"Tea Party" Label Creates Election-Year Controversy
Editorial views on this week's Oakland "tea party" controversy and its broader political implications in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections
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Isaac Asimov "The Last Trump" from the Earth is Room Enough Collection
Discussion of post-apocalyptic Sartrean & nuclear age themes in "The Last Trump." What divides heaven from hell (blue skies from pain?) Etheriel, Archangel Gabriel, Ahriman (Satan), God all make appearances.
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Potting III

Shoo, shoo, shoo went the outside lamplights through the car-cabin, an imaginary whoosh passing between my ears with each momentary flash of illumination. I had come to, I supposed--I was unsure if I had actually been out--somewhere outside the city, for the only light I could perceive aside from the thin aisleway indicators spaced along the floor came now in rhythmic waves from the blackness beyond the car. I could have been the only passenger on a doomed spacecraft heading out past the heliopause for all I could see. The window glass calmly reflected what little there was to see inside the car, just the motionless rows of high-backed, dark cloth seats and the wan shadow of my sack blipping furtively on the opposite wall. Even the train itself seemed still; we moved, I tell you, and fast too if the rate at which the lights passed through was any indication, but only in some strange suspense. A less pleasant iteration of the stomach sadness passed through and beyond my gut, recognizing and deferring to the weary brittleness it saw there. I closed my eyes, not really by choice, and the whooshes quieted once more. We'd pick it up at the airport, I thought, not without resignation. It was late. It was groggy outside, inside, everywhere. I sprawled. And thank goodness no one had yet seen me in my pathetic droopiness and likely no one would. This was good. I already couldn't be sure if I'd be awake enough to notice.
Drag, drag, drag went my soul down the moving walkway that was the only modern-ish thing at this drabby little regional airport out at the edge of the commuter belt, the terminus of the city's longest, windiest rail line. The big airport was maybe fifty miles away, away on the other side of the province; the only walkers here were budget-conscious young travelers and drunks looking to sleep off their sins on a fifty-minute ride out to the sticks. The place was small and close, more like a neighborhood YMCA circa 1950 than a major metropolitan airport. Its cheaply marbled floors looked more like polished cork than precious stone, the beige ambient light they threw off coloring the eggy unadorned walls in what had to be a deliberate effort to turn the stomach. This was a nursing home, a third-tier hospital, a Boys & Girls Club, a middle school, a whatever--not an airport, a beacon, an ambassador to the world!
The stomach...the stomach. It was true that I didn't feel one hundred percent great. It was sour still, as it had been before, but now it was more, and deeper--a pressure, a weakness in the bowels that triggered unpleasant memories of sick days and couch lays and sudden losses of will, control and dignity. It was ungood, poor, a bad situation. Walking was not yet dangerous but with every step I could feel the content-shiftings which years of experience had taught me to beware. To conserve movement I leaned against the railing of the mover, hopping over the breaks with clenched precision. It didn't hurt, exactly, but there was an eerie feeling of simultaneous volume and not-volume that threatened to derail the fragile equilibrium I'd managed to zero in on since finding myself alone and awake, somehow, on a motionless stationed train below a second-rate single-terminal aviation center. I'll admit it: I was afraid. And I wasn't sure how to proceed. The line in front of me stretched almost to the vanishing point, which in this world of low ceilings and monochrome scheming wasn't as far as it could have been but certainly it wasn't anything to sneeze at either. I pawed at the ground, bit my lip. I shifted. It shifted. There was nothing more of the ambiguous sour feeling, only the knowledge of what had become. This line (I settled in, wondering whence everyone came--certainly not my train), this building, this nation-state...I was small & getting smaller.

Isaac Asimov "Living Space" from the Earth is Room Enough Collection
Isaac Asimov story from Earth Is Room Enough. Multiple Earths theory, solar system colonization, extraterrestrial intelligence all discussed.
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Potting II

