The most recent election showed me two things. One is that we are, indeed, Babylon.

The other is that assassination works. It makes me want to take George Orwell's Animal Farm down from the shelf, dust it off and read it. I liked it 40 years ago. This year I might feel at home in it. I think of the art of George Grosz, a German dadaist of the early part of the 20th Century. He depicted the decadence in the ruling classes making the people look like pigs. It's in Animal Farm that George Orwell wrote, "Some pigs are more equal than others."

It's time for me to withdraw from my interest in politics. There's nothing I can do about any of it, but agree or disagree. Hot dog. And what I agree or disagree with is an illusion of an illusion of an illusion.

It's time to take back the emotional energy I invest in following politics in the news. Our course is set and whatever I think about it, pro or con, has nothing to do with anything but my own reasons, which are for me alone.

It's time to turn more inward, pay closer attention to my own quality of life in relation to self and others. I want to cure myself less of believing I have any notion of what is happening any place but where I am at a given moment.

The song by John Lennon comes to mind, "How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?"

Let them that want it have it. I'll wait for the sound of wings and in the meantime live more in the present tense and less in figments of imagination concerning stuff I know not even a little about and care less. I can't help but find it funny, however, that Iraq is the location of the first Babylon. The news has turned plumb scriptural — Baghdad, Palestine, Jerusalem, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Macedonia. It's all too weird. Mind games.

Just outside one of my windows is a maple sapling with golden yellow leaves ablaze in the window's upper half. Out another window fairly dense fog in the background emphasizes the lines of empty tree branches in the foreground. A carpet of light reddish-brown leaves covers the ground, wet from a night and morning of light rain.

Earlier, we had quite a bit of wind. It has slowed down now to gusting breezes. The few remaining leaves on the wild cherry tree saplings flutter like green, yellow and red flags in a harbor full of sailing ship masts swaying in the fog.

Wallace Stevens' poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, pops into the conscious from the storehouse in the subconscious. He tells of the lights on fishing boats anchored at sea in the night, "arranging, deepening, enchanting night." He heard a woman singing on the beach. "And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker."

A marina at night is beautiful anywhere. So are dancing leaves in a window. For the singing I have music by contemporary Chinese composer, Tan Dun, of Hong Kong I think, played by the Kronos Quartet. Friends who have come into the house while it was playing have asked me to turn it off. I understand, so it's easy to comply. No flare-ups. No "You telling me what I can't do in my own house?"

It's a blender mix of eastern and western musical ideas called Ghost Opera. Tan Dun also composed the soundtrack to the kung fu movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

It's been an odd autumn this year. Sometimes it was uncomfortably wet, but I don't mind. We need to replenish ground water after three years of what weather people call a drought.

A majority of the woolyworms I've seen this year have been all black. A few were all brown and very few were striped. It seems like more black ones every year. This year the woolyworms were scarce compared to years before.

If we go by fogs in August, the way I learned to interpret them, we could have the bottom fall out of the sky toward the tail end of winter, late March maybe. It's then we get those big snows that shut us in for a week or two. The last days of August were foggy and the fog kept on up into September. I love a foggy day. It has a certain stillness. It gives the foreground trees a light gray background, and like snow it muffles sound waves, emphasis on silence, but for the water drops that fall from roof's edge to puddles in the rocks below.

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