Legatissimo.info

Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago, was a whistle-blower who prompted the raid by tipping off the F.B.I. to suspicious activity at the company where he worked, including possible weapons trafficking. He was arrested and held for 97 days — shackled and blindfolded, prevented from sleeping by blaring music and round-the-clock lights. In other words, he was subjected to the same mistreatment that thousands of non-Americans have been subjected to since the 2003 invasion.

Even after the military learned who Mr. Vance was, they continued to hold him in these abusive conditions for weeks more. He was not allowed to defend himself at the Potemkin hearing held to justify his detention. And that was special treatment. As an American citizen, he was at least allowed to attend his hearing. An Iraqi, or an Afghani, or any other foreigner, would have been barred from the room.

From The New York Times

I'm going to be quite slow getting back to people until I have my little darling back. But Mr. Portland is currently en route to California, where he will have his left hinge replaced -- after I carelessly broke apart the metal holding it together in a fit of rage-induced super-human strength.

Hopefully, I'll be up and running at full speed again on Saturday at the earliest, Monday at the latest. In the mean time, calling me on the phone would probably be your most fruitful course of action, should you desire to communicate with me.

Answers to inevitable questions:

1. It was bad
2. No, I don't know how it broke
3. A lot. :-(

I have come home, and for the first time in my life, home is not as I left it. It is tangibly, functionally, noticeably different. For better or worse, I have come to the conclusion that my childhood is over. The once familiar faces have moved. Some, thousands of miles and back again, others, thousands of miles, and then a thousand more. They have had babies. Intentionally and not so much. They have moved and shifted so far from my preconceptions and recollections that, if they didn't share the same face, I wouldn't be able to place them at all.

And we struggle. All of us. We struggle carving out our own ways in the world. I know and see so plainly that we all must take separate paths, and yet, understanding why we are all so different, so changed from the people we once were, comes on the wings of epiphany. It is a shock that can only be appropriately contemplated while driving home from a concert on a narrow winded road, rain lightly falling on the window, shoed off by wipers that squeak just a little.

We do have a common history. We share what is ours, and will only ever be ours. Memories, of course, shape one's self, but with a wealth of new input, and with a whole new set of "us" and "we," that shared past has gone from real, to record. And still, there is one thing we share. One thing we will always share: no matter what, each of us does the best we know how, to get through each day.

Sorry for the melancholy mumbo jumbo. It's just, I had a moment, and I didn't want it to disappear.