There was a shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The Bangladesh National Cricket Side was in town for a test match. I hope they’re safe.

The perpetrator is an avowed white racist, not a Muslim. 49 people were killed.

Every time a shooting like this occurs, any murder really, part of me dies too. A little bit of hope that we really are rational, sensitive, loving creature shrivels up, withers away. Maybe that’s necessary.

I woke up to urinate. And look at my messages as if some incredible news affecting me is about to happen.

But no. I guess that’s a good thing.

I did read Porngirl3’s post about her children. I miss the days when my children were little.

Then again there is a lot about my past I miss. However I don’t miss who I was then.

I went back to bed, lay there for about ten minutes when I realized I like being awake in the predawn night. The silence is so compelling.

I’m not one for nude selfies, but I like wearing my logger jeans from Key Apparel and long sleeve tee shirt from L L Bean. So here.

I ran into a friend of my deceased ex-wife yesterday. She reminded me that the secretive nature of her final months left me kind of incomplete around our relationship.

I don’t know precisely what it is I’m trying to say. Maybe I’m saying that I have been striving to be a better person than the lecherous drunk I was when we were married.

Maybe she’s out there in the ether watching. Who knows?

I wake up

Start to think

And wonder

What am I doing up?

Do I want to sleep, renew, restore

Or sacrifice this time for a new experience?

With the wakefulness comes the longing.

For some reason, I can’t seem to chill. The world of Word Press has me happily engaged. I can take an idea, , think it through,write it down, hit the send button and people all over the world can read it. Amazing.

Aristotle or Aquinas, John Locke or Karl Marx couldn’t do that. Not that what I write approaches any of their works. Maybe therein lies the problem. I can put it out there for the millions or billions to read and maybe seven or eight actually do.

Very sobering, I love all you guys, but these exercises in thought and self-expression can merely start here.

How can one have a “Hump Day” when there are no humps in the week? Such is my predicament. The days don’t really all run together, but there are rarely tasks for me to complete, except for swimming and writing.

When I started writing, I was worried I couldn’t tell a story. Now I’m worried I can’t write anything other than erotica (Porn).

I feel a little sickly today, like the cold has rejuvenated itself. I have to fight the urge to keep going. I suck at self-care.

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington.

The story goes that upon arrival in Cuba on an assignment from Hearst and the Hearst newspapers, the artist Frederic Remington wired Hearst that he saw no signs of imminent conflict to which Hearst responded with his now famous answer, cited above.

Journalism, as a profession dedicated to an objective and factual observation of events, stood indicted by this statement.

Now, over a century after Hearst’s pronouncement, journalism, whether print, electronic, or digital, is again having its objectivity challenged. When the media carries the same biases as its readers and viewers, it is difficult to discern those biases. “How could someone who thinks as I think be wrong?” is the assumption we all make. We’re never wrong, right?

The Watergate scandal gained traction by a shared fundamental dislike of Nixon by the media and a substantial portion of the public at large. Nixon had to be behind it, right? That’s what the media was looking for, that’s what the media, Congress, and the prosecutors found.

The John F. Kennedy assassination and its subsequent investigation by the Warren Commission, was never critically reported by the media, nor did the media vet the Warren Report at that time. Subsequently, the Kennedy Assassination is a seminal event in the crafting of popular legends. Involve organized crime and the CIA in any alternative examination of the assassination and one immediately has willing and eager believers. While the Warren Report may be specious, any refutation of its findings aren’t therefore true simply because they draw different conclusions.

We come to the present day and we look to the media for further validation of our beliefs around climate change, the global economy, local economies, electoral politics, race relations or the status of women, just to name a few issues.

It is far too unnerving to think that our own prejudices are what manipulate us into thinking and acting in the ways that we do. No one wants to believe that we furnish and tie the strings to our wrists ourselves that the puppeteers jerk.

Using the Albuterol Inhaler helps but it is taking a while. But I am feeling better. We joke about how we dread the “Spring forward” time change. So I am up and the clock says 5:30, but my body and mind say 4:30.

I’m watching people on YouTube nose around abandoned property. Creepy. I don’t have the chutzpah to do that.

We shall see how today unfolds. Still don’t feel up to going to Mass. I might just watch TV Mass and leave it at that.