Is this really a surprise?

So I've just put Saddam to bed, so to speak. I've been living with him and with the shadows and glare of the spotlight for way too long. The bed is littered with printouts from every journal, newspaper, etc., immaginable, along with xeroxes (now there's an archaic term) from a stack of books on the war that thankfully belong to the libraries of RI and not to me. My computer is burned out and the Explorer "favorites" file under "Saddam" is stuffed to the gills with links. I wait to hear from emails I sent to some of the participants of the event itself.

It's time to throw up and purge Baghdad from my gut for a while. If I don't, I'll probably start making grevious errors just to get it done. I've finished with the dictator, the news and the boys from Paducah for a while.

After a short break to write a play or make a movie, it will be back to the killing fields- only this time to 18th century France and the vicious revolution. Now there were people who killed statues just for the hell of it, for the anger and the passion and the revenge and the bitterness of it. No cameras for them. It was all real stuff in the age of the Enlightenment. (I think. One never knows with these things...)

What I did learn from my time in Iraq was that it's a bitch to write about current events of a political nature without having your partisanship hang out- hell, without having your partisan feelings blind you. No doubt about how I feel about the administration. No doubt how I feel about the war, and the cowed and compliant media. But when I read back my first polished draft, even I was appalled at how evident it was that I colored most of my reportage in the hues of disgust. A well-chosen adverb here. A not-so-subtle ommission of a title there.

Fortunately, one of my readers is a sober-minded critic who also happens to be of the Republican persuasion. I like this guy tremendously for keeping me from tipping over into the cauldron of slaver and bile, and doing it with civility. The other reader is my man David. His eye is honed and his ear is tuned and he is to be trusted on every count. Between these two, I feel that I can navigate the whirlpools...

But now for a breather. A drink. A snifter. A snootful...