NP: Garbage, Bleed Like Me

Once I knew that my one friend in London was okay, I've pretty much put any deep thoughts of what went down on Thursday out of my head. This was about halfway between the immediacy and closeness of Manhattan and the remoteness of Madrid for me, both in terms of geography and emotion. Not because they speak English, although maybe indirectly, since I know far more Brits than Spaniards.

No, I've moved onto all sorts of spurious, and occasionally wildly inappropriate thoughts, like who is going to be the first to invoke the black helicopter-inducing notion that this was carefully planned to knock Karl Rove off the front pages, or who will do the opposite, saying how this means we shouldn't care about who leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press. Or how I'm not going to get worried about whether or not it could happen here, because I'm usually late for work, and a rush-hour bombing would be likely to miss me entirely. Plus, I mostly ride my bike to work these days, and will now plan to do so on the 11th of each and every month, even if they didn't hew to the date this time around.

But the reality of my surroundings is that I do take public transportation in a major metropolitan area. Does this make me stop and think about moving to Montana? Maybe raising me up a crop of dental floss? Nope, not even a little bit. In a country where, if I remember correctly, more than half of a national survey thought they could be shot by a sniper back when that story was getting play, the media obsession with "could it happen to you" gets less and less meaningful every time they trot it out. Obviously, there are things -- within reason -- you do in order to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if you start to obsess over it, when do you stop?

If only I could think of some little catchphrase that would encompass this mindset, with regard to what the types of people who perpetrate these horrible acts are after. I'm sure I'll come up with something.