the dog came back inside today with burrs all over her back and i got mad i said goddamn it violet i just picked a bunch of burrs out of your beard yesterday and then here you are again and commenced pulling little green fresh burrs out of the hair on her back which is much easier than the fur on her face i say fur not hair because that's a better word for it and i apologize for the personification like word i used to describe her fur ie the hair on her back which makes her sound like a hairy human like so many of us with hair on our backs in varying degrees but the point is i got mad and then got to picking burrs out of the fur on her back and the back yard is clear the sun finally came back today just in the last couple hours as i sat eating dinner and reading the paper in this two bedroom and mostly empty of people house in wisconsin i ate dinner and read the paper while watching the cnn news show the situation room which showed lots of bad news and one light hearted story about condi rice that lasted a couple minutes but other than that it was bad news across the board in iraq afganistan and our politicians ragging on each other and on the news services of course i would occasionally flip to fox news just to see what was going on there and it was all car crashes in ohio and not the war which cnn was broadcasting pictures and stories from it was depressing and mind numbing and how much bad news can one person actually take and maybe now i get it when people say i don't watch the news because it depresses me and others who ask if you actually watch or read the news and its all bad including the education report and makes me wonder how it could get better and it could warning political comment really they should cut loose rumsfeld and really the bush administration but that won't happen but rumsfeld seems like a possibility and its freaking crazy how much worse the war is going and the entire middle east but you don't need me to tell you this but what are we going to do about this but anyway whoever works at cnn must be some kind of robot or incredibly tough to stomach so much suffering detail on a daily basis or maybe one gets used to it seemingly not a solution just to endure but a survival technique corporate media to disband the united states somewhere in between exit ramps on the highway frightened midwesterner signing off