffee. Loved ones are taking cups of coffee over to the dancers, who relish the warmth. It’s not all that cold, but they’re wearing breeches. Your friend approaches you with a cup. “Here, drink some of this. It’s reeeeeeeally good.” She smiles, and you remember why you were seduced out to this side of the continent.

You share the cup. It’s true: It’s reeeeeeally good.

The natives are getting restless. Judging by the pink clouds and blue sky, the sun should, by all rights, be considered as having risen. But it hangs behind the far hilltop, hiding, playing a little joke on us. A guy with a drum starts banging a rhythm on it, chanting and then banging and chanting again and so forth: “Hey sun!/Come on up!/Start up/The fucking new year!/It’s fucking COLD/And we need some warmth!/Hey sun!/We all came out/To see your new clothes/To hear your new song/And it’s fucking COLD!/So come on up!/And warm us up!/This coffee SUCKS!” ..and so forth. Finally, when he realizes the sun is just about to rise from behind the hill, he finds a relatively graceful way to stop singing his song.

The sun is a brilliant corona around the top of the hill. The silver lining minus the cloud, and plus a hill, and minus the silver, and plus the gold, if you follow. It is the shadow cast by god. The top of the sun’s disc is almost peeking up over the hill, and the people are working themselves up into a frenzy. It’s hard to believe that so much excitement could be generated by a sunrise; it happens every day, after all. In fact, there is no such thing as a day without a sunrise, by definition.

You’re thinking about all that kind of crap when the sun finally envelopes the top of the hill! It’s up! Another end to darkness! The mass of people cheer and hoot and holler and bang drums and play musical instruments! The dancers take their mark and welcome the sun the way the sun has been welcomed for generations, millenia, as long as people have noticed the changing seasons.

Years later you’ll remember that one guy and his drum, pleading for the sun to rise on a new year, but you’ll utterly forget what the morris dance was like, except that it was like every other morris dance you’ve seen.