medicated

The head pounding set in Saturday evening. I knew something was coming, my whole body felt warm with a slight ache. Sunday and Monday are a complete blur. I didn't leave the apartment, I didn't eat, and my thoughts quickly became sporadic and non-sensical. I cursed the juice company Tampico for profiting off my illness. Eventually, it was only slipping and sliding: slipping in and out of consiousness and sliding blanket-wrapped across the floor trying keep myself in the slanted rectangles of the sun's afternoon window-rays.

The sun set and I was irrationally concerned that I would be unable to warm myself through the night. I needed to call someone! tell them that I wasn't thinking straight, that I was vomiting, and that I felt like crying. After maybe thirty minutes I managed to located the keys and proper change. But then I thought about having to walk all the way outside and around the corner to the phone, would anything be worth that! I chose to stay inside and mumble. "I can't breathe" "I can't go to the campo" "My eye's will turn yellow" "I won't have health to go to France" "I'll never see Africa again."



restless night


This morning Wes was home and I was awake for the first time. I told him about this headache.



He gave me a green pill.




With my glasses off I sat and watched the clear-day, bright-brick colors of El Alto jump in and out of the window. I watched Wes play legos with the Baker's trilingual child: english, spanish, and three-year-old speech (a language that is rarely directed toward any one person, completely devoid of vocabulary and syntax but amazingly expressive by means of intonation alone).

Within the hour my brain felt no pain.

I posited a scientific theory. The green pill probably made my heart beat a little faster than it needed, sending excess oxygen to my head, numbing and buzzing the pain centers of my brain . . . or somesuch tumbling of physiologic dominos. But I quickly rejected it. The remedy must have been those thoughts of loved ones induced by child's play and sun colors.

The always consistant arc of Dave Weber's smile.

The broad stance and non-self-confidence confidence of Ethan Van Drunen giving smiles in exchange for life promotions.

Doug Harbin's genuine enthusiasm and child-like fascination with the bassoon.

My sister with bones loose in their skin, swept up in the current, sharing time and washing dishes.

uummm...

Bush in India: Just Not Welcome
by Arundhati Roy

On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that's getting curiouser and curiouser.

For Bush's March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was considered a security nightmare. So now we're into Plan Three: President George Bush speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

Ironic, isn't it, that the only safe public space for a man who has recently been so enthusiastic about India's modernity should be a crumbling medieval fort?

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush's audience will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human beings, who in India go under the category of "eminent persons." They're mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.

So what's going to happen to George W. Bush? Will the gorillas cheer him on? Will the gibbons curl their lips? Will the brow-antlered deer sneer? Will the chimps make rude noises? Will the owls hoot? Will the lions yawn and the giraffes bat their beautiful eyelashes? Will the crocs recognize a kindred soul? Will the quails give thanks that Bush isn't traveling with Dick Cheney, his hunting partner with the notoriously bad aim? Will the CEOs agree?

Oh, and on March 2, Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat. (Only recently we had the Burmese dictator General Than Shwe, no shrinking violet himself.) But when Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.

We really would prefer that he didn't.

It is not in our power to stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimize the extent of our outrage. Nothing the happy newspapers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.

[Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize-winning author of 'The God of Small Things' and 'The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire', lives in New Delhi, India.]

Heather, I coming back

Feeling Fucked Up

Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs -

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumal and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the wole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing