Good bye 2013. And good riddance.

Men Fighting, 1950, photo by Elliot Erwitt

Maybe it was because we forgot to eat black-eyed peas last New Year's Day. It's a Southern tradition: Eat black-eye peas -- a kind of bean, really -- and you'll have good luck all year. 

Or maybe it was because we slacked on the other custom. In the Celtic countries of my ancestors, you're supposed to kick out the eldest male child before midnight. Then, he's to be the first one to enter the home in the new year, and he should be crossing the threshold with a full bottle of whiskey.

Good luck charms. I wonder if they would have helped during what followed.

First my aunt died. Then my father in law. Then my own father. My identity was stolen. When someone else uses your credit cards and checking accounts, it's disturbing, like being groped by a cold hand. 

A close friend confided the worst kind of secret to me. The kind of secret owning a stench that sours even the best days. Our town was flooded, and mud-stinking water seeped in our basement. My son had a medical crisis, but it turned out well in the end. 

Some other, major disappointments kicked the bottom out of the year. Mostly, as I looked over my calendars and journals, I got the sense of a long grind, of grief and stagnation that didn't lift much until the autumn.

It's all relative. I'm not, for example, scrambling for shelter in Aleppo. I got a new and hugely better day job. In each of the deaths I mentioned, the passing was a kind of mercy. Each of them had suffered with disease for long enough. 

So: good in the bad, even this year. Still. Even though I'm another circle of the sun closer to my death, even though I lost time this year, time that won't ever come back, even with that, I'm glad to see this year go.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, 2013.

Poem by Jerome Leroy

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils louent des chambres d'hôtel à la semaine

Dans des sous-préfectures hivernales

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils regardent par la fenêtre de la chambre

La Grand Rue sous la neige

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils vont vivre dans ce deux étoiles

Chambre numéro quinze

Les morts ne sont pas morts 

Ils s'amusent de l'armoire à glace

Et de la salle de bain un peu désuète

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils s'étonnent un instant de leur visage

Du temps qu'ils étaient jeunes

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils défont tranquillement leurs bagages

Légers juste l'indispensable

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils sont enfin tels qu'en eux-mêmes

Sans bibelots et sans paperasse

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Sans journaux qui s'entassent

Sans lettres à peine ouvertes

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils aiment la fraicheur nette

De la chambre numéro quinze

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils vont sans doute tout à l'heure

Se promener dans la sous préfecture

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils ne sont reconnus de personne

Leurs pas font craquer la neige 

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Comme le bruit d’une pleurésie

Un verre peut être dans cette brasserie

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils remarquent la différence

Avec le Purgatoire de Dante

Les morts ne sont pas morts

La réceptionniste aux yeux bistres

Leur rappelle des amours fatiguées

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils aiment la pureté reposante

De la chambre bien rangée

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Anonyme et pourtant si aimable

Ils s'allongent sur le lit double

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils lisent un livre unique

Celui choisi pour le voyage

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils en connaissent chaque page

Mais enfin ils le comprennent

Les morts ne sont pas morts

La neige tombe toujours la neige tombe encore

Ils s'étirent sourient et se disent

Les morts ne sont pas morts

Ils louent des chambres d'hôtel à la semaine

Dans des sous-préfectures hivernales.

                                    --Jerome Leroy

Buying my father's coffin

I was confused. I thought were were going to the funeral home for some oven-side ceremony before my father's cremation. So I wore a suit, and I was filled with a certain amount of dread. But I was wrong. It was to be more of a sales session to determine the cost of the disposition of his corpse.

It was a sunny autumn day. In Colorado, you often have clear, hard sunshine when you'd prefer gloomy, low clouds.

The funeral home was a not unattractive beige stucco building. A stained glass window of a swirling tree was the centerpiece of a lobby. To the right, some memorial service or celebration of life was underway. You could tell, because some men wore suits and the little girls were dressed. It felt like a church function, but not an actual service. Overall, the home took its cues from suburban church architecture. Stained glass and couches. Thick comfy carpets and domed ceilings. 

Not Mr. Moon. But pretty close.

An attractive young woman greeted my wife, my new stepmother and me. She managed to project cheeriness with a readiness to offer sympathy. She asked our business and relayed our information. 

