THE FALLING LEAVES OF POLITICS

As the leaves fall and slowly bare the trees, exposing the sky for all the majesty it is, the satellite signal is also slowly breaking through, bringing me televised pictures I don't necessarily want to see to the full, calling for frequent surges of will power that I can't always muster (e.g. there's that new program everyone's talking about, and the last segment in that excellent series on History channel is showing right now...).

Thus it was that a few days ago, early in the leaf-fall, one minute I was merely an elder male homo sapiens hanging by one arm from the scaffolding trying to paint under the eaves of our recently re-roofed house up on a mountainside above a lake in central Japan maybe 45 minutes from Kyoto experiencing the zen nothingness of dangling sweating with one arm carefully extended-- like Adam toward God in Michaelangelo's painting, only holding a brown-stain-dripping paint brush, with a white stucco wall playing God-- when my wife stuck her head out the front door and said "Looks like Bush will carry Florida," and the next moment I was an expat American rushing inside to see actual bits of the US election with a paintbrush in my hand.

There were flashing pixels of foto-ops, some pixels of Bush's nose superimposed on stripes of the White House, some stutters of a sound bite, then some Kerry hair and an ear and his wife saying "Shove it" I think it was, and some other stuttery pixelated statements I couldn't make out, random distillations of politics in which nothing was really lost, I know what the characters all look like and it's easy to imagine what there is for them to say, we've heard it all, who needs candidates really, even when the leaves fall. But with the pixel count increasing daily I'll have to find more and more things to do outside, and never bring dripping paintbrushes into the house.