What can I say?

What can I say?
In my current incarnation as a retired, marginalised outsider of at least three cultural spheres, I am suffering from what Toffler termed "deep penetration shock".
I find it increasingly difficult to discern any order in my random thoughts, let alone meaning in a haphazard universe.
What am I to make, for example, of the following prescient (?) lines David Sedaris wrote in 2000 (Me talk pretty one day, Abacus, p. 204) in a tome he autographed for my 74th birthday SIX years before the due date:
"The long list of situational phobias includes the fears of being bound, beaten, locked in an enclosed area, and smeared with human waste. Their inclusion mystifies me, as it suggests that these fears might be considered in any way unreasonable?. I asked myself, Who wants to be handcuffed and covered in human feces? And then, without even opening my address book, I thought of three people right off the bat."
Looks like Sedaris has a lot to answer for, inspiring American jailers and interrogators in vays to make them talk, pretty or otherwise...
'Insurgents' my ass
While on the painful subject of democratisation, a memory wells up in my semi-conscious everytime I see those euphemistically apostrophied 'insurgents' brazenly carrying RPGs and assault rifles around in broad daylight, without attracting much more than the attention of my media colleagues. (Do these inflame the situation, as they did in East Timor pre-Independence, by providing a world-wide stage for such absurd antics?).
My memory is of myself as a nine-year-old in newly American-occupied Germany. When the Americans entered my Thuringian hometown after three days of shelling (some diehard nazi decreed it was to be defended) around my birthday that May, 1945, they used our villa gardens as a makeshift POW camp, and the house itself as billets for some U.S. officers.
German soldiers dumped heaps of surplus arms in the bushes, so I appropriated a reasonable-looking carbine and some ammunition. (I had no idea why I was doing this, certainly I hadn'd been brainwashed by the nazis because my mother had prevented me from even joining the Hitler Youth. Perhaps it was an early manifestation of the hoarding instinct - it 'might come handy one day'...). I also crept throught the thick hedge between our garden and the quiet suburban street and took a pistol and ammunition from a U.S. officer's jeep parked outside.
Now, one of the officers billetted in our house chanced upon me one day openly carrying the carbine. He snatched it from me and smashed it on the parapet of our entry stairway, and then gave me the hiding of my life. (In fact it remained the only such discipline I was ever subjected to...).
Had my captain been aware that I'd appropriated an officer's pistol and ammo, as well, I don't think that this budding 'werewolf' would have survived the day!
Apart from yours innocent truly, I cannot for one second imagine any native in successfully subdued Germany in May 1945 or thereafter openly carrying a weapon. Nor do I think an allied occupier would have thought twice about shooting such a desperado on sight.
We, on the other hand, have now progressed to a level of consciousness where we hesitate to slaughter an innocent rooster or two (Bianca unsuccessfully tried to get one of the candidates drunk as a prelude, using breas soaked in vodka!) merely for trying to gang-rape our poor harrassed hens in broad daylight...
In Iraq, sporting sophisticated arms in city streets appears to be the done thing - just like in Gaza and the West Bank. Don Rumsfeld, I think you've missed your chance!
(The best course of action now for our allied friends might be to concentrate their forces in the north, amid the friendly (?) Kurds, and let the new government assume responsibility for cleaning up the mess. In that way, the Coalition could always intervene in force if and when things got out of hand...)
Domestics (as in AVOs)
Turning to domestic issues: CB still hasn't made up her mind as to when is a good time for Harley's father to see his son. She feels threatened by the very idea, particularly since the distant father has intimated he wants to hyphenate the child, as in Dad-Hyphen (unmarried mum's name).
Perhaps it would be a good idea for the father to step back a little and make no demands of the young mum, at least while she's suckling his offspring. I'd offered CB that the father might want to arrange a visit on neutral territory, i.e. our own Clod Nine, on a Thursday when CB brings Harley to us on the bus. That would remove some of the awkwardness and friction, I'd hope. But what can I say? Natura abhorrit rationem (Huesch's First Law of Nature, circa 1955)...
Até a próxima,
Carioca