blue skies the earth's on fire

I fly through blue sky. Swift. Sure. Mozart. Debussy. Pachelbel. Angel wings brush my eyebrows. I sail on my back. Through the blue, a hint of stars. A hint of something larger. A hint of something distant. So easy to ignore, surrounded by the blue.

Below me: a burst. A pop. A bomb. A single scream reaches me, stacked on the sound-wave-backs of ten-thousand other screams. I am sure it is the scream of my love. We had met on the back of a hippo. And now she is dead. The stars would have warned me.

The ground is on fire. There is no where to land. And below me the tiny ships begin to swarm like militant bees. They are the fire. And now I, in my tiny ship, am the blue. I am Sky Patrol. And I am the dying world's last hope.

My parents did not allow video games in the house until I was comparatively old (comparative to the entirety of my friendbase who enjoyed duck hunt, mario, and kong at their release), and it was undoubtedly one of their many genius moves because they now eat away at my life in the most masturbatory of ways. And I am 25. I know better. I should be mature enough to be immature responsibly.

Without a console to console me, I would make up worlds as I biked around and around my neighborhood, dodging dragons and skirting under wall-sized doors as they smashed close. I would jump into the wind to save that pretty blonde girl in the second grade. I would latch around her with one arm and around the jungle gym with the other. I would save her.

When Dylan and Eric failed to blow up Littleton Colorado but incidentally achieved a minor semblance of their disastrous rampage, the country divided itself, as it is prone to do. I, of course, came to the defense of Marilyn Manson (whom I did not like) and Doom (which I had not played). Music and video games cannot shift a psyche in any significant way. Then their journals were released.

I think anyone who has both played a video game obsessively and seen The Last Starfighter would have to admit that it would be amazing if the skills learned in, say, Mario Kart were directly applicable to the real world. Dylan and Eric made their world one in which their expertise was applicable. I guess it already was applicable: they could have just waited a year and become quite useful to the marines.

One of my old students sent me a paper that she revised to submit to a campus journal. It asks the question: why do we celebrate pirates and demonize terrorists when in action and definition the two roles are not dissimilar. Why are Eric and Dylan monsters when boys their age are ordered to murder victims the same age as the students of Columbine every day? Cultural semantics? Proximity? The States are a sacred ground on which innocent blood shall not be spilt?

Man. I was going to avoid making these things political. But, hey, what the hell. I've started seven journals over the course of my life, and this is the only time I made it to the second entry.