What If...

...you woke up one morning......to discover that what you thought was reality...
...suddenly burst...
...and spiraled downward...
...and the women...
...and men you so admired...
...left even the sleeping idiots in shock..
...while casting you as a dancing fool..
...who for too long embraced the power of markets to push us forward, without realizing the ones that can actually do that...
...are the ones that you've never taken the time to visit.

Biggest. Drop. Ever.

After having a great visit with Gary's first grade students, this afternoon I headed down to Ground Zero and Wall Street since I've not been there in years and it's a place that's been on many of our minds lately. I got there just around the time the news about the failed attempts to push through the bailout hit and stocks were falling. People weren't jumping out of buildings, but the place was swarming with reporters, tourists who weren't exactly smiling and the air was filled with an odd stiffness I've never experienced in the neighborhood.

Making it all the more surreal, I saw a glimpse of myself while watching a CNN report on my jetBlue flight back home.

This was definitely not the highlight of my Manhattan trip, but I thought I'd post it since it's a rare time that I actually crossed paths so closely with world news.

Photos and stories of my four days in Manhattan to follow, but I'm now ready for bed since it's nearly 2 a.m. Eastern Time. Mouse beat me to the punch with this slide show.

Black Monday

Yesterday over cake and coffee a friend and I were talking election nightmares the way I used to tell ghost stories with fellow Wolf scouts by a camp fire enjoying 'smores and hoping I wasn't being too blatant at looking up their shorts. As I babbled on about how I still held that image of Obama in the stadium in Denver and those wonderful "real people" testimonials, we both imagined a McCain-Palin White House. McCain would be dead in the first six months. If not by natural causes then by the gun of a hired pair of Russian/Iranian hitmen. A President McCain is more likely to be the target of a right wing bullet than a President Obama, we concluded.

Oddly at the most secure financial position in my life that could still suddenly slide down the slippery slope, I must relish that today's news from Wall Street may be the same fuel that turned the tide in 1992. I really want to attend Bye Bye Bush parties the way I didn't on a blustery January night in 1993, filled with hope that there really is justice in the world. I still believe and demand that hope return.