Luke 12:33

At this point, I'd really just appreciate the opportunity to be bored. You'd think with all this free time I had off--closing in on a month out of work with no real end in sight--I'd have ample time to while uncounted hours, pottering around getting myself in trouble with new hobbies, which I guess I have been if you count "developing a lower back problem" a hobby. If nothing else, it has the benefit of being free.

"Free" is an important aspect for any new hobby in a state of affairs I like to call "post-income." I seem to have transcended the brutal cycle of paycheck-bills-paycheck-bills by having one of those elements eliminated for me by people I've spent time and energy voting into office. Actually, that's not fair, I definitely didn't vote for this president or the person who has been my completely invisible and useless House district representative my entire adult life. But somehow, these people I vehemently object to with all of my available energy* and protest in the strongest possible terms (which in 2025 means, basically, typing it in this box and hitting PUBLISH, that'll show 'em), have pushed me into this new era of personal enlightenment wherein I look upon my possessions without the limiting bonds of ownership and instead of thinking "how do I maintain my hoard at any and all costs?" transitioning to "I wonder if there's a market online for slightly used socks?"

I'm not at the point where I am considering trying to sell my lightly worn underthings, but I'm definitely seeing it all with new eyes. I think of all the fall-away days where I just flitted through this ridiculously oversized four-bedroom palace for one man and a cat and took zero time to consider how burdened I am by the material, my eyes glazed over by the static and fog of the day-to-day grind to maintain what I have or (best case!) acquire more.

Yes, I'm sort of telling you modern Republicans have turned me toward some principles of actual Christianity. The good news is these are principles none of them would actually recognize or practice, so there's no chance of making me GOP-curious. I'm safe to explore my new asceticism, comfortable in the knowledge that performative capitalist, Christianist fetishization is wholly mutually exclusive with the actual practice of Christianity.

The connection between asceticism and holiness is long established (not just in western cultures), though, so I feel like I'm on the right track. Whether it's communities of monks or nuns living on bread crusts and herbs, sleeping in stone beds and torturing themselves with hair-shirts, fasting, self-flagellation and haircuts specifically designed to make them unfuckable or weird cave-based eccentrics living on their own in self-imposed hermetic exile to achieve mystic communion with the divine, fucked-up anti-social weirdo-hood has been a known path to social and religious transcendence for as long as humans have been keeping records.

I didn't know it, but I've been practicing for it my whole life, I just always called it "acute situational social anxiety." I just needed this little extra push of the elimination of all my income to begin to see the pattern in the noise. When I have my first prophetic visions, I'll be here to publish them here first, NOT behind a paywall for my Patreon subscriber(s). It's not that I don't appreciate them, it's just that this purity shit is only working if someone is bummed out about it. I mean besides just me.

---

*the itemization of what I spend that energy on before I actually get to "object to politicians" I will not be publishing here, but it does fall below things like "watch other people play video games in YouTube," just for scale.

Obligate Ram Ventilator

I typically don't go in for serialization of these posts, as that would violate the one sacrosanct rule I have about my work in this space: don't make it actual work. It's a single phrase, but that encompasses a lot of ideas, like "two hours is too long, unless you spent most of it distracted by YouTube shorts about cats knocking things off shelves" and "never do any actual research, unless by 'research' we mean 90 minute diversions into YouTube shorts about cats knocking things off coffee tables," rock-solid personal ethos stuff like that. The sort of unimpeachable ideas around which one can build not only a limited endeavor like this, but a whole human life.

That said, the ongoing drama of my life has led me to a) skip a week of posting, which almost never happens, because I'm a compulsive weirdo, and b) thrust me in the middle of an ongoing national news story the type of which I have had the luxury to ignore in the past, where I could lazily while away the hours watching Instagram clips of cats knocking things off counter tops (YouTube shorts didn't always exist, you know), none the bloody wiser.

So, to update the major storylines from the last episode:

1) I did indeed go on vacation in the middle of being out of work. It's a weird state of being, enjoying sights and experiences and major metropolitan manhole cover venting smells you've never experienced before while you know you have no money to pay for such things. But when Such Things had already been paid for well before this no-work situation became a thing, well, you do what you do and Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down.

2) I've given away the plot, but it's kind of been out there, so I'm not sure it's much of a spoiler: still not working. Your tax dollars are currently at work somewhere I'm sure, but not in the direction of running the government or paying the salaries of people hired to do it.

