Rough sleep

Had a dream about Gilbert Jordan and those poor women he killed – why do I read the obits at work? I don’t need to, I’m such a morbid fuck – women who had been hopeful and cheerful and loving once, one assumes, and then some beady-eyed baldy fuck decides it’s alright to kill them and a whole justice system full of people decides it’s alright to let them die. Towards the end of this documentary-style dream, when the evidence had become overwhelming against Jordan and he was being marched off to prison, I sat down in the dining room of the Royal Hotel in Scarborough, snapped open a newspaper, saw the headline “Thank God for the Good People Who Stay Good,” and woke up howling with distress.

I fucking swear, every month I appreciate the appeal of agonistic religions a little more. I want the freedom to point at something and call it evil. The last thing that set that instinct off was reading three or four commentaries about how okay Israel is because at least Israel has the decency to be tormented by civilian deaths. How can someone type that without a merciful God breaking his fingers? How can they not see the sick degree to which that devalues the humanity of the Lebanese in particular and of Arabs in general? Devalues their understanding, devalues their emotions, but most of all devalues the great losses they suffer; devalues their pain, agony and torment as much as the justice system around a man like Jordan devalued the women he assaulted or killed by deciding it wasn’t worthwhile labelling him a dangerous offender.

Thank god, indeed, for the people who stay good. It makes me want to keep right on howling, to think there aren’t more of them. But thank god for the ones there are.