A similar fire as to 2025 Switzerland fire took place in Gen X's youth.  The panic was not only about dead and wounded, but "youth" becoming premiere.  "Outside the box" and so by-passing the ranks in such fields as paparazzi-style-"journalism" and espionage.  Faster and quicker were filling in the gaps and divides between people of different ages.  

  I remember Angela Lansberry (sp?) being "equally disgusted" with young and older being so hateful to each other, to the same team. 

  Way back then some of the youngest adults in the Western world were being shoved into the professions, as "the edge".  Sharp sword edges really in all the fields and trades because of greed and desire.  Ambition and desperation.  And an increasing number of factors at play in the old "chess games". 

  Europe and Asia had long been slow establishment in terms of world history.  "Rich kids" weren't even the size of mosquitos to the elephant of the world.  The baby boom generation of world leaders was just begin-ing when the Soviet Union weakened financially and the walls of the Old World got a few crumbly bits.  But East and West held sway on many issues.  Traditional human beings was of primary concern. 

  That being so, "rails" were necessary to avoid train wrecks and collisions.  Diplomacy people'd up where it could.  Investigations into alleged "crimes" took on divisions and modern "murder mysteries" may have become "genre" but "interference" was still against most countries' laws.  Technology slowly got sold as stabilizing forces intermingled with markets.  And when "the streets" as opposed to "royalty" settled down mostly, "geopolitics" almost replaced the more elusive politique and the body politic. 

  In Academia people balanced being both businesses and campuses.  Juggled conferencing and seminar with "course load" and development.  Wrestled with levels of competency and experience.  And started again to publish in journals (different than magazines). 

  "There are always going to be ugly truths in this world.  Focus up.  And wake up America.  You can take a little criticism now and then." 

  Not everyone could of course.  Hormones, personal lives, the press to survive and thrive or "die" was like its own kind of machinery.  "Flung from the carousel and the ladders," a mime frankly admitted on a pretzel break. 

  "Would you like to peek at our notebooks?"  Youth asked him just as he took a bite and it was hard to answer verbally.  "Studying?" He seemed humbled by the very possibility.  We nodded and told of Architecture and Set Design and Fashion and just writing.  The mime had been joined by other mimes and more pretzels and each admonished the one who'd talked.  Then each one mimed contented and maybe a little sleepy.  "Like history and civilization," a youth said.  A mime shrugged.

"So are you saying the exorcism

  didn't work?" 

  "Please don't tell them." 

  "It worked on some of us.  All that mumbo jumbo got us to quite drinking." 

  "Less toasting." 

  "What became of the Priest who tried?" 

  "Slain." 

The whys were harsh all over the world.

Only a few neighbor kids came through

  the roads and tunnels of bramble.  Just back.  

  "What'dwee miss?" 

  "Why so few?" 

  People crowded round people to record every spoken word. 

Word came.

  "Ixnay theah stepney childrenay 

  "BOOK.  And stop talking pug Latin please, you'll corrupt my children."  Robot-dancing children, some tall, some short whikiwheered their ways over to a knot of grownups.  Everyone had a lot of projects on their plates and like diplomats were dividing vacation zones into spheres and zones. 

  A third understudy for Lucille Ball slipped her way out of a vat of grapesmashing.  Huh, someone grabbed a baby's "spit up" towel and made a desperate attempt to clean up the filthy tracks left behind from a gradual stomp over to the aw-dervs.  Little hot dogs in pastry.  The hiked up skirt fell to ankle length as a woman, an actual, biological woman took a babe in arms.  "Did y'all leave me out of a literary discussion?" 

  "Stop it.  Stop it," another lady air-grabbed for the towel.  She tried to stop the man's obsessive compulsions to clean and not to waste.  "That's why we're doing this outside this time," a lady in the vat waved her hand at the beautiful sunshine.  "Fresh air," started a man in a moustache, "And far less cleanup," the handwaving lady announced okay day, okay with this much work. 