The joy! The buttery ham and butterier croissant-like material slid down my hungry gullet like fine-grained leaf litter down a sluiceway in a flash flood, coating the moist walls with sticky juice along the way. Mercy. They used real butter for this stuff here, probably the lowest grade of the low but still measurably better than that empty hydro-oil that reigns stateside. It occurred to me that I should thank the powers that be here for whatever generous subsidies they must extend their noble domestic dairymen so that beef might continue to populate the pocket pastures along the densely-populated tourist-travel lines. Of a piece with the soybeanmen's subsidies in America, I supposed, if not for precisely the same reason, and this flicker of wisdom directed a stomach-sad shiver of a particular confident intensity on a wending course from my ego through to my bowels. I felt heavier already, stronger, and a bit out of place with this brightening aura and no one to share it with or even show it to. The last morsels plopped down and I closed my eyes, leaned back into the void-railing, pushed the cold unfeeling of the unadorned steel away with only moderate difficulty and let the buzz wash over me once more. The spot!
This was the dead spot between the last and first trains now so I took some laps around the McDonald's level, past a lately-stirring Starbucks in fact, and back up to the transport levels where in my sharper state I was able to find one of those spaghetti maps blown up, backlit and available for study. S7 or S5, either one, looked to head out to the airport, but there was some by-the-way kind of fine print whose meaning I couldn't begin to guess at next to the S5 line as it neared the airport. That and its faint grayness, in contrast to the S7's robust magenta, put it out of my mind as an option; I'd been stuck on the outskirts of unfamiliar big cities before on account of my misreading transit maps and at this point in the game that kind of miscue would have cost me my flight and my next day. Looked like I was an S7 man this morning, and as if on cue the little dotscreen above the escalator--running now--leading up to the top level where the aboveground express trains stopped flashed "S7 - 04.48" and then a word that I took to mean "AIRPORT". The shivers of excitement had subsided by now as my stomach continued the work of breaking the meatwich down into the gloop from whence it came. I felt alert, even caffeinated, a weird short excitement building in my chest and radiating out to my extremities like a fever as I rode up through the void. The sour feeling was back too, better-defined and centered on the lower gut like I'd gulped down the rest of the cup and looked to pour more. It wasn't unpleasant, not exactly, but I missed the stomach sadness and I'd been standing for long enough that I craved a warm cushioned seat on one of the long trains heading south even if it meant waving goodbye to it for the foreseeable future. I needed to watch my sack, not worry about the vicissitudes of my weary body. The escalator was cresting. Ahead, great parallel slabs of concrete curved into the middle distance. Immediately to my right, one string of a dozen or more cars followed it out beyond the rim of the station roof. "S7 - 04.48" shone in soft yellow from digitized displays in its windows, two to a car; a more permanent "S7" designation, painted and backlit, overhung the track to eliminate any confusion. This was me. I approached an open door, warm satiny air beckoning me in. Left, right: the car was empty. Phone check: 04.45. Sack down, feet up; three seats to a man. The joy was gone. So was the sourness. So was the caffeinated nervousness I'd welcomed earlier. Little remained. I sat, waited. A voice in the distance announced something in bored tones; a gruff voice cursed in sharp tones nearby announced the presence of people outside the car. My eyes must have closed at some point because I saw no shadows to corroborate this. But it didn't matter anyhow for presently there was a whoosh as the doors shut, the ambiance muffled in on itself and the lights beyond my eyelids dimmed to useless levels. Then there was the imperceptible slide backward and we were (I was?) off.

Potting I

We said our goodbyes on the platform way up above that weird unlit park-plaza that looked like a DMZ/no-man's land thing stuck in the middle of the city even during the day and drifted away from one another to our respective trains. The three Gerlicht boys moved confidently with their respective female hangers-on down a level and under the double track to reemerge on the westbound side, waving ironically over the bored crowns of the dates. I smiled, barely, already half-turned away towards wherever I was supposed to be going. The rumpled foldmap I clutched at in my pocket was almost useless, a wild spaghetti rainbow covered in laughably fine print made more absurd by the crunchy multisyllabic all-caps words they spelled out. I knew where I was and I knew where I was going but the paper was too small to fully express the tangle of lines meeting any one of the several stations which formed the city's main transit hub here in this handsome central district and the blow-up sidebar that was supposed to help in these situations must have been torn off in a drinking accident sometime earlier in the week. Frustrating, frustrating, and they made no effort to heat these above-ground venues with their high ceilings. But there was nowhere to be until sunup, and no one to help anyway at this late hour (not that anyone would have been particularly keen to), so I wandered heavily down one of the criscrossing escalators, immobile now, that bridged the huge empty spaces at the core of this leviathan towards some neon lights shining out into the void from the third level down--and past them, still down, and though there was no one around and I could almost touch a sister escalator that would have brought me to the correct level my knees buckled when I looked into the gap and saw the miniature potted plants way down below and I sighed and proceeded, a little heavier, to the bottom, where I found the correct riser and began to partially retrace my drudges. The trip back up would have been measured in minutes no matter how slowly or quickly I'd moved; coming on top of the cold, weariness, isolation and of course the unforced escalator error it threatened to continue through the grey-sky arrival of the first commuters from parts unpaved.
When it ended and I stood at the top, sucking air, a dormant McDonald's, so quiet inside that the buzzing of its fluorescents echoed off the escalator web, looked to be my reward. Some scruffy men in coveralls waited in complete silence for the lone counter employee to return from the washroom; one impertinently sipped coffee from a steel mug, mischief in his eyes. A long clang, a metal-on-metal reverberation of the sort one hears often wherever groggy kitchen employees work graveyard shifts, emitted from deep within the prep area and played itself out into the void. Buzz again. I felt the tingly stomach sadness that one feels when nearly alone in big, quiet, well-lit spaces, the feeling that replaces fear when all the sightlines are clear and there's no immediate sense of danger other than the vague uncertainty of unfamiliar surroundings uncoded by noise and activity. The cold magnified the feeling, which I had come to enjoy at times as long as it didn't come too frequently (in which case it lost its novelty and shaded towards anxiety) and so I stood reading the useless menu from out in the big hall, a stray shiver of chilly excitement whispering its way through my lumpy insides. There was something else too, a sour sensation like when the first gulp of coffee finds its way down to the lower digestives after a big fatty meal the day before and makes its disagreeable presence felt, but I'd been there too many times before, especially after a rough night like tonight, to pay much attention. And it certainly wasn't going to get in the way of the snack I'd finally settled on, an overstuffed meat croissant that fairly sweated grease through the menu board. The line had disappeared, the men filtering silently past and up to the trains. It was to happen now, in the last hour of serenity before the din filled the hall once again, if it was to happen at all.

