rome is burning!!

You know, a friend of mine supposedly forecasted that "the world is gonna end Tuesday." Well, Tuesday has officially come and gone and the world is still here, but y'know, it is taking something of a beating right now. It's a weird feeling, this feeling of disarray - no one is quite sure what to make of it, how this has all happened, and quite what to do about it - nor what manner of times lie ahead. We kind of follow forward with quiet trepidation, the doomsayers among us clamoring the loudest, those with our delicate balance to protect just toeing the line, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but not so expectantly that we've battened down the hatches and locked up for the long winter, quiet yet.

The media has a nasty little habit of trying to drum up panic, but I see that as more reflective of human nature, really. Still, these are some unprecedented times we live in, with layers upon layers upon layers of - well, no one knows what's on the top and what's on the bottom anymore. Sometimes it feels like society is a very carefully-constructed house of cards. All these rules in place, intertwining and slipping and sliding all around one another, like some Eastern Traffic Pattern - but all it takes is for one sizeable-enough monkey wrench to full in place and gum up the works, and then it just all falls to shit.

Anyway, the natural order is kind of building up and breaking down, and the point of culture/society is to do that pretty much incrementally - not stop/start/stop/start with the slow determinedness of nature, but rather advance, then spread, then advance from more fronts, then spread some more. It's quite interesting really. Sure there'll be some time when that finds some weakness exposed as well I suppose, but it's hard to measure as compared to the regular patterns we see in nature, or at least that is what we like to tell ourselves. The ante just gets raised..

Anyway as I was saying, who knows what's to come. So the money will be all gone? Jobs disappear? People get hungry, lose their homes, submit to desperation - rioting, crime, strife? Never mind the problems on the world stage (they've been expressing themselves here and there to certain degrees) we have a big question mark about to slam into the Homeland of Tomorrow? The rest of the world is already definitely reeling from all this Stock Market BS.

Anyway, things continue with their momentum, all things, good and bad. Life goes on, as it doesn't know how to do anything else. We just take it a day at a time, and hope that those who we've placed in charge are smart enough to steer the course..