Radio, Memory, War, Mind, Fear.

Who knows why, but last night I dreamt of soldiers. I know a few, not too many, less than most Americans probably, more than some others. My dream was one of those nonsensical dreams when dozens of classmates from four or five different places who've never met step out of the shadows out onto sleep-stage to make an absurd comment on a melodramatic situation, the exact conflict of which you've already forgotten. This time, it was soldiers, acting as if they all knew each other, opining on some twist on the classic nightmare of facing exams after not going to class for a year. I've long believed that the main purpose of these dreams is for the brain to shuffle and reorganize its rolodex of faces. How many alarm bells and associations start ringing when the girl who loaned you a pencil on a late night quantum mechanical hustle makes her declaration? Not many? Her face gets downgraded a few neural notches. The guy who used to go rock climbing with you? Ooh lots, better start maintaining those memories. More potassium. Mmm. Time for a breakfast Banana.

Unless NPR wakes you up and takes away your appetite. The other day at Rhinocrisy hedgehog was complaining about its even tone in discussing the prospects of war with Iran: "But what horrified me was NPR's treating agressive war as just another news story. The tone was identical to the one they use when reporting on toad races." I don't need any more caustic tone though. I was just shaken awake from the dream-soldier-powwow by the California Report, profiling the funeral of Lance Cpl. Brandon Dewey, the 5th Tracy, CA soldier to die in Iraq. Tones of AAAAIEEEE would not have thrown any greater a wrench into the neural-maintenance works. What baffling funeral--the activist mother of the first soldier to die said, with a sad laugh, that when people ask her to start a peace movement in Tracy she says, with whom? An Eagle Scout leader notes that the death of so many of the town's Eagle Scouts only firms the resolve of the current crop Eagle Scouts to defend their country. I think about how much work it takes to become an Eagle Scout--how much work it takes to raise an Eagle Scout. No resolve to change their country? Make it choose wars more carefully? Who goes around telling young men in Tracy, young men talented enough to become Eagle Scouts, that the best way they can serve their country is going off to die? Dewey's friends gather to memorialize him, and one friend mourns that he never knew another man who could so easily throw a party on a Tuesday morning. I remember the Party Tuesday of my senior year in college. No college for Dewey. Memories go crashing around again, and I lose all desire for a banana.

And of course all of this is followed by Morning Edition and more on the IAEA and Iran. I'm tired, and I can't remember what I once knew about enriched uranium and bombs and powerplant operations. Part of me wants to get up and start reading, desperately wants to map out what's going on, start analyzing what's dangerous and what people perceive is dangerous. Most of me wants to bury my head in my pillow and never remember uranium again. AAAAAIEEEEE.

Update: In case it wasn't totally obvious from the timestamp and the intro, this was a bit of SSR stream of consciousness, and meant to be an honestly inchoate reflection of what went through my mind as I battled with my alarm clock. There's slightly more awake discussion in the comments. Slightly. I've decided that I'm going back to music on the alarm clock. Too much politics too suddenly in the morning seems to leave me with a lack of REM-closure.