Just the slightest bit depressed today.

The slightest bit depressed because academia in this country is rapidly traveling to Hell in a hand basket. A lamp from another time that should have been our own, that seems always to be growing fainter though we require its warmth now more than ever... in the cold, rusting bottom of a steel hand basket traveling toward Hell.

And the hand basket is being passed hand-to-hand along a far-reaching line of people who really ought to know better. They ought to know better than to pass something so beautiful, dim and fragile though it is, along a line of death, into a pit of suffocating smoke and rapacious fire that reduces everything to ashes...

Academia in this country is rapidly traveling to Hell in a hand basket.

And the hand basket has finally rusted through. And all that beautiful academia is spilt all over the floor. Shards of it lie here and there... Careful that you don't step on it, but then again, better to step on that shattered old thing than on any toes. Oh well. Academia is spilt all over the floor.

And the floor is made of AstroTurf. Sickly green AstroTurf, AstroTurf that tries to be something but can just never get where it wants to be. AstroTurf and plain old dirt. Rub it in your cuts, slather it onto your bruises, cram it into your ears, grind it into your eyes.

And your neighbor's eyes, while you're at it.

And there are no mops big enough to clean up the monstrous puddle, the sporadically blushing carnage beneath the broken basket: The bones of art programs. The blood of world history. The entrails of foreign languages, clumps of hair from the scalp of the spelling bee, shreds of the skins of higher test scores...

There are no mops big enough. Not even if mops worked on AstroTurf.

And so these fragments of the dimly glowing coals of the Renaissance are being left behind, and won't even decompose to feed something newer.

Because AstroTurf is not even real grass.


Hell, I tell you. Those coals that powered Galileo and da Vinci through the night have nearly been extinguished, replaced by LED bulbs, steel, the Model T, progress, AstroTurf... Academia, there you are, neatly diced to 420 characters, devoid of any personality.

The only consolation is that there are people on the sides looking timidly at the mess, and pointing out with quivering hands the coals, suggesting with a stutter that if we but sheltered them as they are and blew at them cautiously every once in a while, that gentle beam of inspiration might again flood the hall.

The only consolation, however, is pushed back against the cold stone walls, forced to its knees, stripped of everything but the morning, the evening, the dirt and the AstroTurf. The AstroTurf holds no heat, the dirt no comfort. The only consolation that the only consolation has, is the knowledge that the morning breeds the evening breeds another morning, and someday a breeze might come along - of its own accord! - and breathe a stronger light out of those dimming coals...