On a Night like this, I Deserve to get Kissed at least Once or Twice

Who doesn't love a good peanut butter conspiracy? After all, it's spreading everywhere. Sometimes for reasons that say more about us than about the life and times in which we live it's easier if not actually preferable to believe something that was accidental or random was anything but. And we'll cling to that belief no matter what.

Take as an example a two-fisted, certifiably sad, heartbreaking calamity from another time in the era of pre- 9/11 air-travel. So many lives lost, so many more tangled and twisted and ultimately broken under the weight of everything done and undone in the course of the investigation of the aftermath and we may start on this all over again.

The holes in the hearts of the survivors, where the thinnest of scar tissue has only recently started to cover the place where their beloved was are about to be exposed again in the grim pursuit of The Truth (capital letters are deliberate because The Truth is and should be always Absolute even if it provides absolutely no absolution). If the truth will set you free, what liberation is grief without surcease?

Earlier in the week the game was afoot for Jimmy Hoffa's body. Again. It didn't seem to work out for the folks who see gunmen on the grassy knoll sharing a fudge sundae with Marilyn Monroe and eating peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches with Elvis always want it to, but they're used to that by now and are very comfortable with blaming Them for that magical miscreant tour that leads us all astray.

I had a note yesterday from a former friend whose so former in his current mental state I'm not sure in real life I'd recognize him (and suspect he'd say the same about me; and we're both right). He wanted to talk about the death of Michael Hastings. Instead of trying to share condolences over the loss of a brilliant and talented reporter, whose profile of General Stanley McChrystal did for Afghanistan in 2010 what Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail did in 1972 for presidential campaign politics, I found myself listening to a crazy person spin a saga beyond my compassion and my power of comprehension.

I'm not sure what pushed him over the edge but that's where he was calling from and I hope he makes it back around here sometime when he's better because I miss my friend. Hadn't heard from him, or of him, for close to three decades until yesterday and he never did explain how he knew where to find me which, for the record, I find disquieting. But not every tragedy makes the headlines and somewhere, his happened very quietly but was no less profound.

"There's a spy in the sky.
There's a noise on the wire.
There's a tap on the line
For every paranoid's desire."
-bill kenny