The place smelled of woodsmoke. Which made me think of fires, ovens and ashes.

Then, the nice young woman ushered in a tall, moon-faced fellow whom she introduced as, of course, Mr. Moon. We went to a side room farther in the depths of the building. We took our seats at a large table. A computer monitor was on my left, another stained glass tree faced me, and a subdued landscape featuring a country road hung on my right.

Mr. Moon spoke in a hollow, breathy bass voice. He apologized in advance because he'd have to excuse himself during our meetings to leave. He'd had something at lunch that was causing him distress. A whiff of diarrhea entered the experience.

Styles to match every taste.

Mr. Moon managed to blend the worst elements of a Presbyterian deacon and used car salesman in his manner.  It made me wonder how he managed to do business of any kind at all. Maybe the grief of his prospects made them ignore his combination of sepulchral solemnity and pseudo-sympathetic sleaze.

To my relief, it turned out we'd be making arrangements and payments and not participating in a cremation ceremony at all. My shrewd stepmother held him to the firefighter's discount which made him wince.He laid out the options for services and cremations like a car salesman would, working hard for the upsell. We declined them all because we'd already planned other services of our own.

He excused himself. We tried not to think about Mr. Moon, his intestinal distress and its probable results, and failed. When he came back, I signed the paper work allowing them to transport his body to a central crematorium and specifying the treatment of his ashes.

Then Mr. Moon led us to a side room where the caskets and urns were on display. Urns come in a lot of styles, with crosses, stars of David, American eagles and other gewgaws plastered on them. Mournful imagery, of the kind favored in 19th century graveyards and the album covers of Goth bands, is not available. No weeping nymphs or mothers here. The cost of them was breathtaking. The functional and embarrassingly plain urns started around $200. This is for a box you could buy at Home Depot for $10, maybe $15.

But of course you feel like a penny-pinching peasant when you think thoughts like this in these circumstances. It's . . . Dad, after all. But, he's dead. And they're ashes.

We bought a low-end urn. My stepmother is not sentimental. I'm not either, at least, not when it comes to the storage of ashes.

Yes. that's the Last Supper on a casket handle. photo via the Denver Post.

Then Mr. Moon drew our attention to the caskets. You have to have a casket, even if the body is to be cremated. A law, apparently. he showed us a nice mahogany number for $7,000. Then, and the symptoms must have hit him really goddam hard because otherwise he never would have left at this critical point in the spiel, he excused himself again.

We looked good in the pink light of the room. We considered the esthetics of coffins. They all seemed overdone to me, fat boxes inspired by some mid-70s Detroit esthetic of pomp and crap. The extortionary pricing took away any shame any of us might have had in looking cheap. 

But even knowing the sales machinery in operation, I paused. Would it mean anything? A fancy coffin? Would that make up for the times I'd politely begged off from seeing him? Would it smooth over the hatred I'd felt for him in the past? Could a coffin salve the past?

DId the Egyptians have a point? What if I sent him to an afterworld lacking some critical thing -- what would it be? Would cremation mean his soul would wander the earth, homeless? What if I was wrong about my beliefs? They didn't seem particularly well founded, or based on anything much at all.

I remembered my aunt in her coffin last January. The dead are so utterly dead. The soul, or whatever you want to name it, the personality, the animating snap of neurons, whatever it is that makes a person a person on this earth, in this frame, was gone. 

Did it matter? I wanted it to matter. But I didn't see the means or the tools in the showroom, in that funeral home, to make it different.

Mr. Moon came back.

My stepmother asked for the least expensive option.

It was on a bottom shelf, barely visible under the gleaming silver and shiny blonde wood models.

A cardboard box. Really. Just picture the box a refrigerator comes in, turn it gray and add some paper sheets and a white pillow on the inside. It cost $75. We ordered it.

I signed the paperwork and a check for $4,500.

With the odor of woodsmoke still in our nostrils, we decided not to have a bite to eat. 

Instead, we walked across the parking lot in the sunshine to our cars.

Absence

My father died two weeks ago today.

But I'm not writing about that. What I am writing about is how the absence of ritual can really fuck you up.

First of all, I'm surprised to be taking this particular position. I am, in the abstract anyway, ready to do away with Old Forms. Outdated Traditions. Moldy Remnants of Days of Yore. Who needs that crap, after all?

