Bad things come in them.

Triplets appear as them.

Days as most are lived are divided into them, with sleep, work and other stuff filling the triad.

Crisis used to be defined as something that can be solved in three, recognized in three or dealt with for three of whatever.

Like three months. Anyone can handle anything for three months. 90 days. Simple. Piece of cake. Which should probably be cut into eights or nines rather than thirds. But I digress.

This time though, this one time in our history, we are inundated with debacles that come with no limits. No simple end in sight is seen. Politics, environment, economy. Three of the four horsemen running through those brains trapped under layers of hairspray holding those good hair guys preaching today that the oil spewing into the Gulf is either an act of an angry God for acts of sinful lust in the hearts of all who don't see the world as they do.

That world used to have very clear lines of right and wrong, black/white, no gray shading allowed. Now, the whole world is being inundated with a pollution event that could rival the sudden appearance of some asteroid that could wipe us all out as it covers the richest ecosystem in the world with black, brown, gray or reddish ooze, coating abundant and endangered alike in a slick coat of death.

Can't blame that on moral failures of the dancing boys and girls in the French Quarter or just on the consumptive nature of the West. Then again, we can't offend the oil execs with accurate allegations of criminal negligent ecoside. Can't, can't or won't...put the blame where the blame belongs.

This isn't your normal Act of God. This is the retribution for worshiping something that the evangelists can't bring themselves to name. This could be it. Apocalypse on the horizon.

Ain't gonna be no ninety day wonder either.

Couple that with the honest to goodness, doing good, do gooders being shot numerous times in the backs of their heads, execution style, and a country that cannot say the words, "We were profoundly and massively wrong," and we have part the second.

Part the third is the ongoing meltdown of the economy that began in 1929, abated some, got a nudge and a serious push from deregulated bankers and investment houses, and Part hte second appeared in 2008, after raising its head earlier in the 90's and 2007, and now Act 3 is going on in the Eurozone.

Add in the H1N1, pollution from all those other sources, scourges, plagues of ravening greedy genocidal hordes cloaked in a mantel of some religion that is not a belief held by their victims, the dying honey bees, the intrusion of genetically modified food into the mouths of all and sundry in the most uncontrolled study (?) of tolerance to and usefulness of gene manipulated foodstuffs, and that is way more than three.

But, just this week, just this week, three are my limit.

I don't know about you, but three is all I can handle. Nothing I have written of is even close to my own crises of life.

Like being unpaid. Again. Like having my identity stolen. For the third time. Like the pantry running to empty because of not being paid and my identity now being someone else's. For the third time, I note in pain filled irony.

Then again, it could be solved in 90 days. Three months.

Piece of cake.