It’s Monday, and my social-media feeds, as usual, are full of football.
Frankly, I’ve never understood how the rabidly antidoping cycling crowd can go so gaga over the NFL. It’s an inconsistency that I find amusing, like listening to a vegan extol the pleasures of watching a good cockfight on Sunday afternoon.
Yesterday’s terrorism in Bibleburg is getting the usual reaction across the Innertubez — shock, horror, dismay, etc., plus the usual elbows being thrown in pursuit of sociopolitical points. Seems everyone has a dog in the fight, including Your Humble Narrator.
A friend asked if it was official “that Colorado leads the nation in this sort of violence,” and it’s true that my old home state has generated more than its share of headline-grabbers.
But maybe we should be paying less attention to wholesale bloodshed and more to the steady drip, drip, drip of retail homicide that somehow eludes us.
There’s Chicago, for example. And Baltimore. Body counts that mostly don’t have a damn thing to do with revolutionary politics or a slight to somebody’s imaginary friend.
It’s just too easy for Americans to kill each other. And while we wait to add a bit of insight regarding cause to what we already know about effect, we can be certain of one thing right now: Gun sales will skyrocket, in Bibleburg and elsewhere.
It’s like watching the fire department fighting a five-alarm with a tanker truck full of gasoline.
“Black Friday” got a whole new meaning in Bibleburg today.
It’s certainly too early to speculate about motive, and probably too late to do anything about the shite job the Founders did on that Second Amendment, though we do have options in that regard.
But I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that for sure a whole bunch of folks got shot, again, and taking off our shoes at the airport, letting the NSA peek in our digital windows, and keeping Syrian refugees on the other side of the Big Water don’t seem to be keeping Americans safe from terrorism.
I bet a few people within rifle range of that Planned Parenthood center felt terrorized today. That’s one product we don’t need to import from overseas. Not even for Black Friday. We make it right here at home.
• Late update: The Dumbass is strong in this one. From The Gazette: “There was a moment this afternoon when a man walked up to the scene with a handgun strapped to his waist and ammunition vest around his chest. He appeared to be asking police if he could help. Officers told him to leave immediately because appearing at the scene while wearing firearms and that equipment was a bad idea.”
It was quiet around El Rancho Pendejo yesterday. No friends, no family, just the five of us — Herself, Mister Boo, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), Miss Mia Sopaipilla, and Your Humble Narrator.
Ordinarily we do the holidays with my sister and her husband, but with Fort Collins now an eight-hour drive each way, and the road conditions decidedly Novemberish between here and there, we decided to give the road trip a miss and instead treated them to a FaceTime video tour of our new digs.
This seemed a particularly bright move after we heard from our pal Hal, who did the big U-turn from Weirdcliffe to Highlands Ranch and back again, narrowly avoiding disaster. Via e-mail, he reported that Bibleburg “was dry on the north end and a fucking skating rink on the south end. A six-car pileup happened right in from of me on I-25 and I was lucky to not be No. 7.”
Good times. Maybe not.
So, yeah. We stayed home, and I whipped up a mess of Emeril’s chicken cacciatore with a side of Martha Rose Shulman’s stir-fried succotash with edamame. Herself was detailed to prepare a green salad and a raspberry cobbler but instead chose to lean on her shovel, sipping a glass of vino, and who can blame her? Not me. Plenty of veggies in that succotash, yo. Plus we had a salad with breakfast (right), which included eggs over easy atop spuds slathered in green chile. And we had ice cream for dessert.
Hope your day went as nicely as ours did.
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