Setsuled's Journal

There. The new chapter of Boschen and Nesuko is up on my site. Have a look, I beg you.

I guess it took me, what, two and a half weeks to update? That's bad. I promise it shall be no more than two weeks from now on.

And it's September 11, so . . . hmm. The September 11 is a day I, like everyone, still remember well. Memories of it for me are somehow appropriately tied to William S. Burroughs. I went to the mall that morning and I sat there reading Burroughs' Last Words before everyone at the mall realised that they were closing. Somehow Burroughs' voice seemed perfect for the strange, fearful atmosphere that reached all the way to San Diego.

Yesterday, I was driving between two large hills listening to Tom Waits' Mule: Variations. The sky seemed perfectly clear until I looked in my rear view window and saw a strange, enormous mass of clouds. It occurred to me that if the clouds were coinciding with a terrible noise, I probably wouldn't hear it from that distance and with the Waits music.

Which brought my attention back to Waits, who was singing, "Why wasn't God watching? Why wasn't God listening? Why wasn't God there . . ."

My mind played a movie of San Diego devastated by a strange attack of clouds; a montage while the Waits song played. The usual apocalyptic imagery--burnt, empty stores and mangled street signs teetering in the wind.

I guess I was thinking about those moments when it's irrefutable that there is no benevolent, omnipotent deity out there. Why wasn't God watching? I remember the old Iraqi woman in Fahrenheit 9/11 who was crying in the rubble of her destroyed home where several of her family members died, asking where God was. Maybe it's because I believed in God when I was a kid that this sort of thing gets to me . . .