Wednesday, 31 October 2001 | Brown

So, tell me, should I be depressed? Worried? Grateful? Angry? In denial? Suspicious? Preoccupied? There seem to be a thousand things happening at once, many of them quite unrelated, and I'm having some trouble processing all of it; I don't know how I should feel or react. It's normally much simpler: yellow and blue make green, red and blue make purple, yellow and red make orange. But what do all the colors combined at once make? That's right: brown. And if you add another color on top of that? More brown. Well, that's where I am right now—the good, bad, and mediocre have been stirred into a giant stew together, and I can hardly make out the original ingredients, let alone figure out what that strange flavor is.

It's Halloween (my favorite holiday), and I can expect a full moon. I can also (potentially) expect another terrorist attack, and, according to Herrn Rumsfeld, there's rumor it might happen in the South (well, in the southern part of somewhere). My birthday's coming up (am I happy or sad about that?), this morning my boss gave me Halloween candy in a paper bag meant for "nap sacks" (a relatively new term for me and a refreshingly unconventional "trick"), and I feel good after having had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep last night, (something that hasn't happened since the last time I got sick). There's speculation that the anthrax attacks are being executed by American neo-Nazi extremists (which would, in some backward way, be a good thing, because then we'd be forced to deal with culprits in the court system, rather than with bombs). And, well, there are civilians dying and hospitals being bombed, in my name, and there are people who paint their SUVs like red, white, and blue clowns who cut me off in traffic and neglect to vote. There is so much going on that I don't know about—that I probably don't want to know about—and it makes me uneasy. The sky is blue, Richard just sent me a cool haiku, and I am the new owner of an Onionhead Monster painting. So?

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Happy Halloween! [link courtesy of Tracy]