01.26.04 - 12:34 p.m.

I am ridiculously, blissfully, sublimely happy today, and there is absolutely no explanation for the sudden flood of good-feeling. Or, perhaps, no concrete, solid, specific explanation of the sort that people often offer for happiness: marriage, children, divorce, new job, sun-shiney days, concert tickets, books, whatever. There's no thing at the root of this happiness, it's just the sort of happiness that sweeps over me, sometimes, on those rare occasions when I feel completely in sync with the universe.

Hullo: I feel completely in synch with the universe. In synchm in synchronous orbit with the spinning earth, perhaps even the spiraling galazy. Consider this a little wave to the other arms across the vast black emptiness between us. Hiya.

This morning I lolled half-conscious for an hour and a half, periodically calling work and hoping to hear the magic words: that work was off, the day was mine and mine alone. I knew it wouldn't happen, I suppose: the ice was bad, but it was supposed to be in the 40s by afternoon and indeed - afternoon now - it is in the 40s and the ice is melting. Still, this morning was bad, and I hoped against hope, half-sleeping, half-waking.

It was a particularly bad dream in which the floor of my apartment was so covered with those Japanese pseudo-ladybugs that are everywhere in fall that I had to sweep a path free in order to walk around that finally pierced the half-sleep enough to get me the f' up. I got dressed and caught the bus to work: I'm not crazy, the roads were awful. Easier to crunch my way to the corner than... well. Yeah. So, crunch crunch crunch and here I am, happy.

I was dreaming about a good story: day-dreaming about one, interview myself on the successful completion of it as a novel, this morning in the moments of head-ish downtime one gets while working: walking down the hall, whatever. For the internal interviews, I adopted a British accent as the questioner and an indefineable something-something suggestion of European-ish vowels with which to answer. Classy, eh? My story would make a good novel, so maybe I'll write it. Maybe, when I move.

As someone said: I'm in hibernation.

But I'm happy.

I was also reading this article from the New Yorker this morning, about American imperial power and whatnot: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?040202crat_atlarge. I really enjoyed the article, and agreed with a good bit of the analysis. In particular, this bit:

American power is magnified when it is embedded in international institutions, as leftists have lamented. It is also somewhat constrained, as conservatives have lamented. This is precisely the covenant on which American supremacy has been based. The trouble is that hard-line critics of multilateralism focussed on how that power was constrained and missed how it was magnified.

Conservative ideologues, in calling for an international order in which America would have a statelike monopoly on coercive force, somehow forgot what makes for a successful state. Stable governments rule not by direct coercion but by establishing a shared sense of allegiance. In an old formula, "domination" gives way to "hegemony"�brute force gives way to the deeper power of consent. This is why the classic definition of the state speaks of legitimate force. In a constitutional order, government accepts certain checks on its authority, but the result is to deepen that authority, rather than to diminish it. Legitimacy is the ultimate "force multiplier," in military argot. And if your aim is to maintain a global order, as opposed to rousting this or that pariah regime, you need all the force multipliers you can get.

I'm running out of lunch-time in which to finish this entry, so I can't really sit here and medidate on the article, but reading it did send me off on a complete other tangent about history and narrative and how events get shaped into stories, which was also partially inspired by (heh) watching Deep Impact last night on TV. Now, there's a lot of that movie that I can't stand, there are so many cinematic clich�s in there that I have to wonder if the screenplay was written by online roleplayers, really. Or political speechwriters. Or AM radio commentators of the folksy, homey types. Or country music songwriters. I particularly want to know where these crowds of people who apparently stand around and stare at kids' houses, or randomly placed television sets, or any other sort of thing, come from? Don't they have homes? Don't they have something better to do? Then there's the pseudo-suspense as the clever reporter searches on the internet - hahaha - for some reference to E.L.E. Smirk. And also: the sign that says they are six miles from Virgina Beach as the waves rush in and the kid and the chick on the motorbike climb up uhm... the Appalachians apparently covered with scrub-piney forests (uh, no. Puh-lease.), er, six miles from Virgina Beach. So, apparently the tidal wave struck as far as the "Ohio Valley" but the high ground in WVa was safe? And the high ground in WVa was... six miles from Virginia Beach?

Anyway, so yeah: there's all that, and also the ridiculously noble and perfectly multicultural space crew, the nobody-guy who is of course the guy that gets blown out into space first, and the crotchety old guy that the others don't understand (do REAL astronauts talk like twelve-year old bratlings? God, I hope not) until the end when he really proves himself and they're all buddies, and the best parts are really Morgan Freeman and, well, heh, Morgan Freeman, who makes a helluva lot more believeable president than George Dubya Bush (Shrub!), but I still like the movie because of the weepy, mournful sort of ending, and I just cry and cry and cry and cry and cry. I love the montages, I want more montages, of people getting ready for the end (though why people litter like crazy when abandoning their suburban homes ahead of a 700 mile high tidal wave I'll never know. The papers strewn on the street are supposed to signify disarray, but please!) because I'm a complete sucker for that stuff.

So, from these two different sources, I'm thinking about history and how it provokes a narrative � a storyline � out of a chaotic tangle events merely because of the historian's perspective. These things have happened and may now be themed, tickled and teased until some comprehensive, presumeably comprehensible and relatively structured story-arc can be picked carefully from the events. To people of the time � or rather, people, like me, of the time, who do not tend to force events into place in some overarching theory of place or time � its all rather confusing. How did we get here? How do people think like that? How does the confusion and chaos of a disaster lead to recovery? How does 9/11 turn into the war in Iraq? Could I even have imagined that change around when it happened?