Of course, by the time I finished debriefing Dottie and her husband, the eleven was over. I contented myself with leaving the TV on, volume down, and hunting around on the radio dial for some info. Rhode Island has a great many attractive natural features, but an all-news radio station is not one of them. Then I looked over at the little black and white screen. A special report? Now why would a network break into one of those?

Sunday 11:55 pm... Oh my freaking god...Coup in Moscow? VP Gennady Yanayev ousts Gorby? KGB involvement? The feeling—the zero bone—of Fear. The Wall came down, but now the Hammer has fallen and it's Real: a leaderless nuclear power rattling around in the centrifugal throes of secessionist frenzy. Should I call people? Wake them up? Tell them to flee the cities? Uh-uh. Where would they go?

Eff it. I sit back to watch Quincy.

"I...I can explain..."
-Dr. Frank N. Furter

"Make it good. They shot you last week."
-The Audience

This particular 9" cheap plastic TV, made by some knockoff low-rent electronics concern with the spooky monicker of "Arvin," seems always to inflict a nasty Greek choral tone to the News whenever it can con me into letting it pretend to inform me. It's probably just that time of year I seem to, in it, behold. Usually I'm up here by early August, just in time to see the bell ringing at the Genbaku Domu-mae, or folks gathering around the cenotaph in Nagasaki's Peace Park on Today's Japan.

And it was...what...two years ago...when I managed to get up here early in the summer, end of May, and I sat watching this footage of The Goddess in the Square brought down.

I could even forgive all that, if it wasn't for the plane crashes. Since I started coming up here in the mid-Eighties, not a summer has gone by without at least one low-rez crash site. August 2, 1985: Dallas-Fort Worth; 137 killed. September 6, 1985: Milwaukee; 31. August 31, 1986: Cerritos, CA, mid-air collision; 82. August 16, 1987: Detroit Metro; 156. August 31, 1988: DFW takeoff; 13. July 19, 1989: Sioux City; 112. The horror at the Ramstein airshow followed a couple of days later. Six of the worst air disasters in US history.

Last year, just into August and getting twitchy, I watched with increasing horror as Special Reports fragmented the overnight infomercials with slices of an invasion by an unknown character named Saddam Hussein.

Not that I'm superstitious, but I've begun to be afraid of looking at this particular television late at night, anymore...

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