2025iii2, Sunday: Moments.

I'm tired.

Partly this is because this has been a pain of a crunch of a week. One of those tsunamis of clashing deadlines and obligations where you just try, somehow, to surf the crest without toppling off and letting anyone down too badly.

But mostly because of - well, you know - all this stuff. That's going on. The gleeful wrongness oozing from the new US administration and its satraps, its Vichy-esque apologists, and any who would make any common cause with them at all.

It's exhausting. And yes, I know it's meant to be.

I can't. Even. Not just now.

I have a couple of pieces brewing. When I have the energy.

But till then, two long-familiar pieces of text have sprung to mind in these past couple of days. Which encapsulate, better than anything I can write just now, how I'm feeling. The darkness. And, perhaps, the hope for light. It being better to light a candle than merely to curse the gloom.

Neither is terribly original. Both will be very, very familiar to a certain class of nerd (albeit quite likely different classes of nerd for each).

But I think they're apposite. So here we go.

First up: that old favourite, Hunter S Thompson.

Nightmare of a bloke, in many ways.

But the volume collecting his writings on the road for Rolling Stone during the 1972 US Presidential Election - the one which Nixon won by a mighty landslide, and during which his fixers broke into an office and kicked off the scandal that ultimately cost him his presidency - is to my mind his masterpiece. I haven't read the whole thing for years, but I must have read it half a dozen times since first encountering it more than 30 years ago.

And the September piece from Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 nails it, despite being written more than half a century ago:

If the current polls are reliable... Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states... This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

I'm not sure we've yet got the final answer to that one.

Then there's something far, far more geeky than that.

I've written about Babylon 5 before. I think I may even have quoted this speech.

It's from the character which changed, and grew, and learned, more than any other over the five years of that remarkable show. G'Kar, who started out as something of a one-note joke; a vicious, untrustworthy former freedom-fighter keen to make his former oppressor suffer in every way his people had, and more. And who became a philosopher, a writer, a beacon of honesty and humility and honour. The late Andreas Katsulas, who played the character, did something truly wonderful and exceptional over those five years. Yes, the writing was great too. But Andreas made G'Kar live. As few long-lived characters, in genre or elsewhere, have done before or since.

This speech ended the show's third season; its best. The fourth was great, mostly. The fifth, much more patchy. But this is worth hearing (or watching), not just reading: not merely as an index of an iconic show at its height, but also as a meditation on seeing clearly when the light seems to be failing. While G'Kar speaks from the midst of darkness (and knows that darkness far, far too well) that is not where his attention wholly lies. And every word - every word - speaks to me, today. Perhaps it's not just me.

It was the end of the Earth year 2260, and the war had paused, suddenly and unexpectedly.
All around us, it was as if the universe were holding its breath . . . waiting.
All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation. This had the feeling of both.
G'Quon wrote: "There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities – it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender."
The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation.
No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us.
We know only that it is always born in pain.

"The war we fight is not against powers and principalities. It is against chaos and despair."

Indeed.