As usual, only the Washington Post is on this story:

The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.

But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.

Read the whole sorry piece.

This shows the danger we're in (on many levels), and the pathetic job Bush Co. is doing on national security. If we were outfitting and supporting our existing emergency response organizations, our reps could tell the Pentagon to screw off (as if they ever would).

These plans move us closer to totalitarian rule in significant ways: It leaves us vulnerable to military coup, and it also provides a plan for the government to instill martial law if they think (or just assert) that there is enough of a threat. The conspiracy theorists are right to be worried -- it would take one staging of an attack, let alone a real one, to bring us to martial law. Imagine. We already have Gitmo, a prison for the nameless (including American citizens). Now we will have a military authorized to make arrests and "round people up," as the article states, to take them there.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

My nights are getting restless here. I think it's because I'm going to bed early and though my room is in the back of the house, the window is not blinded and the morning sun shines in directly on my bed around 6, heating up the room and waking me up. Inu comes in around then, too, to see if she can rise me up for her morning walk. Until this morning I've resisted, covered myself up with the blanket to block the sun, and have managed to get in another hour or so of sleep by turning my back to Inu. Today, though, I woke up from a bad dream and decided it was better to get out of bed than to force myself to fight nature.

It was the first time I've dreamt of S dying over there. I've dreamt that we break up after he returns, but my sleep self has never taken me to that darkest place where I never see him again. It was horrible. I mourned him and I mourned our life and I mourned the fact that we never had kids together. It's amazing what we can do to ourselves, making things worse in the middle of the night. When I woke up, I thought about all of the families who have lost someone in one of our wars, and about how they were robbed of a last visit with them, a last touch.

It came for obvious reasons. Fred is still in the hospital. Now he is hoping to come home on Wednesday, but every day it is pushed forward. It is good that he's still there, of course, so the doctors can monitor him and make sure he survives this treatment. Chemo is poison. It is toxic. So given that, "complications" like my friend's are normal. I spent a couple of hours with him again yesterday and he was in better spirits than the day before. There were new patients on his floor, including a man who looked at least ten years younger than me and a woman who was also young. I was thinking about zen and the principles of acknowledging the normality of illness and old age and death, how they are not separate from life or "abnormal" but rather an integral part of the deal. Ten years ago I would have become nervous about my own health seeing those young people there. I would have become hypochondriacal and anxious, and wouldn't have wanted to spend time in a cancer hospital (and it is named that), let alone on that floor. But yesterday I wasn't nervous at all. I thought how it wasn't a matter of if I will get sick someday. Of course I will! I might not get cancer, but I will die of something. There is no way to avoid it, so why be scared of it? That would be like being scared of life itself!!

I think our fear of death is so strong that we become superstitious, think that all disease is contagious, and therefore are scared of people who are sick. We have this crazy idea that everyone has to be "positive" all the time, that if the person suffering was to voice their worst fears then those fears would come true. It's sort of ridiculous. As if cancer could be brought upon by numerology, bad juju, or even association. Crazy. How powerful our fear is!

Fred and Selma's house is on the side of a hill, which isn't uncommon here in LA. The city is surrounded by hills which would be called mountains in Chicago, where the only "hill" is the subtle rise along Ridge Avenue that marks the old boundary of the lake. The houses here seem to hover, be airborne. When I walk Inu up the hill and see how precarious the houses are placed, I question whether I would want to live in one of them, if my midwestern roots are too strong and my need for solid ground too great. The houses are beautiful. They are open and airy and outlined with windows. Pines and eucalyptus and monkey's puzzle trees surround their house, but there is no yard, you see no earth from the windows. There are decks, several of them, but they are suspended too. They are engineering wonders, but perhaps I am distrustful of engineers. The houses seem as if they could tumble with the slightest shift of plates, or even from too much dancing. When I hear Selma hurry across the floor in the morning (she visits Fred early, before going to work), I imagine the house floating away, or worse, sliding down the hill, with every step.

I'm not afraid of heights. At least I wasn't. For our honeymoon, S and I went to Yosemite to go rockclimbing. I'd never rockclimbed or repelled, though S had done a bit of both in Ranger school and again in LRSLC. We signed up for classes, and lucky us, by our third day we were the only students and had a private lesson with Scott, a world famous climber (so famous I had no idea who he was!), who had climbed El Capitan and Half Dome on the same day 52 times, a world record. Most climbers spend two weeks getting up just one of those rocks, but he would climb one in less than 12 hours, rush over to the next rock, and climb the other in less than 12 hours too. When we met him, he was just getting back into teaching after breaking his back when he fell 100 feet from a precipice on one of his climbs. (It made us nervous, then, that he never roped himself in when he climbed up ahead of us. Imagine!) On that third day he decided we should do something more advanced since it was just the three of us, so we headed to a taller rock. The plan was he would climb up freestyle, meaning no ropes, and would tie us in by attaching our ropes with caribiners stuffed into the smallest cracks of rock. Some of these caribiners looked like odd office implements or cosmetic tools: by pulling a trigger, the thing would contort and become smaller, so that when you released the trigger once the thing was inside a crack, it would expand and fill in the space and, in theory, hold you up so that if you slipped you would suspend in air rather than tumble to the ground. It seemed impossible, really, to be held up with what looked like a slightly more sophisticated eyelash curler. But S assured me by telling me to trust the equipment, to have confidence in it and our instructor. Well, I had no choice, really, so I did.

Scott went up one length of rope and tied us in, then told us where to put each foot and each hand on our way up. I went first, which was fine with me. I liked being sandwiched between our teacher and S, who I trusted with my life. We got up one length, which was 150 feet, then Scott went up a second. Again, we followed. Up again Scott went, and again we followed. After that third length of rope, Scott still not roped in, standing on the rocks with his feet and hands and nothing else, I made the mistake of looking down to see where S was behind me. The trees were tiny. The rock, steep. I was shocked. It's one thing to be 100 floors high inside a steel and glass structure like the Sears Tower or the Hancock building, and it's something else entirely to be suspended on the side of a granite slab, 450 feet in the air (that's what, 45 stories?), with only a couple of rubber stamp-like contraptions and your own big toes holding you up. When I looked at S, he could see enough in my eyes to look down himself. He looked back at me and said "I'm sorry!" I asked Scott how much further we had to go and how we were going to get down, and he told us just three more lengths of rope. S got up to my little ledge and we had a laugh. There was only one way down, and that was to get all the way up to the top and walk down the backside. Three more lengths of rope it was!

Obviously we made it. The walk down was a little shaky -- or at least my legs were -- but we did it and we felt, as you'd expect, some amount of accomplishment by the time we got down to earth. But for a couple of years afterwards I found myself anxious when I was up high anywhere, I suppose because that climb taught me how vulnerable I really was, even as it taught me that it was okay to trust myself, my instructor, and the equipment. S and I went to Devil's Lake in Wisconsin the next year to climb a bit, but lucky for me Devil's Lake is no Yosemite, so the climbs we did were only the length of one rope, and since S was tying us in, I felt better anyway. Still, I can't say it was "fun."

So here I am again, trusting the equipment.


This is me on our first day, when we still had enough wits about us to take pictures.


And here's S, dwarfed by a felled Sequoia, a tree that lived a thousand years or more.