So, someone is shooting people here in Montgomery County, Maryland, USA. This is the sort of thing I normally laugh about apathetically, if it goes on somewhere else. I'm kind of a sick weirdo like that, you know. My first reaction to this one, too, was disinterested laughter, but only now is it starting to freak me out a little.
Evidently the first shooting took place Wednesday night, about a thousand feet from here, in the parking lot of the grocery store I walk to sometimes. Most of the rest of them happened this morning, around the time I was walking up the hill to the Glenmont Metro station, on my way to work.
On my way home I had to take a pedestrian field trip to the music store in Wheaton, to obtain a Line6 POD as a going-away present for my departing boss, an avid guitar player. Some of my co-workers, who had chipped in for the gift and were reading the same news reports, said things like "Aren't you afraid of getting shot, walking around up there where all those people got killed?" and so forth. Well... what am I going to do? Stay at my desk until they find the culprit? Uh-oh, there goes a nondescript white van, let's all run for cover? Yeah.
Anyway, I got my POD and got home, free from any bullet-induced additional holes in my body, and not thinking much more of it. Then I turned on the TV, and kept watching CNN despite my professed disinterest in the whole thing, and it was a while before I figured out why: It reminds me of the time I had to hear about the death of my friend Amy, by seeing a TV news report on a local woman dying of hyperthermia and finding out afterward that yes, they were talking about her, all right. Furthermore, I'm seeing all the same place names as I did then. Aspen Hill. Rockville. Silver Spring. It's not a coincidence that this is only the second daylog I've written, and the first one was about that.
I'm driving to work tomorrow instead of walking to the train, I think. But I was planning to do that anyway... honest.