coincidentals

There are asbestos in my sick building that due to a burst pipe have made themselves manifest, which means an unplanned four-day weekend of supreme chill time, drinking coffee with my mom and helping babysit the nephews, teaching the one how to draw with chalk and building a fort with beach towels and a patio table, wrapping the other in a sweater when the wind got cool, and then picking up the little sis for smoothies and sitting on the porch and trying to avoid the elephant in the room.

And then I'm up at the beach with an old friend and get a call from my metalhead concert homie who's looking for something to do, and awesome hanging out ensues with him and a friend of his, who's strangely got the same love of stuff that I do, of Central Asian politics and big riffs and Italo Calvino and general historical geekery, so we have a lovely night of playing frisbee in the dark and walking on the beach and when it starts raining, we decamp to my place for sitting around the kitchen table talking until it gets late. We were talking about Uzbekistan and Syrian-Lebanese relations and Chechnya and lo and behold the next morning I'm reading about some Chechen kids and a big-ass manhunt. This whole police-statey thing weirds out my quasi-libertarian side of my brain, and it reminds me of those scenes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of my friends points out the plot similarities to a Die Hard movie and I'm thinking of Sacco and Vanzetti and what more perfect enemies than both Russkis (never mind that it's a different ethnicity) and Muslims combined into the same group. I don't know, my brain is trying to process all of this. I don't claim to make sense here.