Postings of these sorts of silly quiz-memes will probably be minimal on my part -- enough other people link them that the chances of my introducing anything new are slim to none.

Still, in the rare cases such as this one when the result of the quiz appears to actually indicate something interestingly accurate about my persona, I'll pass it on.

In this case, in the world of tarot cards...

I've always rather fancied artist Dave McKean's interpretations of the tarot, though, so here are his fool cards from The Vertigo Tarot deck and the book The Particle Tarot.

My arrival at the apartment homestead yester-evening was met by a whole building full of doors plastered with memos from the building management.

Oddly -- and a bit chillingly, as you will see in a moment -- my apartment was apparently the only one lacking these missives. I walked over to a nearby door and quickly read the contents before replacing them on the neighbor's door.

In front, a colorful, festive invitation to a wine and cheese reception for residents on Thursday. Behind that, detailed news of the recent FBI warning of the possible plot to have terrorists occupy residential apartments and rig them with explosives.

At first, I was mildly outraged -- yes, I've already seen some cursory notice of the FBI warning in local media, but isn't this bit of communication important enough to double-check that you've reached everyone?

Ultimately, my mind settled into a more deeply troubling question: assuming something "out of the ordinary" did happen in my building, would I know?

My building is on the whole remarkably secure and safe, with electronic swipe devices at all of the entrances (which work at least most of the time), and two members of local law enforcement paid to live in the building. These and other features were trumpeted by the building management in their memo.

But these things aren't likely to be especially effective against this particular threat. One only notices the out-of-the-ordinary if one knows what "ordinary" is.

Apart from the friendly young entrepreneur woman who lived next door until recently, I don't know anyone in my building. How am I to know if something is amiss in the neighborhood if I don't know the neighborhood? Do I even have a neighborhood?

This is really the problematic difference between "them" and "us", terrorists and their victims.

Terrorists know each other -- their organizations are structured in tightly-knit, almost familial, cellular networks. Even where cells are unaware of each other, there's always a strong trusted link tying them to the rest of the network. Terrorists have one big neighborhood.

On the other hand, we in the U.S. have a government of disconnected bureaucracies, intelligence agencies that distrust each other implicitly, a government that distrusts the public, and a populace increasingly disconnected from the people and places in their immediate surroundings.

As effective group dynamics go, we're in a horrible place. The concepts of "neighborhood" and "cooperation" are becoming about as foreign in the U.S. as the concept of "class action litigation" would be in Zimbabwe.

I'm not sure what to do about it on the national level (and indeed I have little hope of improvement -- an Australian work visa is looking like an increasingly attractive option), but on the local level, however accidental the pairing of those two memos probably was, I think the silly wine and cheese party is a step in the right direction.

I hope I'm not the only one who shows up trying to build a little bit of a neighborhood.

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

--Annie Dillard

Well, I've been keeping it to myself for far too long. It's high time I started spending some words.

Thus, I'm re-enacting my web presence, and belatedly entering the world of blogging.

This will be probably turn out to be a pretty eclectic undertaking, a hodge-podge of poetry, photos, musical snippets, provisional opinions and incomplete sentences.

I'll try to make it interesting.

"I think most people are more important than their opinions." -Jorge Luis Borges

I'll try to make it interesting.