Tuesday, October 23, 2012              2:18 AM

Our sweet petunia, Jessy, came up on the Harlem North train tonight with her dog, Tuesday (the Wonder Dog). She came and asked for heartburn remedies, of which I have several. But she was in intense abdominal pain and she wanted a hug. So I gave her my best daddy-hug, but it didn’t work. Claire just called from Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco. They say ‘appendicitis’ and she’ll call me back when she knows whether the surgery will be tonight or later this morning.

 I know I’m not supposed to be worried about a little appendicitis operation, but it is surgery, minor or otherwise, plus I’ve been getting pessimistic lately and I could really use one in my win column—if only to convince me that there are two sides to luck, and not just the s**t end of it, which is all I’ve been getting lately. And our baby is so fragile. I couldn’t stand it if anything went wrong.

 Just to give you an example of how things have been going lately: Jessy’s emergency surgery in the next few hours will require us to cancel the surgery scheduled for Tuesday later today—the reason Jessy came up to our house in the first place! I should be grateful—if she had stayed in the city, who knows what might have happened. Now she’s with Claire, up here in Westchester—and I’m watching Tuesday until they get back. And Tuesday’s surgery can wait—she’s just getting something removed, in case it’s cancerous. Maybe I should talk to my doctor about adding a third anti-depressant prescription….

And that debate tonight—I nearly gag every time that nut-job tries to criticize Obama while saying that his policies won’t be any different. It’s times like these that I really wish the USA had a higher standard of education—if Obama doesn’t get his ‘four more’, I’m just going to stop talking to people. If the people in this country have already forgotten what eight years of GOP admin has done to us, we have nothing to talk about.

Besides, it seems like the stupid people are always winning elections these days—those tea-party whack jobs got voted in in 2010, pretending they were a new, improved conservative agenda—they’re new, alright—we haven’t had such narrow-minded, fear-based elected officials since the Salem Witch Trials—who woulda thunk any group could out-stupid Geo. W. Bush!

 But it will all happen the way it happens. I’ll be thrilled if we voters get the better man—but, if it’s Romney, that will only indicate that our days as an ‘empire’ are fading. And that’s something I’ve been hoping isn’t true for decades now, while suspecting that it already was. Making sense and having patience—stuff like that has never been the American way—hell, it’s never been the way of the world at large. Nor can I claim any great sense or patience in the way I lived my own life, so how can I complain?

If civilization doesn’t simply collapse under its own weight, it will only be due to a sea-change in the global paradigm. Unless the entrenched powers-that-be are overrun by angry mobs, nothing of significance will change quickly enough to stop our totally uncontrolled explosion of digital tech, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the abuse of natural resources that threaten the world’s ability to sustain life of any kind.

 And that angry mob will have to be a global one—so, imagine Syria, then multiply that times the whole world. Not a pretty picture—yet, still the only alternative to allowing the stuffed shirts to guard their own precious quality-of-life until it is too late to reverse the damage. Am I advocating violence? No, I am not. But I would appreciate it if someone else can tell me what the hell else can change civilization’s inertia from self-destruction to self-awareness? And in just a few decades—because, while our ecological policies remain as is, the damage they cause accelerates constantly—and now we have all of China (and other just-now developing nations) well on their way to matching, even exceeding the pollution that we Americans produce.

I’m just saying.