Sitting here in Dreamland after running another 7 miles, I’m stunned with my own inner silence.  Laptop’s humming, sun is beating down intensely, I’m seated with closed eyes, yet nothing.  I wait.  And wait.  And wait…

I feel a presence near me.  It’s a huge German Shepherd that a girl is walking leashless through the cemetery.  She’s at an unapproachable distance, but the dog has strayed toward me to check me out.  I was caught off guard by its approach.  It seems that I was dreaming and just woke up.  She yells “Come on.  Let’s go.”  I guess she understands that I understand that she means the dog.  But do I?

My dream state was not vacuous.  There was a female presence with me.  She was typing on my laptop.  She stopped when I returned to consciousness.  I was hoping that she had written a book and left it for me in my session of Word.  Yet the page is still blank.

That’s how books get written, isn’t it?  Nobody really writes those things, right?  Spirits visit and endow us with the transcripts and then strangely and mysteriously disappear.  I kind of feel that the female sprite in my dream was just getting started and that that ruin-a-good-thing dog disrupted our relationship. Damn it.  I want my ghost writer back!

*closes eyes…drifts off again*

—this is the first chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—

Understanding Killer Katrina...

Although the winds of Katrina decreased and it was ‘downgraded’ to a Category 4 (145 mph) storm before landfall, the storm surge that had formed when it was a Category 5 (170 mph) storm persisted and whelmed over New Orleans.  Why?  Because nearly all the momentum built up in the water endured—energy in water does not dissipate as rapidly as energy in wind.  So for purposes of destruction, it remained a 5 as it surged into Lake Pontchartrain.

Before the storm hit, I told my buddy Mike (in Arizona) that I expected 5,000 dead as a result of this storm.  We both expected New Orleans  to become a lake.  It’s funny how to regular guys like us had it all figured out, yet Mikey Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, even now is adamantly maintaining that the Katrina scenario that Mike and I (and nearly all the rest of you informed victims and observers) were envisioning didn’t exist and was beyond imagination.

What a total crock of bureaucratic shit.  If Bush doesn’t fire this lame ass, then we must conclude that Bush stands behind this totally unacceptable self-serving alibi-ist.

"There's a lot of aid surging toward those who've been affected. Millions of gallons of water. Millions of tons of food. We're making progress about pulling people out of the Superdome," the president said.

Millions of tons of food?  2,000,000,000 (two billion) pounds of food?!    Bush had better super-size New Orleans' plumbing while he's at it.  And to have "millions of gallons of water...surging toward those who've been affected"?  Well, just a poor choice of words, in addition to the forementioned presidential hyperbole.

Given the ill-prepared response by government to this disaster,  I just wonder what our government would (will?) do if…

the Canary Island mega-tsunami unleashes? 

an Avian-flu pandemic strikes? 

or the Yellowstone Park super-volcano, long overdue, re-erupts?