  "How difficult?" Another man asked while taking the baby.  "Quite," said a person in a typecast Detective "get up" holding a magnifying glass to fingernails to affirm that an impeccable manicure had been given the man.  "It's very simmulahr." A person on Nana's golden phone sounded trying to convince the MOST most famous Director in the world. 

  "What is?" Different people asked simultaneously of difficult and similar. 

BoooofhphmpAH

  The woman fell on all fours when she'd run smack into a kiddie pool.  "That'll be a bruise," to several other people commenting, gasping, laughing, and one person being tackled by a body without arms but flailing in an air jump.  "WHADDYA TELL HER TO RUN FOR ARSEHOLE????" 

  "Wa, wah, WE'D HAD TO." 

  "SO THAT MEANS WE SHOULD TOO?????" 

  The tackled fell into laughing hugs. 

  "YOU DON'T GET IT!!" 

  Ssssshhh, sssssh, "Blind, not deaf, remember." 

  "What don't we get?  And don't call anyone a communist again or I will have to smother you." 

  "I am so SICK OF POLITICS!" Someone yelled. 

  "Yeah, I think a line has been crossed myself." 

  "POOL'S RUINED." 

  "Where are those going to have their puppies?" A glance in the direction of dogs rescued from a "pound". 

  "Is that what this is for?" 

  Shocked awes.  "You didn't?" 

  "Oh I did." The majesty said. 

  Some people chose to get up off the ground, others stayed put. 

  "What were you thinking?" 

  A huuuuumph and laugh.  "You all need to love again." 

  Na-ah, no way, a lady said to her promised man (nobody was going to be sexual for seven years, past even their "promises" made in front of family and church groups to wait until marriage). People shot stares and awkward gawks at the couple talking implying the question:  Is someone pressuring someone?  

  "We can't AFFORD TO feed a puppy."  The man's shoulders slumped, sad, dejected.  "AND, we'll be traveling." The man's eyes grew wide and his shoulders lifted his back straight and tall.  "Really?" 

  "Where you sneaking off to you two?" 

  A hand held up two cigarettes. 

  Puff, puff, drag, blowing smoke out relief.  "What did you mean?" 

  "About what?" 

  "And I quote, 'We'd had to.'" 

  "It's complicated." 

  A cigarette crushed out with a shoe'd foot.  "Try me." 

  "I, I...." 

  "Don't trust me?" 

  "Trust you?" 

  Eyes peeking through bushes.  One's down on one knee.  Is it a proposal?  I can't hear that far away. 

"These accomodations are killing us."

  The flight attendents crammed the last of the seemingly shrunken meals into the racks. 

  One passenger griped out loud, "Really.  What are you trying to do?  Take over the flight?"  A business-suited, Saudi head-wear man was stared at.  "Must be sitting in the front row," someone said like an actor had said in a movie.  Forced a laugh and told of other funny lines in the script.  Others started staring at others aboard.  The regal man took a palm pilot from his breast pocket, typed in something, then said in heavily accented English, "Please, you are making me very uncomfortable."  A minder gently backhanded a staring person's arm.  The person continued to glare.

"

Dismembered????"  The law students had been called and jetted to Trifalgar Square and were getting an earfull.  

  A report was heard.  Gunshots?  Fireworks? People helping people change their outfits wondered out loud as everyone inside fell silent. 

Glass broke and a projectile thumped onto a stolen "cafè table" that was actually a big spool for cable or wire.  Voices shouted from the shadows: Come out, come out vherevah yooooos are.  Just a spot of flesh peeking out between black gloves and blackish long coat revealed human forms amongst shubbery.  "Yah! Dis eesz TRIFALGAR, NOT TRIFAGGOT pussies." 

  A man with a hand over the mouth of a woman in a more than twenty minute shock scream when she'd come to being cut out of a sar-coph-o-caus pulled our front line of just good citizens back, back.

  Someone scrambled forth to blow out a candle and felt for the thing that had thumped onto the table.  It was a large stone with a threat tied to it. 

  "Had it been true?"  What the already gone person said. 

  "There is no sane way to describe quickly what happened on the way towards the (i)Hindustan Times(i).  But, yes, y'er honor, people have been battling near the fringes of the protests.  Yes, dismembered.  Yes, cut up, sliced, seared, hung up on telephone poles beside the train tracks..." 