Confronted with death, or birth or any major crisis, though, you look for guidance. I'm not so sturdy that I don't yearn for some kind of support.

If your father died in Ancient Greece or Rome, or 16th-century Japan, or, hell, in 1910 in America, you had a prescribed course of action. A set of rules and behaviors surrounding how to mourn and how to bury the man. These were enforced by a priest, a minister, a family. You shared a set of expectations, the etiquette that hid and eased the process. You had experts to rely on, that were not in your pay or your thrall, but who represented, however poorly, a tradition. You could adhere to that, or not, depending on your temperament and philosophy.

Now, you have to decide. And make choices at the worst possible moment, when you're tenderized and scraped raw and dealing with anguish. You have no form to pour those feelings in to. Instead, you have to make up the program for the burial, as if you're a half-assed theatrical producer.

My father set out his wishes in his will, so we have guidance. It's a set of requests both awesome and completely foreign to me. I'll honor those wishes. I'll put his car on display for the Shriners, have the piper play, and invite the firefighters to do their number for their fallen brother.

But it's all improvisational, made up. Grab-assed. That freedom is cool, I guess. But I wish, now, for a rule. A set of regulations that would dictate how long to weep, how many weeks to wear black, to put an armband on my suit, how many tears to collect.

What songs of mourning to sing.

Then, I'd know what to do. Absent a church or a temple, you don't exactly know. Maybe I'll shave my head, or burn his possessions, or find some ashes to toss on my head as I sit and meditate on him and his absence.

Or not.

Some nights

Even thought it's late, you don't want to sleep.

Slipping into the evening past 10, 11, midnight is delicious, a sin without vice, a familiar shirt you've forgotten about. The daily leash slips away, and you just want to stay awake and savor the darkness, the black pressing against the windows, the sudden chill, the deep night frigidity, the sudden sense of freedom, of possibility. Jumping a car and driving someplace, anywhere -- Nebraska, the Wyoming border, or down south to the deserts of New Mexico seems impossibly romantic. The silence, as palpable as silk. Whatever music's playing seems deepened, even more resonant, and a tacit partner in plans.

It's time to go. To head out, and forget whatever's at home, at the hearth, and see where you end up.

Fake isn't what it used to be

When I first traveled to Paris, seeing McDonald's on the Champs-Elysees bruised my tender illusions. Then I grew up, and realized that if the French wanted a Big Mac, they had a right to it, just like the kids in Boise or Dubuque.

Of course, I didn't go there. Not until, about a year into my stay in Paris, a genuine expatriate invited me to meet him at the place. No one revoked my Francophile card. In fact, the place was packed with Frenchies of all ages, something you couldn't say about the other restaurants on the Champs.

And upon reflection, McDonald's, KFC, and even Haagen Dasz are examples of globalization I can understand. They provide the benighted masses of Europe with delicacies that their own cultures -- no matter how fertile -- cannot.

In the 1980s and 1990s, coffee culture took off in the US. That was a fine thing, too. Back in the dark ages, marijuana was easier to come by than espresso. You had to earn it. Surly baristas, as I learned to call them, would glare at you darkly as they pulled at alarmingly complex machines. Perhaps they were composing lyrics, or trying to recall Pound's XXX canto, or just hung over. Cafes were filled with low rent bohemians, sketching, writing, reading, or pretending, too, anyway.

It was a lot like Paris: bad bathrooms, lousy service, indifferent hygiene, pretension swirling around thicker than the clove cigarette smoke clouding the air.

I loved it.

Those places all reminded me of Le Village Ronsard, a cafe in Paris that I tried, through regular visits and mighty acts of imagination, to convert into my version of Les Deux Magots. The regular waiter, who looked exactly like Harry Dean Stanton in a red vest and soiled white shirt, would bring out a morning cafe creme or the afternoon pression with a minimum of fuss and a smaller amount of cordiality.

Instead of resenting his impersonality, I honored it. None of that, "Hi, my name's Rainbeau, may I take your order?" nonsense. No pretense. There to do his job, and he did it. If he was moody, hell, shouldn't anyone be entitled to a bad day? I can't remember his ever being cheerful,  mais alors, he had to serve all those jerk ricans, American tourists. That'd bring anyone down.

