A River in Egypt

Coming to you live from a rare Wednesday night due to potential scheduling conflicts tomorrow involving anything at this point, depending on a few unresolved circumstances, ranging from Christmas shopping to nookie. If I could somehow find a way to combine those two things... yeah, Christmas shopping would still be awful. And, now that I think about it, with online shopping, wouldn't really be much of a feat. It's all a question of positioning, leverages and manual dexterity. More a logistical space-management problem bordering on feng shui, or to put it another way, predictably for a man, it all comes down to the length of your power cable.

I've taken this opportunity to be absolutely juvenile and a little gross because the rest of this might get a little heavier than I normally would; but don't worry, if you've come here to escape the tidal wave of tragedy porn that is currently alienating the bereaved, I'm going to do my best to spare you the weight of my own personal sadness.

I was about to start this paragraph with "Whenever something like this happens..." but you got this meta-commentary on sentence choice instead. Because nothing like this ever happens. People get shot up all the time, sure. Sometimes all at once, sometimes even in schools, but instances like Newtown, with its particular tincture of befouled pastels of soft pinks and blues, goes so far beyond the moral pale that it feels less like an event and more like a reckoning. And to an extent, it has functioned that way: we have, some of us anyway, stopped and considered ourselves, our neighbors, what we mean to each other and how those connections and responsibilities multiply to form a governable society we can all reasonably stand to live in. I'm neither certain nor even confident our reflection will be allowed to amount to much, but I take the act of consideration as a thing of value in itself, allowing of course for my own selfish desperation to find value in anything anywhere at the moment.

I also pull back from "Whenever something like this happens..." as it's a invitation to myself to consider the massacre further, which, thanks to the both evolutionary and practiced reflex of hard denial, I'm less and less capable of doing as the days progress. You feel the sting of unexpected sunlight against the darkest parts of your imagination, let in by the piercing trauma of the news. Plenty of news outlets are throwing around the word "unimaginable," which isn't strictly true. But for those of us lucky enough to be burdened only with speculative hardship and family loss only in the fringe-est of national senses, the psychic wounds close and the deepest recesses lose their light source. It's happening already, I'm lucky to say. I can no longer see inside the classroom as I once could.

You'll be noticing a lot of "I" in the information above, but that's only because I can't begin to express anything for or on behalf of the families affected. Condolences are both implied and ludicrously inadequate.

I also hear a great deal, and always with grave solemnity, that things will return to normal and the community will heal. I haven't found it in me to be quite so sanguine. How are they doing in Dunblane? Or Beslan? Maybe we should ask first.