The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

I feel like starting on or around 9/11, time stopped, as everyone scrambled and tried to pick up the pieces or deal with the parade of horrible mistakes that were about to get made — 

There was no chance Al Qaeda would win, and as little chance of a Democratic Bushtopia. And we sat with the lies, and the malapropisms, and the senseless deaths we did not register or understand – maimed young men maimed for a lie – and nothing much seemed to happen – I fell in love once and got my life together, without hope or purpose — 

A fermata in history. 

Now, finally, after an eight year exhaustion, time & history have started their inexorable crawl again, faster and faster now. Perhaps this is a function of being older, and knowing and being told that it will soon be on me and my like to govern this dying planet — 

Even as it glistens so magnificently. 

The great political experiments have all failed. The Great White Hope Barack Obama — just another Clinton. 

But the Middle East is changing. China is rising. I am the average age of the human in the world. The world belongs to the future now. And it comes.