God's Dice

So, I'm sitting here in Houston and trying to make sense of the National Hurricane Center's discussion of Hurricane Gustav. New Orleans apparently will miss the eye of the storm but catch the "dirty side" of the hurricane. This is according to the "storm track philosophy" that forecasters have built up over the last few days.

I'm counting on paranoia and caffeine to carry me through the graveyard shift until the storm hits the Gulf Coast.

In the meantime, I've also been reading "God's Dice," a weird little story by Martin Amis that I found tucked away and apparently forgotten in a copy of the "Primer of Offshore Oil Operations."

And suddenly there's a passage that I find unexpectedly resonant. The effect is like finding a hand-written message in a fortune cookie. Amis is writing about punk London on the verge of an expected apocalypse in 1980, but he could be sitting in a Buffalo Wild Wings here in Houston, which is where I ate boneless chicken wings tonight. That, as much as anything, could account for my quiet desperation:

"You know the question I mean and it's cumulative disquiet, its compound interest. You ask yourself the question every time you open a newspaper or switch on the TV or walk the streets among the sons of thunder. New formations, deformations. Yogi knows the question. It reads: Just what the hell is going on around here?

The world looks worse every day. Is it worse or does it just look it? The world gets older. The world has seen and done it all. Boy, it is beat. It is suicidal. ...The world has done too many things, too many times with too many people, done it this way, done it that way, with him, with him. The world has been to so many parties, been in so many fights, lost its keys, had its handbag stolen, fallen over drunk, drunk too much. It all adds up. A tab is presented. ... We live in a shameful shadowland. Quietly, our idea of human life has changed, thinned out. We can't help but think less of it now."