Timequake

def.: ten years on automatic pilot.

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Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov.

He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay with a mate that cracked?

“Anything interesting happen at work today, Honeybunch?”
“Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?”

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Thus spoke Kurt Vonnegut during the Timequake, ten and twenty years ago. We are quoting him, so that we don’t have to judge and be judged.

In any case: Nobody, even Kurt, ever asked Sakharov’s wife if she was planning to leave her husband. That would be ridiculous.

And when a blue-chip company CEO effectively steals from his employees and drinks their life savings for aperitif, nobody asks his wife if she could bear to stand by him, or if she was planning to leave him.

But when a politician uses his own money (until proven otherwise) to have luxury sex with a consenting, non desperate, and adult set of limbs, don't let the apparent lack of a victim deceive you: things change drastically! To quote our dear friend Biko Azinuth, It's everybody's business now! It's not hard to imagine the faint spark of life inside the mummified bellies and mucus membranes of the Desperately Cruel, upon uncovering the titillating (?) details. Those C- students who have dated themselves to lobotomy, only to end up having instant soup every evening alone in front of the TV, and on the phone, and the computer, finally get the chance to dance their ecstatic dances of boredom-avenging around the “Harvard educated wife” - in a moment of glory they have to ask: Are you going to leave him?

And we were not quick enough to zap away in time.

But things could be worse. At least according to the quintessential Disgusted Person, Phillip Roth. In other words: it's been 10 years since 1998. Below we are giving you a piece of Roth to indulge, dear readers!

And do have a lovely weekend! If you really have to use the TV, phone, computer, etc, at least please try to use one at a time! Otherwise, really, you don't know what you are doing.

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...
Ninety eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine, in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism – which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s national security – was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne [] identified in the incipient country of long ago as “the persecuting spirit”; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman’s ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is.
...

Thank you for the Music

And for the coffee. And for the comedy. And for the beauty. And for hot showers. And for dijon. And for dogs. And for the Mediterranean. And for idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page! Thank you for the roses.

In the spirit of the days – and since we're no artists, just two silly people -- let us make some suggestions for further reading:

For the beat and the bitter and the disgusted persons, William S. Burroughs' “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, as in:

Thanks for the Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

For the reborn, Alanis Morissette's "Thank U", as in:

the moment I let go of it
was the moment I got more than I could handle
thank you nothingness
thank you clarity
thank you thank you silence

For the irreparably thankless, some Johnny Cash - no, it's Egbert Austin Williams, actually: "Nobody", as in:

When Wintertime comes
With its snow and sleet
And me with hunger
And cold feet
Who says "Here's two bits, go and eat"?
Nobody

For the battered traveler of life, the bipolar, or the bad hangover, a mellow "New Morning" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds seems fitting, as in:

Thank you for giving
this bright new morning
so steeped seemed the evening
in darkness and blood
there will be no sadness no sorrow
there'll be no road too narrow
there'll be a new day
and it's today
for us

Google them, YouTube them, what are you waiting for!