Use that rage

It was such a normal day. Hot, but not unbearable. Beirut was plastered and yet void. Plastered with cars and bad drivers, plastered with hot air from air conditioning units and hotter air from empty political promises. Plastered with inflation, escalating inequality, and economic depression. The city and the country were plastered with work for the lucky and void of work for too many. Plastered with corruption but void of civil and political sanity. Void of certainty, void of equality, void of water and electricity. No mind. After regular working hours there was food shopping to be done. It was such a normal day. Until right after 6:00 p.m. when the signs of the catastrophe announced themselves in an alleyway halfway up the hill of Achrafieh with a roaring noise that this writer’s heuristic had never known and thus misidentified as the noise of jets breaking the sound barrier. Something