The Future

Yesterday I went to a Chinese New Year party with my little friend Emily and her parents. It was a fun little get together with a bunch of little girls from China. It is the year of the rooster and they made little roosters out of paper plate cut outs stabled on a stick. All of the little people were sitting at a table and all the parents ringed them, snapping photos and sharing stories about their different trips to China, how some are going back for another daughter, all daughters, no sons. We ate, a variety of foods, some traditional and then there were cocktail weenies.
I just read about a professor in Colorado, a tenured professor might be ousted because he was to harsh a voice after 9/11.
The witches are coming, the hunt for our thoughts is taking another step up. We have squads of people flying around the world, snatching up people and flying them to countries that torture people, that is happening right now. People are in small cells hidden away, their minds turning to jello, they are going insane. I am paying for this.
After we ate we all attempted a song in chinese, mandarin I guess. Emily needed a break, so we walked down the hall and looked at the eight inch sturgeons in the tank and looked at the display with the eagle, and the otter and the mallard duck, all of this at the interpretive center outside of Ashland. The sturgeons were not moving, they were very still at the bottom of the tank, this fish as old as the dinosaurs, it's numbers dwindling.
Another friend told me that there are now reporters hired by the White House and then given press credentials. These are the reporters that George Bush calls on during press conferences. There was a time when a woman named Helen Thomas was always asked the first question, always. Every president, all kinds of presidents before this one. He stopped this.
Emily and I went back to the conference room that we were using and she got a squeeze box to play in the parade. The head of the parade had a dragons mask and the kids walked around the information counter stomping on bubble wrap, which was just about as loud as firecrackers.
This morning I sit at my computer, I listen to the people speaking at Ossie Davis's funeral on my radio and look out at the four inches of new snow, glad my recycling got picked up before the plow knocked that bin over. What is the next year of the rooster going to have for you little Emily? I don't know but it sure was a nice day we had wasn't it?