Long day at work...big, bad air traffic control ju-ju was all around. I walked out the side door into the sunlight with tired head, tired eyes, and tired soul. "What the hell am I doing still talking to bloody airplanes?" I thought to myself, knowing full well what the answer was and is. Dragging my carcass to the car, I departed for the quieter realm of my daughter's softball game, secure in the knowledge that I didn't have to "plug in" for another sixteen hours. Life, in all its infinite measurements can sometimes stand still, held at bay by a fresh breeze or the single off a young girl's bat. Stop, smell, reflect...Ah yes, it is a rose!

As you drive, the radio tells the tale of four more dead, their bodies charred and damaged by an anger and rage we can't comprehend, by a force mysterious yet all too familiar these days, mere meat for all to see. The ravaged still fighting to vanquish, the defeated rising again and again to defeat. The battle is lost, the war remains, constant reminders of nothing gained, nothing gained. What constitutes "victory", and will we have enough innocence left to recognize its arrival? What's to become of the sons and daughters? American or Iraqi, they're all the same, what's to become of them Condoleezza? Can you tell me George, or Dick, or Rummy??? Charred or otherwise, we're all just meat to you...

Tomorrow I'll go to work and plug in, it's what I do. Perhaps I'll stop from time to time and consider my good fortune and how it fits into the grand scheme. Perhaps I'll resort to mere survival, thwarting all attempts on my sanity with divine insanity, dark humor at the expense of all. Maybe I'll catch a whisper of something radiant, something unblemished and fine, a shiny babble of some long ago memory that calls me back to days of the not-so-long ago me. That freckled boy with holes in his soles, the one who wanted always to run with the wind. I think he survived and is lurking there just out of sight, afraid, but curious as to whom he becomes. I listen when he beckons, a deep longing for what I once accepted welling up from my center. "Run with me" he says, "Run like the wind, run until it hurts, run through all the pain and beyond". I want to, and maybe we can run to Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, or even 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe the sight of me and my young freckled friend, running with the wind in our hair and nostrils, faster and faster, maybe this sight would be enough, enough to stop the world.