  "Like crucifixions?"  Someone shit their pants.  "Avocados did me in." 

  "And as 'bags of garbage'.  Some of our USO found their loved ones' body parts in such bags." 

  "Oh my God, Oh my God," an Indian friend started chanting.

By the time we'd gotten there...

  Planet Earth had been loosely coral'd as far as excessive movement distracting precision warfare. 

  "The Best" in the world had volunteered life and limb, resources and intellectual input for last ditch efforts at reversing course on shutting down and walking back rhetoric, at least as far as how fast "policy" could be read.

     "They've smushed them," a runner relayed to a side of the stoppage. 

  Between train cars. 

  "And stomped all over the 'evidence'." 

  "Okay.  Okay.  Our team is leaving." 

  "I told you." 

  Still someone clucked chickens.  And made gross kissing noises. 

  Oriana's long legs almost weak knee'd at having watched people ground into flesh and bone powder mixed with dirt.  Still, as a leader, she strode to meet a deadline of giving word about situation. 

  "Fucking mul

  "Never mind 

  "I think we should express a statement about different cultures handling things differently." 

  "Who asked you bitch?" A franco-type roamed the razor thin space between worldly activists and people covered in jeel-abahs. 

  Some "nuns" had also carried through with their devotional prayers at an altar's side.  Two were dead but posed kneeling until we could collect their earthly bodies.  Two were "hiding" a small person between themselves, this person was trying to resist Muslim duties.  Allied troops single-filed behind the pray-ers since an old map showed a demarcation line.  Some of the women there had been forced to chomp on valium and other subdue-ing herbs to quiet their hysterics.  "For some may not want to live," was all a woman pounded with books related.

  The videography had been deftly carved by literati trying to beat paparazzi.  All of it confiscated had to be still-framed and documented.

  "The whole fucking world is a crime scene right now," a "worker" from Scotland Yard spit out a plug of tobacco into a thinned meaty hand.  "As far as he is concerned, that's true," a woman thumbed at the he that had spoken so loudly.  "And you are?" A flashbulb blinded the subject speaking as a Reporter, Press person turned with a pen and notebook.  "I'm the old gut's missus." 

"It won't be forever, like peasants,"

  the young French woman coo'd to the magazine man.  The morning commute had brought us through canals.  The more-metropolis-bound were standing soldiers of finance on a pallet raft above flooded train tracks.  Crossing to boats and to enter the underground of Paris.  She'd fished out a few coins to get us all a bakery item to share when only crumbs were on the newspapers to read.  The usuals were getting back to work.  Photographs of feet with ambitions of getting foot in door. 

  Somewhere. 

  "It's a costume.  And you must put it on," the Worcester boyman looked at the tall French man in solid tights and poofy shorts, "Not exactly sure those will fit me." 

  "Not the tights.  Those are mine." 

  Pigeons alighting from the reading tables revealed thieves carrying the furniture off. 

  Deep inhales of the vibrant colors' inky smell.  Dances with newspapers had seemingly overnight turned to frameable magazine art for some.  Serious newsprint people scoffed at the exuberance displayed by a more generic lot of writers at the trophies freeing from beat.  A man with keys on a necklace chain viewed the scene.  Surveying as marketing.  

  "Happy response?" A man in a bathrobe with a towel on his head joined the liminal people on the veranda.  

  In between the darkness of night and a day dawning--the pulse of city is more a few lights streaming to connect humans to actual production.  Still shots of lights on the move.  Streamers. 

  "Would you like to know more about our city?" 

  Cribnotes snatched.  "Spying?" 

  "What say they?" 

  "Fools." 

     Mignots, like, people who are sweet and weak, from those kind of spots, in lines, last chances, for? 

  "Very good, thank you." 

  "We've just stuffed our faces on the very last eggs, parboiled, here." 

  Invitations, real stationery, place cards, silver trays--tarnished.  The streets are full of them this morning.  Pillow cases and velvety bags with the lasts