Alpha, Beta, Epsilon, Theta

So this morning was truly STORMWATCH 2006!!!!. The water was running off the eaves in sheets, and some poor soul's window screen was blown onto my porch. But the most compelling sight of my morning, when I finally shuffled off my warm and downy sheets and kicked the basset/beagle off the bed, was the view out my big living room window, as train after train ran down from Pasadena, each one full of plastic pod people.














They were coming from the near-drowned Rose Parade, wearing their brilliant multi-colored rain ponchos, and from a hundred feet away, they looked amazing on the enamel-white train cars of the Gold Line. As they slid past the spotless concrete platform that stood with a shock of bright light against the darkly spitting slate sky, I could glance just for a moment how past "futurists" must have imagined our high-tech, reason-infused, clean and modern age.

Then I remembered that they were a bunch of people in wet plastic, crammed onto a public train, probably smelling much like the basset/beagle who had just come in from the yard, marking triangular mud prints across the kitchen linoleum. I cut a piece of pecan pie and a glass of milk and went back to bed with my book. A couple of miles away, the parade ground to its regular halt.