Yesterday and today have blurred into one, dear reader, at least over here.  I know there is separation somewhere, but you will hopefully forgive if I have trouble finding it.

A day like this demands the kind of emotional bifurcation that would make a saner man pull over, vomit into the nearest ditch, and reassess his life choices.  But not us, dear reader.  No, we ride the razor’s edge with a kind of reckless, wide-eyed gratitude, because history has finally decided to stop mumbling into its sleeve and instead shout something worth hearing.

The Persians are dancing.  Not metaphorically, not in some wistful, diaspora-poetry way, but literally dancing, bodies unshackled, hair uncovered, wine flowing like the collective bloodstream of a people who have waited far too long for the boot to lift.  The downfall of the Islamic Regime, that decades-long monolith of fear and clerical sadism, is cracking open like a rotten pomegranate, and the seeds spilling out are incandescent with possibility.  I’ve been drinking Syrah with people who haven’t tasted freedom in their homeland for generations, and let me tell you, the stuff hits different when it’s paired with the sound of theocracy collapsing under it own sanctimonious weight (and the military might of the United States and Israel, both commanded by the only men in my lifetime with the sack to actually do something beyond hand-wringing and moralistic bitching).  There’s a kind of cosmic justice in the air, the sort that makes you believe the universe occasionally remembers to do its goddamn job.

But the universe, being the fickle, bipolar bastard it is, never gives without taking.  And so, while the streets of Tehran hum with the electricity of rebirth, the halls of the Dead Poets Society have gained a new resident.

Dan Simmons is gone.
Seventy-seven years old, felled by a stroke, and suddenly the world feels a little less sharp, a little less dangerous, a little less willing to stare into the abyss and report back with something other than platitudes.  Simmons was one of the rare ones, the kind of writer who carved his stories, chisel to bone, leaving behind works that felt like they’d been smuggled out of some forbidden archive where the librarians carried knives.  Song of Kali, one of my all-time favorites, remains one of the most unsettling, intoxicating pieces of fiction ever unleashed on the unsuspecting public, a book that doesn’t just frighten you but contaminates you.  And Hyperion – that cathedral of myth, machinery, and metaphysics – was proof that science fiction could still punch holes in the sky and let the dark matter leak through.  And then there was Children of the Night….

To lose him on a day like this feels like some cosmic accountant balancing the ledger with cold, bureaucratic precision.  A regime falls, a titan falls.  A people rise; a voice goes silent.  Celebration braided with sorrow, like barbed wire wrapped in silk.

And yet, dear reader, maybe that’s the only way days like this can exist.  Maybe joy without grief is too flimsy to trust, and grief without joy is too heavy to bear.  Maybe the only honest way to live in this absurd, flaming carnival of a world is to raise a glass to the living, pour one out for the dead, and keep marching forward with the kind of defiant swagger that would make both the Persians in the streets and Dan Simmons in whatever cosmic library he’s haunting nod in approval.

So drink.  Mourn.  Celebrate.  Rage.  Repeat.

N.P.: “I Know You Can Feel It – Working Men’s Club Remix” – Nine Inch Nails