i slept through it all

about four months ago, much to my amazement, a gun shop opened up in the strip mall at the bottom of the hill i live on, only a couple hundred yards from my front door. my neighborhood, see, is very quiet. that strip mall has an independent grocery, a couple of banks, a tamale place, a cafe, a paint-your-own-ceramics place... it has a large parking lot. with trees. it's not, you know, a ritzy neighborhood, but things just don't really happen here. usually the most excitement we get is when some surfer gets in trouble and the coast guard has to come fish him out.

at 5 this morning some guy drove his mercedes through the plate glass window, grabbed a shotgun, and started shooting.

damn. i mean, damn. Pacifica hasn't seen this much excitement since a few years ago when some crazy woman tried to wire a bomb into her ex-husband's van and blew herself up. and of course, a few years before that, a bank down the road in Linda Mar was robbed by sword-wielding ninjas who escaped in a blue El Camino.

i guess we were overdue for something over-the-top.

Update: time revised. i didn't realize this happened so early in the morning. i slept through the whole thing!

blaming the victim

i was thinking this afternoon about the way C. used to dismiss my feelings by attributing everything to my depression. whenever i got upset about anything, he'd say "maybe you need your meds adjusted."

which leads me to this: the distinction between not blaming the victim and not taking the victim seriously is not so fine that you can't step in it.