I'm sitting here at the kitchen table. It's a perfectly breezy evening. Around here, we get this 4 or 6 week window of time sandwiched between the sweltering humidity of summer and the crisp dryness of winter. The windows are open, and the slight evening sun does it's best to glaze through the puffy cloud cover; but after 3:30 or so it's ambient lighting at best. It's probably in the mid or high seventies during the day, and low sixties at night. The breeze blows almost all day long, and if you can stand the noise of the crickets, frogs, and birds; you can sleep with the windows open. Nature's air conditioning.

I'm thinking of all that's happened in the recent past, and how it belies the place I find myself in, here at the kitchen table. There was Ike, who kicked the shit out of Texas. Towns absolutely wiped off the map, people without power and water for what may be weeks; and worse. But where is that on my local nightly newscast? The talking heads are going on about our problem with rabid cats, or that a cement company wants to build a plant. WTF.

And then there's the economic news. It seems to me that the gloom-and-doomers have been heralding this day for at least a year. Stock markets climb a wall of worry. Americans are sitting on a sinkhole of debt. It's time to pay the piper. Well, believe it or not, somehow this bit of new became blurbworthy on my local innocuous newscast. Crammed for a few seconds between a peice on a reopened murder case and some guy who builds shrimping trawlers by hand.

And there's also the election. I won't go into specifics, but suffice to say I hope everyone's doing their homework; and I mean real digging. Read the sites you don't usually read, ferret out the partisan shit, and read the factual stuff. You'd be amazed what's lying under the facade of these candidates; and it seems we do really have to pick the lesser of two evils. I've decided not to talk politics with friends anymore, because there's one candidate I simply can't stand. The sad part is that the other one just makes me feel 'sort of' like I won't have to fear my government. This is making the local newscast. We're just enjoying the weather, I guess. Shit, the weather makes the news a couple times a day.

Where's all the in depth analysis? Report on the issues. Then report on the people and events driving the issues. Where are they why's? I don't give a fuck that the weather's going to be awesome tomorrow; I give a fuck about the stuff that really matters. How come I have to look that shit up, and you; as a news agency, the informers; only have to bring me rabid cats, cement plants, and the fucking weather?