Insanity on my part, mixed with masochism. But an afternoon at Le Village Ronsard was filled with drama. When Henri finally deigned to greet us with a merely chilly bon jour, instead of growling a glacial one, it was a joyful day. We, whether either of us liked it or not, had a relationship

Smart people took note of Parisian cafes and their messy American cousins. They took the cafe concept, streamlined it, juiced up the coffee with a  few extra hundred milligrams of caffeine to make it that much more addictive, threw in some familiar sweets, ditched the alcohol and standardized the back room operations. Thus was Starbucks delivered unto a ready nation.

And the nation saw and drank venti caramel lattes, and, lo, it was good.

In the meantime, Ralph Lauren, (born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx) had been packaging and streamlining Saville Row (among other inspirations).

Dallas, on TV earlier, showed rich Americans living in copies of wealthy British manors.

That was usual. I understood all of that. Real/fake. Authentic/copy. Sort of like what the Japanese did with cars, motorcycles, and cameras.

Then it got weird.

The British Royal family got caught wearing Ralph Lauren. They also moved into new places, houses they had built for themselves, places that weren't old castles dripping with atmosphere and soul. Manors that looked exactly like mansions some nouveau riche Texan would erect in River Oaks.

And then Starbuck's opened in Paris. Several, in fact. With happy-ish Parisians patronizing them.

They're real, but not genuine. But is that even the right question to ask -- can a Starbucks be authentic?Unless you consider that its essence is that of a smoothed-over copy. Can't fakes, or copies, be real -- as real in their replication -- as the real?

As real as Euro-Disney, which is a copy of an American version of a German version of a fairy tale?

And as languages die, and cultures fade, as eccentricities are drowned in pharmaceuticals and pieces of life are packaged for lifestyles, what can you make of it, or consider how to resist? Or is that idea of resisting and boycotting just posturing and impossible, and in the end, not helpful towards preserving -- what, exactly? The old Ronsard cafe, which was just itself (no mattered what fevered nostalgia I brought to it). An un-ironic diner which I would self-consciously appreciate, thus destroying it's very un-ironic presence?

Or just sit back, plug in, take in the AC, dip my scone, swirl my biscotti, and wonder.

Wonder how long it will be until the form, aesthetics and culture of the shopping mall finally conquers everything.

Sara and Randy

If you met Sara, you’d like her right away. She has a round, open face you see a lot in the Midwest, a German-Irish face. She’s not outgoing, but if you say hi to her as she’s ringing up your lunch, she’s happy to chat about her dog walking business or the weather.

Pretty. But not too pretty. The kind of pretty won't intimidate or frighten a man just past his prime. 

So Sara the cashier has a fan club. Guys, mostly in their 40s and 50s, linger around her register if there’s no one in line, and use the chance to bask in the glow of her wide smile and agreeably simple banter.

Randy, on the other hand, doesn’t have a fan club. He rides the same bus I do from the same stop. He's tall, and permanently hunched over, probably from coding for the last 30 years or so with bad posture. He's the sort of semi-autistic programmer who has a hard time socially. 

He seems smart and he reads a lot, but he's incapable of talking about much besides the weather. Day after day we’d wait at the bus stop, talking the weather. At least he chats, I thought; it could be worse -- days waiting for the bus with long pauses as we both pretend to read email on our phones. Instead, we debate the forecast. Not so bad. I tried out a few questions, but only received short answers as he smiled his usual smile.  

Randy worked as a contract programmer for about seven or eight months, then got laid off. I found out a few mornings ago. We got off the bus together at our stop, as usual. He looked more ragged, wearing a frayed t-shirt instead of his usual Ralph Lauren Polo. 

We walked to one of the office entrances, talking about the temperature. When we were nearly there, he said that he'd been laid off. I asked why, but he said his agreement prevented him from talking about it. We paused.  

"I just wanted to let you know," he said. 

"Are you going in?"

"Nope. All done. I'm just going to take the bus downtown." The he asked me if I'd do him a favor. I said sure, sort of dreading something time consuming, but figuring that everyone needs help once in a while. It might be my turn next. So what the hell.

"You know Sara, the cashier, right?" I nod. "Can you tell her?"

"Sure."

"Please say goodbye to her. Tell her Randy says goodbye -- could you do that for me?"