I was being overly coy I guess talking about your tax dollars "at work somewhere," as that "somewhere" has also been in the news a fair bit in the active non-allegorical demolition of the White House. I missed the start of that particular subplot as I was busy up a mountain (or what the East Coast adorably pretends is a mountain) taking in the resplendence of a sunset over a horizon of autumn foliage. I'd like to claim I was purposely unplugged; I definitely had my phone with me, but the reception up there is shit. Couldn't even do the Wordle, I just had to take in the wonder of autumn or whatever.

And I guess that's the lesson: normies like me can get sidelined or sidetracked, but completely inexplicable, self-justifying extractive bullshit, well, that has a tick-tock work ethic immune to diversion, distraction or sleep. It just keeps humming along, swimming ever forward like a shark, because, like sharks, these types of enterprises understand that to stop would mean a potential moment for self-reflection, the only thing fatal to a project immune to logic, reason, financial constraint, moral compunction, information, objectivity, decency, empathy or fairness.

Wait, no, sharks just do it because they'll drown if they stop. I don't have any insight into their ambition, fiscal discipline or moral character, that was too far. If I had to guess, I'd say they're probably less Kant or Rousseau and more prone to Ayn Rand or purposefully misreading Nietzsche, but wait, I'm probably talking about Republicans again.

Anyway: New England was great. Saw zero sharks. We went prepared with the correct rain gear, but we only needed it those first two days. I got to come home and start dipping into my saving to pay my mortgage, but again, that's not the vacation's fault. Like looking at the fall leaves, it's valuable as experience, but way less adaptable to any kind of edifying metaphor like the cycles of natural shedding and rebirth. Unless I do eventually get the backpay I'm supposed to get, then I can maybe work up something more poetical and life-affirming for you. But that's going to be in heavy, heavy retrospect.

You're Fired*

Well, here's the BIG UPDATE: still out of work.

I know every time you get a Government Shutdown 2025 alert update on your phone, like I presume we all do, your first thought is inevitably going to be "Hey, I wonder how this is all affecting that guy who writes that blog still like it's 2006?" Year by year, the number of people that sentence could describe comes closer and closer to describing just me. All the Blogger OGs either quit the game entirely (goddamned hobbyists) or fucked off to twitter (shorter attention spans, by percentage probably Nazis) or Substack (longer attention spans, by percentage probably also likely Nazis). As far as I can tell the only real logic-puzzle-proof causes of sticking with Blogger seem to be a) no ambition in the direction of monetization or audience growth and b) not a Nazi.

This is the point where one of you gets in the comments to let me know, actually, how many Nazis are using Blogger these days. I would check myself, but come on, I don't read anything on Blogger, who does that? It's 2025 for fuck's sake. Grow up.

How am I doing with it all, being out of work? Just great! A lot of people who hear about it don't really know what to say so you get a default jocular "heh, cool man, free vacation," which I have learned not to respond to automatically by jabbing my index finger into their forehead and shouting in a mid-2000s nü-metal scream-growl "IT'S NOT A VACATION IF YOU DON'T HAVE A JOB." Do that enough times and you get barred from the inside café part of more than one local Starbucks.

Not only was that approach socially and commercially inadvisable, but it's also not technically true. I do have a job, I'm still gainfully employed, I'm just currently not allowed to go there or perform any functions for which I could then me remunerated. Maybe gainfully was the wrong adjective there. Cash-flow-zero is an interesting state to be in for any period of time. I'm responding to this financial crunch in the way any responsible American would, like for instance just today I took myself out for a nice lunch and then bought myself a new pair of shoes.

Look, I know it sounds crazy, especially the day I also paid out all my outstanding bills with what I had left in my checking account and ended up in the cozy low-three-figures with no prospect of replenishment (shoutout to my single Patreon patron!) on the horizon, but before you judge me, I want you to keep in mind: I needed the shoes because I'm actually going on vacation.

This isn't weird! I had planned it well before the shutdown, so it's on the books at work already. I'm going off to New England to witness the collective seasonal death of trees, which is a thing people do.