Laustt

Feb 16
Trained to Rome, switched and took a faster one down the coast to Napoli. The terrain became drigher and more mountainous, with several long tunnels under fingers of craggy elevation jutting out into a sea that generally remained within view. Napoli was large and grimier than anywhere else we'd been on the continent. The bulk of the city sprawled laterally along a gently curving series of hillsides which swept down to the Medshore, vaguely (chaotically) centered about an aging, unimpressive port complex. The geographical & topographical similarity to coastal SoCal was immediately clear; culturally, of course...well, some things are better left unsaid. Brash humanity infused the streets and plazas: everything for sale and not a pricetag in sight. The city and regional buses were packed full of poor dark disoriented immigrants trying to make their way northward or at least into the hills away from the portside bazaars; increasing elevation seemed to reduce the alacrity with which the diesel filth settled on everything. Compared to Rome? Unfair. Shittier cars, shabbier construction, no pretensions of grandeur. No pretensions at all, actually, judging by the trash overflowing into the streets at the busier corners. But who could worry about practical matters like garbage collection with that beautiful conical volcano poking out of the smog across the bay? Nothing would matter to Napolitanos anymore anyway if the thing erupted; surely the city's elders teased their grandchildren with vivid depictions of pyroclastic clouds streaming across the water to catch them in their beds. Visited an "authentic Napoli pizza ristorante" for dinner, sidestepping some trash piles, and moved on to a cheap ripoff of an Irish pub (7oz beer glasses?) called O'Malley's for nightcaps.

Feb 17
Took a commuter train around the base of Vesuvius to Pompeii. It's real! The town was larger than expected; we walked for about ten minutes at a leisurely pace, inspecting the ruins of homes and businesses, and then looked at a map to find we'd moved about a sixteenth of the way across the site. In terms of size this was the Roman equivalent of Nashville, one of us quipped, not Sadbackwater, Tenn. (Someone suppressed a chuckle and looked guilty.) Saw some bodies in ash casts, peaceful except for the dog contorted in such agony it was difficult to look for very long...had the corpse not been encased in Plexiglas someone long ago would certainly have taken a brick to it. Yeesh, we agreed. But we bounced out and spent most of the rest of the day traveling. Reached Berlin around 11 and met up with Anna and Christine again. Looked for bars in Friedrichshain; found a quiet cocktail space half below ground and ordered a few whatever beers in pint bottles (praises sung accordingly). Asked the waitress where to find a more lively estab and after spitting in our drinks deliberately, looking deep into each set of eyes as she moved clockwise about the table, she directed us to a place called The Matrix, which squatted under an elevated-train station in a dingy riverside industrial park. Highlight (only): the good-looking Teutons dancing with themselves on a depopulated dance floor. They're paid to dance in place like that and they aren't allowed to dance with one another, flatted Christine with the blase certainty of a female who's spent time in the back office of a gentleman's club, and-what-do-you-think-about-that. We left presently.