"Yeah, of course." 

We shook hands. 

He loped off without even taking my email.

The face

His was a hard face to miss, for reasons I didn't understand. You know how you notice someone -- in a bus, on a corner, standing  in line -- and you can't figure out why? It was like that. 

He wasn't particularly distinctive. Handsome in a bland way, like a second-tier actor in 1950s movies. A clean, square jaw, well-proportioned features. Brown eyes, fair hair, short nose. He'd play the up-and-coming lawyer or junior executive, Rock Hudson's buddy, say, and get the spunky ingenue in the end. 

He wore pair of glasses with frames like mine, square and black. I wondered if he looked a bit like me, or like a relative of mine, and maybe that was why I'd pick him out in the line of trumpet players in the jazz band or among the baritones in the choir. 

Because he was a star at his high school. He played jazz trumpet well, and went to all-state jazz band, too. He played solos, smoothly. He sang in a pleasant, old-school baritone, so beautifully that he took the lead in musicals and performed solos during choir concerts. He even had a featured act in once, crooning All of Me, à la Sinatra. He was smart enough to invite a cute girl in to the act and make it a duet.

Besides acting and singing and blowing the trumpet, he made short films. He earned top grades. He was accepted to NYU.  I wished him well, from a distance, relieved that I wouldn't be puzzling over why my eye was drawn to him.

Then I heard a rumor: He raped a girl at a graduation party. I didn't believe it. I don't believe many rumors, particularly those spread by teenagers. He didn't seem the type, either. He had girlfriends. Wasn't a kid who'd sequester himself in front of RedTube or World of Warcraft. 

And, two kids, drunk: maybe he was a jerk, and pushed things too hard, but it probably stopped well short of rape. Maybe she decided she didn't like sex with him. Maybe someone hated him and wanted to trash his reputation out of jealousy.

Other rumors surfaced about other rapes.

Then he confessed to that rape at the party. He received a light sentence: three years, probably as part of a plea deal. The details were murky, because he hadn't reached his eighteenth birthday. The local paper, usually eager to spread around a bit of muck, was quiet on this one. The plea spoke of familial money, discretion, skilled lawyers and a compliant DA. They couldn't blot out the crime, but they did what they could.

If, God forbid, it had been my daughter . . . well, let's not talk about it. I don't want to think about it or imagine it. Just two points. First, I believe in retribution more than I believe in justice. Justice is fine for people I don't love. Retribution would only be the beginning for someone I care about.

Second, say what you will about the old-fashioned patriarchy, but one point gets missed. In the old days, and today, among my blue collar relatives, if you mess with our sisters, wives or daughters, you would get hurt. Chivalry didn't mean just opening a door in time. It meant protection. When protection failed, it meant retribution. The men would assemble and take care of business. It still happens. You beat our sister, our daughter, our cousin, you receive a beating in return.

This does not address the central problem of violence against women. But, in some cases, it might make a lesser psychopath pause. If my man here had known he would risk injury and death of his own, maybe he might not have gone through with it. He might have paused. 

As it is, he's losing a chunk of his upper-middle class dream, which is pathetic, but not, by my lights, nearly enough.

The woman he raped wrote a memoir about it, about her process of survival. This was a topic more congenial to the newspaper's editors, who published a front page story about her healing and recovery and so on. 

I wish her well. I hope she continues to recover. My cousin, who was raped by a stranger who broke into her apartment late one night, still hasn't gotten over it. Some women tougher, resilient, manage. 

If you read between or through the lines of the article, you realize just how brutal the rape was. A rotated hip joint. Other injuries are alluded to, but glossed over in favor of the healing slant of the story.  But enough is there that I can say, without melodrama or without  exaggerating, that the guy, that suave baritone and fine musician, was also an evil motherfucker.

And the only clue I had was that vague disquiet when my eye was drawn to him rather than the other kids on the stage.

2

Back when serial killers were in vogue, a book came out called The Killer Beside Me. A woman who'd known Ted Bundy for years wrote about her experiences with him as well as what she later learned about his gruesome career. She knew him as a co-worker and friend. He was handsome, witty, a great guy. 

Who just happened to butcher young women for fun.

