From Inside the Aquarium

Awoke to the terrible news from Paris.  A provocation, a gesture demanding a response, this will bring France further in to the conflict in Syria.  An act of war, as declared by Mssr. Hollande, on one NATO member, is an attack on them all.  This was perhaps the intended outcome.  It is all but impossible to imagine mere rhetoric will suffice from France, after this.   It will almost certainly force Obama’s hand, as well.  It is hard to imagine how this conflagration can be quelled.

This evening, we drove over to our local mall.  The older one had plans with a friend.  The younger one dined with my wife and I.   There were at least three films showing that we narrowed it down to.  I thought we’d all but confirmed it would be the new James Bond flick, but my daughter pressed hard for “Maze Runner 2” which we got tickets for. 

I’d actually found the first one kind of interesting, watching it with the girls on a computer.  Or at least it was much more unpredictable than this one, where in the kids were all on the run for one hundred and twenty minutes.  Zombies, partisan bands and of course “Wicked” all want a piece of them, so the multi-culti cast flee across the post apocalyptic landscape, in a series of unending narrow escapes.

Alas, driving home the vibe was not wildly dissimilar.  Misty clouds of pollution swirled about on the roads and in the fields.  The idea of seeing stars above was about as remote a dream as one might have eyeing them from inside an aquarium.  The lights of the cars in front of us, the lights at the crossroad illuminated the foulness in the air.