ARCHIVES - 1996 to FOREVER

Crimes were done, murder was done, mistakes were made... more died. Just revenge was denied.

I came home and cried.

(I cry a lot easier now than I ever have before.)

For the world and for myself, a small part of the world.

All of those parents... all of those friends and lovers and spouses of those who died and who might yet die... all of that sorrow.

The answer is, of course, fewer guns.

O'wait, the answer? Is more guns.

Both answers are stupid.

But if there was but one good guy armed and willing to kill to save others... that would have been a good thing. And quite possibly we would have never heard about this incident today.

Kansas has a concealed carry law... just recently passed.

I would never carry a handgun... I gave mine away years ago.

But I don't mind people thinking that I have one on me. And I like the idea that every criminal out there knows that anybody might be carrying.

It doesn't necessarily mean that we have returned to the WildWildWest again... so far, there have been no shoot-outs in Kansas, and I think that when we look back ten years from now, we will find that there are fewer gun crimes of any kind.

It kinda goes along with Mutually Assured Destruction... remember that one? The whole world was on the edge for damned near thirty years.

Maybe nothing at all can be done to keep these things from happening.

That fact won't keep lawmakers from doing something, though... even if it's the wrong thing, patriot-act-like.

Anyway, I felt really good when I went to work today... and then I started feeling worse as the day went on. Got a gland swollen up in my neck again, the same one that was hurting me a coupla weeks ago, before the flu got me... and it was the flu, according to local reports.

So I'm afraid that I'm relapsing.

And I'm afraid that Karen's getting it too, dammit.

And tomorrow's the day she gets the chest x-ray and the labs and her last (I hope for a while) chemo. She needs a rest from it... she told me tonight that she wasn't going to get any more, and we had a talk about that, of course.

Damn, damn, damn, I hate this.

Y'all send Karen some good vibes, OK?