I'm not going on my own and all the major steps have been paid for (flight, accommodation). I hadn't planned on buying anything else pre-trip, but then I found out (as of like a day ago) that the weather for the duration is now forecast to be "basically underwater." So I thought some waterproof walking shoes, the goofiest of curiosities in Southern California, would be a good idea. Stores even sell them here, for reasons way beyond my limited knowledge of marketing strategy. Maybe for people who like beach walking but don't like sand (which is not helpful, since that category includes All People Forever), I dunno.

I can't really justify the lunch expenditure, other than I was out and I like lunch. We'll see how much I miss than $16 two weeks from now when pay day runs around.

The weird thing is, if I take my vacation while the government is shut down, I won't be charged leave days and I'll get the leave I technically didn't use credited back. So maybe I'll come out ahead?

Oh, I forgot who was running this administration. Probably not.

---

PROGRAMMING NOTE: So if I am able to actually leave, probably no blog next week unless I decide to throw something together on my now totally working iPhone. If nothing appears in this space, either I'm having a great time or the air traffic control situation means I'm driving through what I will angrily be calling "fly over states" during the whole unplanned ground-based trip back from wherever we got stranded.

Damnatio Memoriae

This isn't a journal, and it never has been. There is plenty of overlap with my actual personal life, sure, but this record is also shot through intentionally with lies, misdirects, exaggerations, omissions and hyperbole. If it were just my experience, my god, you can't imagine how dull it would be. These days so much is done for clout or to build an audience or just straight-up for money, I'm sure you can forgive a little bit of zhuzh-ing of the truth so I don't threaten to drive off any portion of the mid-single-digits readership by being my regular boring self.

I trust most of you who read this are sophisticated, well-read adults who don't need the reassurance and aren't put off by the SHOCK REVELATION that some of this is lies. If you built a parasocial relationship based on the content here, I'm not going to try to discourage or dissuade you directly, I'm just going to say: you could just do so much better.

I'm prefacing this because I'm about to tell you REAL THINGS that have happened to me in the last 4-5 days. I know I just said I do a bunch of lying and exaggerating but this all REALLY HAPPENED!

1) I managed to lock myself entirely out of my iPhone.

Now look, this is the First World Problem of First World Problems, I get that. But it if you've bought into the the-known-universe-in-my-pocket lifestyle, you find out fast that being cut off from your little world-tether umbilical is pretty disruptive. You sort of die, socially and economically. Not biologically of course (if you have that app on your phone that does kill you if you lost contact, my god, delete it. Why would you download that in the first place, what is wrong with you? What's the upside, I don't see it), but you do get the sense, in the dim, cold quiet of separation, that the world is moving along just fine without you being able to affect it in any way.

The short version of the story is I switched carriers and learned about "SIM card carrier lock" on a cellphone, which I had to clear by doing a factory reset on my iPhone 12. I have iCloud backup, but it turns out you can't get to the backup if you don't have the password. And it really doesn't help you, once you've already started to delete the phone contents, to only then remember that you'd changed your password semi-recently and didn't bother memorizing it because it was written down on an app in the phone. The phone whose contents you were watching it, irrevocably, delete. Woo!

Can you recover your Apple ID using other means? Sure! Like if you have another Apple device that's logged in to it, like for example the MacBook Pro museum piece I use to type this very blog on week after week. But when it's so old it hasn't been able to update the operating system since pre-covid, you will get the very helpful "an error occurred" when you try to initiate the recovery process.

I thought I was stuck with a non-working phone. I had dropped my previous cellphone provider but couldn't initiate the new one, I thought, without access to all the phone's functions. I don't want to say which provider I went with, but this one seems to have spent all its money on a second-tier British soccer team and none on in-person stores for emergency service. The process is DIY and pretty straightforward, but only if you skip the crucial step of Being A Giant Doofus, which I opted in for.

I thought I had to sit through the long process of having Apple review my case and give me an opportunity to re-set my Apple password, which takes minimum 72 hours, but the 72 hours passed and... nothing. So I had the genius idea to call Apple support. They walked me through the reset in maybe 15 minutes? Felt great to get back to the life-giving oxygen of online existence again, to reclaim my digital citizenship (and be able to drive without terror since I haven't had a physical card for my proof of auto insurance since maybe 2018). This is all being presented with the tacit agreement, after this, to never again talk about the circumstances by which any of this came to pass. I'm OK leaving a mystery in place. Man, that was crazy, what was it again? Probably a lightning bolt or an angry Jesus. Maybe both, I'm not sure if Jesus does lightning bolts or if that's too pagan.

