John's Blog

Sometimes you stop to take a breath, meaning to finish a sentence but change your mind midstream, and you create an awkward silence. So it's been with blogging recently. At first I was just busy and exhausted, but then the convergence of several sad events and my increasing ambivalence towards blogging left me with no time or motivation for updates.

One of those dark clouds rolled in last week. Far too many times we read headlines like Man shoots ex-girlfriend, then kills himself that we've become almost jaded to the horror and pain that an event like this entails. Thankfully, it isn't often that it happens in your own back yard with you knowing the person responsible, even if you didn't know them as well as you thought.

Making any comments at all risks trivializing a tragic and unexpected event. But one reaction I've heard surprises me greatly; those who are looking at the event and trying to find some logic to his action. These aren't the behaviors of a person who is thinking and functioning rationally. It's hard to imagine feeling the total absence of possibilities, that this would allow this to be an option. Probably not what the framers of the Second Amendment had in mind at all. The bottom line is that without easy access to guns, things like this wouldn't occur so frequently.

I wish I could say this event was the source of my blogging malaise, but it probably isn't. We'll see if there is a reset button floating around to be found, or if this is a full blown case of Ted Barlow's Disease. Sometimes a little "time-out" refreshes the spirit.

Tags: life experiences, blogging, pointless rambling