Yep, it only took oh, 500 or so shots before I got the one I wanted. Happy frickin’ Friday.

This week has sucked. Plain and simple. The earthquakes on the financial markets have threatened far too many, and caused me to face the idea that my entire career’s efforts could be wiped out by the greed and carelessness of a few.

It was a week where everything that we might trust, even a little bit, was shaken. Some will say that fools place their trust in institutions, but who here expected the kind of across-the-board shakeouts that we’ve seen this week? I’ve spent 30 years telling clients that the word “prudent” meant diversification, safe investments. You know, like mortgages, FDIC-insured accounts, spread risk among mutual funds. All that. At this point, I couldn’t guarantee that money in a mattress would be worth much.

With that in mind, and because it’s Friday, and because this week has made me want to tear my hair out, here’s a toast to my friends online and off, a picture and some music. I hope your weekend satisfies and that for at least a few minutes, you can relax and forget all the bad news for a bit. Music courtesy of the CSUN combo, with Sticks on drums, photo mine.

Have a great weekend.

Not talking to the folks who live on the Gulf Coast, particularly those close to Galveston. I have received some email with unverified claims of coverups and press blackouts concerning the number who died. But more disturbing even than that is Julie Pippert’s recent post linking up the number of Superfund sites in her area:

I live by quite a few superfund sites—chemical and manufacturing plants. In fact, my area is home to “the nation’s largest concentration of chemical plants and refineries,” many of which are not even close to being in compliance with the EPA and other safety standards.

Were they inundated too?

What all else has my area been exposed to as a result of breaches from the hurricane?

I already know my area was unsafe and unhealthy, before Ike hit. I’ve blogged about it many times, testified before the EPA in an open hearing, and pestered when, who where and how I can to improve health and safety conditions in my community.

In my humble speculative opinion, there are a major vulnerabilities here:
* citizen vulnerability due to unsafe plants and businesses that are not in compliance with standards
* those selfsame plants and businesses were in vulnerable spots hit hard by Hurricane Ike
* what confidence or reassurance can residents have that their only “hazard” is from “wastewater plants?”
* the biggest vulnerability? Republican politicians who enable these businesses to keep the standards lower than is best and safest for people who live there, and who do not enforce compliance—right before an election.

Really, let’s get some reporters on this. Lives may depend upon it.

The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems…

- Wallace Stevens (Lesser Poems)

Although I’ve completed my protest posting of photos of the Pacific coastline over on the political blog, I have a few more that I took at the end of August while watching a sunset that felt like a gift from God. So I’ll post those here…and at the same time, remember those who are suffering as a result of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, including some blogging friends.

Even though we’re in a horrible economy right now, and things are tight everywhere, please try to make a donation to the Red Cross to help the folks out who have been devastated.

Go visit Julie Pippert’s blog to get an idea of what she came back to, then multiply that by tens of thousands…they need attention and help. There is a sort of general sense that because they aren’t New Orleans, they’re getting no media attention. I think that’s likely true to some extent, though I’d also include the bleak financial news that kicked off this week as another reason.

Anyway, help if you can. As will I, and every little bit will hopefully help folks like Julie.

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

(Yes I am still on my poetry binge, though I’m transitioning from TS Eliot to Wallace Stevens. It’s so dang nice to pick up old friends and get re-acquainted…and maybe even go back to writing some myself, though it’s been a long, long time…)

My heart goes out to all of the families and friends of the victims. This train is one that Sticks rides regularly. He has a late class on Friday and had to drive. Had he taken the train on a normal day, this would have been his train. As well,another one of the victims listed here is the close friend of a close friend…gratitude and grief, comingled…

Remember them, even if you did not know them. Because they represent the urgency, the fierce urgency, of now.

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.