Editorials

it sucks being back, but it's nice to have one's absence noted ....

he heat wave broke a week ago, but it still smells like the foyer to the inferno, thanks to the more than eight hundred fires that started in a lightning storm .... a lightning storm? in california? i think of lightning as an east coast or midwest phenomenon, along with humidity and lightning bugs .... i didn't register the lightning storm, but something hit a tree down the street from me, setting it on fire, and i don't think it was osama yo mama ..... he's kicking back, with his dialysis machine, in the hyderabad hilton, driving room service crazy .....

it was really hot last week, with the temperature hitting and holding in the high 90s .... i'm not a happy hot weather person; maybe i got it out of my system, growing up in pakistan, where it rained two days a year, where water rationing had teeth, and i always marvelled at the refugee camps that stretched for endless miles across a flat and featureless plain, not a tree in sight forever and beyond, the people living in skin-covered half domes that must have been all of five feet high, and the temperature hitting 114 and up ......

our sense of humor, of what's funny, has changed drastically in a few short decades; if you're familiar with richard pryor, you'll know what i'm talking about--you'll know that there was more to the making of humor, of creating laughter against a background of insight, than providing an internet link to youtube .... do you ever get tired of people forwarding you an endless stream of shit that's supposed to be funny?