We tend to ridicule the chumps on the TV news who babble on about what a regular guy he was while in the background, backhoes dig up corpses. We'd know, we think. How could you not know? 

The mug shot and the pictures that will run of the monster in his prison jumpsuit will further confirm our self-regard. That guy? Total killer. We ignore that nearly everyone looks like a murderous freak or pervert in their own official pictures. Check out your own driver's license, and tell me:  what conclusions would someone draw if they saw that on the evening news? 

Villains don't come equipped with handlebar mustaches that they twirl or flat 100-yard stares and gnarly tattoos. Of course, we know that. But we also forget or don't quite realize that they come with no tell-tale signs at all. Perhaps, at most, we might experience a certain disquiet, a whisper of worry.

And, even though we hate to admit it, we expect evil to be glamorous. No matter what we may have learned as adults about the "banality of evil," hundreds of tales and movies and myths have either reinforced or trained us to believe that some terrible beauty surrounds evil, some incredible magnetism. 

Maybe we believe that to excuse ourselves when we fall short of our own better impulses. 

So I learned a lesson, one that's hardly a secret. 

To pay more attention to the disquiet that intrudes.

To recognize that this disquiet could come from that Bosnian next door who sees his chance and kicks you out the house your family lived in for a few generations. Or the Hutu who picks up his machete.

Or the high school kid with a great future ahead of him.

Or, finally, the one in the mirror.

Aurora

What is there to say?

That these events are common, now as spring floods. Insightful, eloquent things have been said before, many times. An avalanche of idiocies will be certain to follow, true to form. Few capture the awful fascination, or how grief moves those who did not know the victims.

Or how you live with a weird anxiety during the suspense of wondering if someone you knew might have been there. Through Facebook and Twitter, we find that a friend of a friend from high school was shot. Two degrees of separation from the blood and smoke filled room.

It sounds like rank superstition, but there was something evil in the air, some black smudge that bleared the hot night. No one slept well. Restless, without knowing why, we tossed and turned. Those who lived closer heard sirens as the ambulance sped the wounded to outlying hospitals with more space. The cineplex -- an ugly made up word for an ugly, made up place -- is in a modest area. You can rent a single bedroom apartment for around $500, and most of the places around there are rentals. Hooligans, as an Asian acquaintance put it, hooligans like to loiter on the parking lots.

Some offer statistics showing that killings like these are unusual, and your chances are good for avoiding some man who is heavily armed and sick with his own heavy blood and ready to shed the blood of just about anyone.

You have to wonder, too, about the film. Conservatives won't wonder, liberals will silence their misgivings about filmed violence to talk about gun control. They're both right in a way.

The last Batman film played a guy getting killed with a pencil through his eye for laughs, and offered up for our thrills one explicitly S&M inspired scene after another, dealing bondage out like playing cards. Then I felt, more than thought, that it was the most depraved movie I'd ever seen. I hate making this argument, and I am vehemently against censorship, and I've read the stats that don't show much of a link between fictional violence and the impulse to be violent. But the breathtakingly casual way that violence is manipulated for sensation and for profit is vile.  It is dishonest and morally bankrupt for a creator to disown all responsibility for a work that presents killing as entertainment, to pretend that it's just good fun. It's when violence has no weight, no heft, no human price attached to it, that is disgusting.

But even if we could wave a magic, sanitizing wand and dial the portrayal of violence back to the 1930s level and ensure that for each act of violence the audience would experience emotional pain or dread, it wouldn't work. It wouldn't stop Dylan or James from making that final leap.

And, as a gun owner, I'm vehemently for gun rights. But should stacks of semi-automatic weapons be legal to own, really? Should driving a car be more regulated than owning a pistol that can pump 15 rounds out in less than a minute?

But even if we had sane gun laws, which will not happen any time soon, that would not stop atrocities like the one last night. The suspect bought his guns legally. A determined person can buy guns illegally. At most, you could guess that there would be fewer wounded or dead. But reform's not going to happen.

The victims, as they usually are, are innocent. Or, at least, innocent of any injury to the shooter. An Aurora teenager doesn't have much to do with PhD programs in neurology, or existential failure or, perhaps, the snapping of a neuron gone wrong.

Instead of chatter, even expressions of grief, I'd like to offer a keening moan in a corner for their deaths and their pain.

 Or silence.