It starts. I visited the White House in my dream last night, and took repast at a nearby tourist cafe where our hapless waiter was none other than George W. Bush. He was unable to get my order correct (admittedly it was a confusing one: some sort of mushroom flatbread or pizza which inexplicably came with a sandwich; I wanted a reuben, but without mushrooms and with turkey), and I took it out on him rather meanly. I felt bad though, to be so abusive of George.

When I woke up I had "Know Your Onion!" pulsing through my synapses, so I fumbled to slip in "Oh, Inverted World!" and advance to track four, before I put on my glasses. Before the track finished though, Rebecca came in and commanded me to turn the tuner to NPR, where I was greeted once again by the Porky Pig-esque speech patterns of Mr. Bush, whose only coherent sentence this time was "Terrorist attacks against our country will not stand." As if it were a summer sci-fi blockbuster or an April fools joke, the newscasters had announced only minutes before that two planes had crashed into the twin towers of the world trade center. As we listened, transfixed, and squabbled over uneaten banana halves, reports came in of a fire in the White House and a bombing of the Pentagon (as a correspondent in the Pentagon bantered on: "Well, I didn't notice anything when I came in a few minutes ago, but now I think, yes, there is a public address announcement being made, and we are I think being asked, yes, to evacuate the building...") The news passed without remark through a quiz and a lesson on les adjectifs, but by the time of 11:20 syntax a murmur passed through the room before the start of class, and the introductory discussion of generative grammar included the several syntactically ambiguous ways to diagram the sentence: "The students told the teacher about the crash in NY." On the way from Kohlberg to McCabe (by this time the story had evolved into a Travolta-thriller worthy saga of seven hijacked 747s, several of which have yet to reach their targets) I passed through a thronged Parrish parlors where a TV set flashed live images of destruction, and a crowd outside the McCabe doors frantically muttering about the NSA. As many of my e-mails touched on the news as constituted responses to this weeks Moby-Dick reading.

It's endearing how this campus responds to events of national import such as those of today, or the post-election shenanigans of last year. There is a sense of intense concern and valiant effort to remain abreast of affairs and determinedly sympathize with the victims, and yet these issues don't affect the school itself in any concrete way. The bubble remains unbroken, even when the outside world makes enough noise to have us pressed up against the glass peering out in semblance of solidarity. Because everyone else is on edge to hear the latest breaking news, I don't have to; I know it will come out in distilled form in a matter of hours or days, and I can synthesize it more harmoniously. Besides, I was one of the first to hear the news, thanks to Rebecca's alarm-radio. For all you readers out there, I'll keep you posted. Or you could just visit CNN or something.

lucked out, found my favorite records lying in wait at the Birmingham mall.
the songs that I heard, the occasional book were the only fun I ever took.