2) All this occurred right as the government was shutting down. This is the government, the American federal one, that employs me and issues the checks that allow me to fund my gasoline-free Southern California lifestyle of glamour and hedonism. It's super fun and not at all embarrassing to tell your boss they have to call your Google Voice VoIP number you just made up because you all-thumbs-ed your way into monk-like asceticism, right at the worst possible time.

The phone now works, but this all meant that in the interim, I had a ton of unexpected free time and literally nothing to do. It was quite the crisis for a brain that has been trained for constant input.

I paced some. I talked to the cat, but her muted reactions (up to and including changing rooms or remaining disdainfully asleep) left something to be desired. I filled the void with caffeine and sugar, like any responsible American should, but things got desperate there, I'm not going to lie. I even read a few pages of a book.

I came to my senses though. By the time the book-related vertigo wore off, it was only a few hours until I had my phone up and running again. I only had to scroll through 3-to-7 hours of Bluesky and reddit posts to remember who I was and how I belong in this world.

I can thumbs-up or heart react to Instagram posts again. Bright red oxygen-rich blood flows from my core to my fingertips and back again, once more. I'm whole. I'm me. I can do this shutdown standing on my head.*

--

*provided I figure out how to lock the screen so it doesn't keep "fixing" itself right-side up for me.

Proper Spinal Support

SPECIAL NOTICE: None of the proceeding should be taken as a metaphor for mental health.

---

I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,

I know that's difficult to square with the SPECIAL NOTICE I made all the very necessary effort to include, entirely out of character, right out at the top, but I want to be clear: I'm being incredibly literal here. I'm making no attempt to be clever or misdirect or disguise intent. That is the purview of punsters and others species of fraud-peddlers in the Hack genus. I'm a normal man, classifiable strictly using the Normal Man categories of... whatever other words might go before or after "genus" in a biological taxonomy, I forget. I'd learned all that briefly for a junior college anthropology survey class, but I purged it all immediately after the final and filled the space with more trivia about Claremont-era X-Men, Mario Kart track layouts... almost exclusively anything in the opposite direction of projecting sexual appeal in the early/mid 1990s.

No, I'm speaking to you plainly here, which if you're a new reader (we get one every 11-14 years, so we might be due!) you might not know is incredibly typical of me. Straight shooter. Blunt. To the point. Well, as much as one can be in a 3,000 word piece stitched together out of single-sentence large-block paragraphs and more subordinate clauses than an Elon Musk birthing-partner pre-procreation contract. Is the language torturous? Maybe. But the points, once you get to them, are almost always crystal clear, in the times I can be bothered to remember to have one.

OK, sometimes I'm out here be-boppin' my way through a masturbatory tone-poem of free flowing word association that makes sense probably only to me, but the point is: NOT TODAY! Today I'm being literal. I want you to hear this: l i t e r a l .

I've woken up most mornings in the last 5-10 years in a depression,

I mean that my mattress has gotten old and I only sleep on one side. So in a literal sense, I've been waking up, in increasing degrees over the passage of time, along a portion of the surface of a plane that is at a slightly lower elevation to the surfaces on all sides of me. There's a depression in my mattress.

Emotionally? Totally fine with it. Well, I guess the depression did leave me a little sad from time to time when I would realize "don't I deserve better?" but that is STRICTLY a coincidence. I have more personal dignity and respect for you, gentle reader than to try to slip "the depression made me sad" past you. If I tried to just leave that there, uncommented upon, sure, this blog would be like 75% shorter, but we'd all be so embarrassed.

Is this too much work to tell you I got a new mattress finally? After like 20 years wearing down the old one? And what the consequences are of being so compulsively averse to deviation from the comforts of repetition that even after my now-ex-wife moved out OVER FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I've stayed sleeping in the same spot on the same side?

DO NOT start reading things in now, I've warned you. I've lived a full spectrum life in those times. "Over time the depression grew" is facile and beneath all of us, and frankly a denigration of the complexity of my nuanced and varied emotional being. It's been 20 years in the making. Many life events! Many relationships! Several pets! Sure, as I said, I can be rigid and locked-in to certain physical routines and take great comfort in expected outcomes, especially when pleasurable or tied to feelings of safety and/security, like for example sleeping, but that doesn't mean the beat-up, floppy, sunken-in mattress represents anything specific about who I am as a person or how I'm getting on. It was just time! Because of how it was depressing! I mean that literally!

