To The Scandals, A Sacrifice

The scandal flurries continue, and I haven't posted for a couple of days. It's kinda like when you've known a hard winter was coming, and you finally get that unmistakeable feeling when the season turns. The first serious snow starts to accumulate and has the "I can keep falling all month" quality to it. You could check the barometer or the weather channel or the newspaper, but instead you go make yourself some wimpy kind of herbal tea you almost never drink except maybe when you were home sick from school, like chamomile, only you're not a kid anymore and you stand at the living room window sipping your wimpy herbal tea, savoring nature's implacable harsh realities and wondering if the cycle of sacrifice ever really ended.

I could've written about the state attorneys who got fired for not dancing Republican enough. I could've written about the bottom dropping out of the sub-prime mortgage market. I could've written about more soldiers getting the shaft. I could've written about markets not going up forever. I could've written about an ex-CIA beauty holding 9/10ths of her story back, and may yet. Every one of these, you could see it coming from a long way off. They're just details from the same stories we've been making since we started, as a species, to wear clothes. All those corny old sayings run through your head: rust never sleeps, the bells toll for thee, and it's going to get deep. Nature can't be denied.

You can almost smell the tang of iron, the noble old scent which blood emits when it hits the air anew; no minor official or minion will do. The tree has been split, and then pried apart with great force to create a highly tensioned, yawning place. It waits to embrace another king in its Golden Bough.