Responding

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 29

"God protects the upright but destroys the wicked."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

If you ever needed proof that religion is full of steaming hot shit, you need look no longer than the eight words quoted that begin this post.  

God protects the upright but destroys the wicked.  Sorry-- I just had to write it out fully a second time to see if they were kidding or what.

Apparently, they're not kidding.  

Don't worry, my dear sweet ones.  This isn't going to be a vitriolic post about the two faces, hot feces steaming stench of religion.  No.  I'm not in the mood.  This is going to be a mix of the good and the bad, the same kind of bad as me, things that are on my mind.  This post will probably meander like a gray Camry piloted by a grayhead somewhere along the gray streets of Graysilvania.  

Remember that post about the old Russian nanny?  We hired her.  She was great.  And then she quit.

Hey, it was a good week.  A really good week.  Some parents never even have a good nanny for a good week.  

She gave us some bullshit.  Pain.  Her shoulder.  X-rays.  I don't know.  Maybe she didn't like our kids or our house or the commute or the fact that we can't pay her what she's worth or that we're Jewish or that she found a better gig or I don't know.  Or maybe it really was her old Russian shoulder.  I'm so tired.  I'm so tired of hypothesizing and moralizing and responding.  When I worked on the unit at the psych hospital and someone would go off, someone would push the panic bell, and I'd respond.  A million thoughts raced through my head as I'd run-- toward what, you never knew-- you just responded.  

When felony car Six-Zebra-Four didn't answer the multiple dispatch calls on March 9th, fifty years ago, LAPD officers responded.  From everywhere.  They converged on Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger's Plymouth, abandoned on the side of the road.  The officers were gone.  They were miles away, standing side-by-side in a pitch black onion field, their arms and hands raised high above their heads in supplication-- or was it surrender-- while two career criminals pointed guns at them.  For a second, their hands touched in the moonlight.  Two police officers, both Marines, alone and sweating through their sport coats in the night.

Campbell was shot dead and Hettinger ran through the screaming darkness.  He escaped a bullet wound, but he was forever damaged by losing his partner, haunted and taunted by unceasing thoughts about what he could or should have done differently, labeled a coward by his department.  At Ian Campbell's funeral, Hettinger wandered over to Campbell's mother and murmured, "I loved your boy."

They had been partners for two weeks.

I went to a social media workshop today, and I wanted to throw up the entire time I was there.  From 9:45-11:50 the bile was riling.  Rising.  Writhing.  Former beauty blonde glossy lipstick pageant queens making twice what I make were prattling on about Likes and Tweets and Pings, Clicks, Impressions and Analytics.  And I listened and took notes and crossed my legs and forced it down and everything hurt.  Self-important prats.  Disingenuous.  Inauthentic.  Superficial.  And my mind was sick.  It was thinking about nannies and shoulders, and a white-hot bullet crashing into Ian Campbell's mouth and racing for the bell through a field of onions screaming in the hellfire of darkness.  

And I didn't know what I was going to talk about in therapy.

Don't worry-- I managed to think of something.  I always do.