And once every year or two, you rotate it so you're sleeping on a new part of it, even though you know you're just causing a depression on the other end. And even as much as you'd like to flip it over entirely, with the pillow-top technology, you can't really, so rotate all you want, you know deep down you're limited to existing on the same surface, tidally locked, where every rotation is just another step toward the inevitable future rotation where the same circumstances play out again and again in a space, while technically differing, is functionally and materially indistinguishable. It feels new, but in the end, for all your efforts, no matter how you feel in the moment, you're weighing a thing down to the end of its design-life and incrementally toward its eventual entropic scattering into atomic nothing.

Ah shit. I almost made it to the end.

Hold The Underwear!

My first instinct is to go "see, I told you last week shit was going to get in-a-bad-way weird," but that's hard to take any credit for. It doesn't even qualify as prognostication when there are really only less than four likely outcomes and all of them are directly related to the same people and the same impulses. My bold prediction was that "something will happen!" and I guess we can be relieved it was only yet another late night talk show host getting summarily fired and not, like, an act of violent retribution. Yes, we're down one Jimmy, but the basic rule of late-night TV for the last couple of decades is we stock Jimmys so deep, you never really run out. Things are a little more dire now as we've only got the one Jimmy left, but he's taken steps to anchor and aluminum-clad himself against the battering of the growing storm, for the low-low cost of his basic human dignity.

Kimmel was ostensibly fired for saying insensitive and outrageous things about the Charlie Kirk killing, but it's not even below the surface where we see the issue isn't so much murder as it is merger. Murder is an A-1 problem that warrants no defense. But side by side with the Stephen Colbert thing, the suggestion emerges that the exact same people--the Trumpified FCC--finds points of leverage to lean on corporate interests caught in delicate negotiations for which they need federal approval, then attaches the string tied to the back of the suit-jacket of the very public comedian they don't like, resulting in a yoink off the stage. This is a very cynical analysis, I know, but it starts to look a little bit like the murder of Charlie Kirk is being deployed as a cover in the Kimmel "suspension" to avoid the awkward, muffled indefensibility of the Colbert cancellation. Congratulations I suppose to the Nexstar people, whoever they are, and to the Walt Disney Corporation for their act of radical compliance. Everyone denies this and all is couched in the right number of broadcast-safe allegedly-s. It's also a shallow analysis, but that's what makes it seem somewhat compelling: I'm not actually capable of a deep analysis as the business of corporate law isn't really one of the topics I know anything meaningful about. If it were a category on Jeopardy, I'd still well clear of it. I'd go for "Potent Potables" first and I don't even drink. One of the answers is reliably to do with sherry, whoever she is. But if I can cobble this chain of events together, we can't even deign to call it "underhanded." It's pretty openly handed.

It's also not novel or interesting (and yet here I go!) to notice that the loudness and brazen-ness of the perpetrated act ends up kind of being the point. The first Trump administration was hampered by professionals who knew what they were doing monkeying up the works by insisting on actually doing the jobs for which they were ostensibly hired. Inevitably, they would be fired for competence, or to put it another way, for not offering the most full-throated defense for an insane and reckless idea by the idiot Boy President when asked about it within a half mile of a microphone. On the way out, the president would make sure we all knew they were useless, backstabbing weasels who didn't deserve any level of employment and the fact that he failed to notice that before literally all of them were hired in the first place, well, that just proves how sneaky and sinister they were.

Now the most raging, virulent, audacious incompetence is not only excused but praised as long as the person doing it remembers to extol--as loudly as possible!--the courage and virtue of their boss. The fireable offense they could commit would be to stammer in public when questioned about the work they do. That's the old model, where when pointedly questioned by a lawmaker or a journalist, a functionary caught in a lie or not able to explain away a deficiency or a public fuck up mews and burbles and eventually crumbles, and that's the scandal. Recent testimony in Congress by FBI Director Kash "Krash Out" Patel and RFK "I'll Kill As Many As Your Children As It Takes To Keep Them Safe" Jr. shows that the new model is not only to defend the indefensibility of their records, but it's to SHOUT DOWN ANGRILY those who dare question. If you're wondering how committed they are to this course of action, think of what it takes for someone with RFK Jr.'s voice to actually shout.

