Scotland's Shame

It's getting dark enough that I can go for walks before midnight and be under a veil of complete darkness.

In this city, all the streetlights are incandescent, which renders everything into a relief of orange monochrome in the middle of the night. When it's raining, the sparking orange and black pebbles on the street are four-dimensional, seemingly existing on the ground and in my eyes at the same time.

It's been a strange season. There's all the talk of CERN's Large Hadron Collider destroying the world on October 21st, which incidentally is the day after my birthday. A few friends of mine have suggested using that as a pickup line, but really, the world's been in a slow state of self-destruct for almost a century now. Trying to sleep with a girl on the pretense that it's all coming to a head tomorrow is... pretentious, at best. A bad pun at the worst.

Anyway. To abuse a scientific analogy, things have been crashing and grinding together lately. Violently. Beautifully. I can liken it to the cosmic fireworks of two asteroids or planets crashing together. Relationships have crashed and burned, and from their smoldering ashes, beautiful things grow. The economy is sinking like a one-flippered seal, and nobody seems to know how to fix it without spending massive amounts of taxpayer money.

So essentially, ladies and gentlemen like you and myself are paying for the fuck-ups of some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world. When we've had time to settle from the shock, I wonder if everyone will be pissed off, or merely apathetic. It's not right, but really, whatever has been when it comes to our particular brand of market economics?

I know a lot of good people are going to be left twisting in the wind when this is all over, but what really stings is the people responsible won't be. And again, I ask myself, how is this different from any other time.

We've got an election coming up soon. I think I'm going to write the song titles from Mogwai's latest album over my ballot.

I vote for this CD. Because it's done more good things than any suit in government.