Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken

I guess happy new years are in order to everyone who deserves them. To those of you who don't deserve one, and you know who you are, you get a big raspberry.

This will be the last week of the schedule of the weird, for a few weeks anyway. This hopefully means some decent sleep for a change. Sleep is necessary when your psyche is as fragile as mine, one bad week and I'm heading to the desert for 40 days to commune with god.

I'm uneasy about the new year, as regular readers will know. Actually I've been uneasy since the early nineties. People who know me find it hard to believe I'm an optimist, but I've found it necessary that in order to be an optimist you must confront the darkness in front of you in order to burst through it. If you don't acknowledge the darkness, it will surely overwhelm you.

More and more people I'm finding in recent months are finally starting to acknowledge the dark secret of western society, our inability to deal with homeless people. Perhaps it's because the problem has now moved to the suburbs.