That's the line now: we must be outraged, and the source of the outrage itself is irrelevant, so long as it is correctly performed in public. In the short term, it makes everything feel empty and hopeless, as if everything is an edifice and no building, like the rebuilt decoy version of Rock Ridge from the climax of the 1974 historical documentary Blazing Saddles. In the end there, the forces of cynicism and evil and Harvey Korman were defeated; the main difference now is there's no obvious Cleavon Little figure to save us, even though we don't deserve it.

Can't We All Just Get Along?

OK, I don't even want to write today, not because I can't think of anything, which is my normal point of departure as far as procrastination goes. In the guise of "looking for inspiration" I'll be eight tabs deep into an internet rabbit hole about the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world or the post-Laverne & Shirley career of the guy who played The Big Ragoo. Turns out that guy died just a few years ago and he wasn't even 70! Well, at least we know Lenny is still kicking around.

No, the problem is that there's too much inspiration. We've entered into one of those deranged periods where the content and the hot takes are so thick in the air it's impossible to tell which way to move, ever since right-wing political somebody Charlie Kirk was shot and killed yesterday.

As a person who writes a thing that is public, when the atmosphere becomes this saturated with a single subject, you become obligated, to a degree. This even counts when your "public" is a modest, retiring number of low-volume but of high-discernment and class (and well dressed and handsome, don't think I can't tell). That's enough to constitute and audience though, if we're quoting Jesus. To paraphrase Matthew 18:20, if two people show up, you gotta get the puppets out and do the whole show. But Jesus had it easy, he was a prop guy. Loaves, fishes, a whole-ass human-size cross and his big closer, the cave escape. It's a little hack in retrospect, but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it still really plays in Branson, Missouri.

Me, in these heady days before I give up and start feeding prompts to an AI version of writer's autotune, I can't whip out a walk-on-water trick, I have to grind words. It feels too weird to ignore it, even though I couldn't really tell you who Charlie Kirk was beyond "right wing" and "not an elected politician" as recently as Wednesday morning. I couldn't tell you where he lived or what his voice sounded like or what platform he was on... I could probably draw him if you asked me to, but that's kind of cheating as they all have that same JD Vance-Ben Shapiro aesthetic of pasty brunette white dudes in poorly fitting clothes.

So do I have a take? I'm on paragraph five to tell you: not really. It was just a week ago I reiterated to you guys I didn't wish physical harm on anyone. That's a long-standing personal conviction I take pretty seriously, but ever since I heard about this yesterday while I was at work, since I'm not entirely off social media, I had to hear about how I, a Dirty Leftist, revel in this stuff and DEFINITELY a) knew who Charlie Kirk was, b) really super hated him! because of all the truths he did!; and c) celebrated his violent death in front of hundreds of unsuspecting people.

Since then I've done really the minimal amount of research, admittedly from probably the least sympathetic sources like The Guardian to orient myself, but it immediately became too depressing to continue. I haven't developed anything. It's a liberating thing when you realize you're definitively the wrong guy to ask about a thing.

Really, what it came down to was this: as soon as I heard about it, I freaked out a little. He didn't seem like a pleasant or admirable person, but I wish he hadn't been shot, for his sake, for the sake of the witnesses, for the sake of his family and for my own. I had to reawaken the group chat with my three GenZ adult sons as the anxiety compulsion ordered me to tell them to keep their heads on a swivel, partially because this is a reminder that no open space is ultimately safe in this country from random gun violence, and because the charged atmosphere felt like a green light to people who have been waiting, engines revving to red-lining, for the word GO to get out and do some really heinous shit to "evil leftists" who will finally--finally! we're certain it was them!--did the thing they've been fantasizing about for ages.

This is even though we currently don't know the shooter. And we don't know the motivation. This would not be clear if you were watching Fox News. They killed him because they couldn't shut him up. None of them will say who they is, but I'm less worried that it's specifically me and my tragic, stubborn leftism and more that one of us will be at whatever public event at which they choose to exact their ritual of blood-extraction payback. Just because they won't be shooting at me or my kids doesn't mean was can't be shot.

A faceless they is effectively all faces. The only reprieve any of us got from this incidence of murder is that the assailant only fired once and no one else was maimed or killed. I have no confidence that will be the case next time.

Jesus. See, I told you I didn't want to write about this. Nothing good can come out of peer-pressuring yourself.