Wibbly-Wobbly

Within the building I work in, there are several televisions dotted about. Partially this is because one of the organizations we share space with is a broadcaster of some description, so the fruits of their particular labor are being displayed for all to equally enjoy with their eye-holes. Another part of it is because zero people are worried anymore that a television operating 24/7 in the middle of a professional place of business is going to be a distraction from getting any work done. By now everyone just accepts people will ignore the televisions as they're too busy at their computers, diligently searching for pictures of cakes to post to their Pinterest page.*

I stop by from time to time, usually just to make chit-chat with the Baby Boomers who occasionally pause there as well, being all adorably convinced that television is still a worthwhile way to gather any kind of information. And partially because I want to check the latest development in the silent war between whoever keeps changing the default channel back and forth between Fox News and CNN. I'm not sure who's winning, except I'm pretty sure it's not MSNBC, the Generation X of cable news wars, apparently.

Today nobody was there, so I was able to take in the on-screen headline graphic SIX INJURED IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING all on my lonesome.

It's hard to put into words exactly how I processed this moment. On the one hand, yes, obviously it's disheartening and depressing. A high school shooting in America. Great, let's re-live all the horror-sad-rage and wailing impotence of the last 7,000 of these fucking things all over again, right? Especially while at essentially the same moment in spacetime, Republicans were blocking any movement on gun legislation. Here's the emotion that registered when I heard about that:

(Blank. It's a blank space after the colon. Because of how not surprised I was. Do you get it? It's a visual joke, which I thought I should... you know what, forget it. I feel like this is not the most important thing at the moment maybe.)

On the other hand, as I read it, ha, something funny occurred to me: "Hey, I know someone who is a Southern California high school student. Wouldn't it be a funny coincidence ifoooooOOOOOOONOOOOHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCK..."

I don't know how long it took me to scan the TV screen to figure out where exactly in Southern California this particular shooting took place. It was probably in actual time somewhere on the order of four to six seconds. But in that FUCKING INTERMINABLE span, I was forced to live an entire reality where this time it WAS my kid's school, out of all the thousands, and among the injured or killed (or, Jesus, the one with the gun) WAS my kid.

But it wasn't. In either case. Again. As it is statistically unlikely to have been, I know. Santa Clarita is kind of on the other extreme end of the Greater Los Angeles area from me, about as far apart as you can get and still recognize the same local news weather guys. And I've been all around SoCal for high school sports, but I know I've never been to Saugus High School. I'm sure it's a great community and a lovely school. But this is the world we live in now. One where I get to be relieved it was someone else's kid who got shot/shot at.

There have been a couple of instances like that, where I've had to live a lifetime in the tension gap between becoming aware of calamitous news and confirming it hasn't ruined your life forever. One was when I was downstairs at my house and I heard a dresser fall in the room my two-year-old was supposed to be napping in. I don't remember touching the ground as I tore up the stairs and practically broke through that bedroom door to see a toddler standing, perfectly safe, on his bed, his face a face of startled concern, looking down at the fallen dresser that was definitively NOT on top of his little body, crushing it to death. The space in the few seconds of searching between panic and relief is a whole lifetime of trauma, as real as any, but with the wound slammed shut before the knife cleaves your heart in twain. The scar is there, sure, but it's a thin, almost surgical one that nobody can see unless you get a really dark suntan.

So lucky me, I got to do a little bit of that today. But there aren't any parents left in this country who don't absolutely know that there's a Next One coming. And we all live in a different limbo, a liminal space whose borders are drawn in blood pushed into position by an obscene apathy to child-murder.

It was going to take a lot for something else to win the Biggest Fucking Calamity This Week, but lucky for the president, child-murder always wins. If nothing else, this is the one constant factor in Trump America: sure, everything is horrible all the time, but don't worry. Something unimaginably way fucking worse is just around the corner.

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*I actually don't know how Pinterest works. I've only seen it a couple of times in passing. But since it's the internet, it's going to be dominated by either porn or food, sometimes both. Again, I've only seen it a couple of times, but I feel like I'd have recognized porn if I'd seen it. Cakes it is then.