The View from the Top

Earthquakes are shattering the calm and Michigan State is fouling up the Final Four. It’s only a matter of time before things start falling off the shelves.

It’s another rainy day in the void. Bad omens and bad moons are rising up, trying to take control of the situation, which is chaotic at best and open to furious interlopers with evil intentions. The picking is prime, fellas. Get out your baseball bats and shelter the children.

The Bad Big 10 is the best conference in the nation. The Big East, who’s won the last two, is nowhere to be found. But before you start bemoaning the state of the real basketball conferences, consider that the last non-ACC or non-Big East school to win it all was Michigan State, back in 2000. So the Big 10 isnt just a football conference plus Indiana anymore. It’s a real powerhouse, and the odds-on favorite to take home the title this year – they’ve got a 50-50 chance, which are my kind of odds.

If you werent parked in front of the television on Saturday and Sunday, you missed the best weekend in the history of the tournament, and you should be the designated flood-watcher for your hometown, standing on the riverbanks with a ruler and a cell phone. The only team that doesn’t deserve to be dancing in St. Louis is, clearly, UNC, but their time will come, very soon, and they will cry when it comes, like punished children who don’t understand.

But the bottom line is that I was right about 3 out of the 4 remaining teams, and that doesn’t bode well for avoiding armageddon, since I’m so rarely right about these things. That is another omen, and it’s time to be afraid.

I’ve written thousands of words in these past four weeks. I’m trying to keep up with my determined progress but it hasn’t been easy. Also, it hasn’t always been successful or of high quality. But I’m going to keep going, if only for my faithful readers.

I’m thinking of cutting my daily goal from 1000 to 500 words. This will certainly make it easier for me to keep on keeping on, and I’m in the mood to make things easy on myself. Life is full of betrayal, though, and I’m wary of betraying myself just at the moment when the going gets tough. After all, entire tomes have been written using only cliches. And they’ve sold well. So before I give up on my big-time goals, I should at least consider giving in a bit, if only for the time being, while I straighten myself out and pull myself together.

I don’t know what the answers are. I know that Illinois will win the NCAA Championship and that meteors arent going to fall on my head. I’m pretty sure that most of the people I pass on the streets arent precisely determined to undermine everything I stand for. I know that a lot of things arent as evil as they appear, but I also know that true evil is where you least expect it to be, and that it’s always good to be careful.

What I fear most is that the most destuctive evil for me lies within the words I type, that somehow they will undo me, directly or indirectly. That I am unwittingly laying out my own path of destruction, that years from now faceless robotic researchers will see this destruction as if it were a preventable, predictable element of my existence. It’s true that I’m too close to myself to be able to see this happening, if it is indeed happening, but that doesn’t change the anger I have for it, or its certainty, or, tragically, the fact that I’ll continue on this road despite my worst fears.

I have to continue to work on my narratives, that much I know. Because these reflective essays are hastening the bad effects I have on myself. I have to find another character to kill off.

- posted by seanmh @ 8:44 AM