lisa makes me smile and laugh.

ha! Oh in researching just what that part of the neighborhood was called I found this article

[link]

written 10 years ago just about the same time I moved to the neighborhood. fascinating!

I'm don't see how its more appalling to kill someone who wrote wonderful books than a wonderful father or somebody's precious baby boy.

I guess, but the reverse happens all the time. So and so was the father/mother of two small boys/girls... we have no idea what kind of father or mother, of course, but that rarely seems to matter.

Everyone was someone's precious baby. (Or at least should have been).

I want a universal remote. So I can pause the universe while I take a really long nap without missing any deadlines.

My guess is that if you kill a writer whose work you've read and/or enjoyed - it makes it that much more personal.

On the flipside of the thing I posted - I've read a number of accounts where a soldier almost kills an enemy, and then after the war they meet again and become friends.

They just broke a light bulb the cube over. We're all going to die.

Killing your authors...I guess the idea is that if you kill someone you've heard of, you should be killing that specific person on purpose. And that the more people that have heard of them, the more people you're depriving.

A pretense of facelessness serves war.

I can't believe it - we're under a winter storm watch starting tomorrow night.

Yes, the first day of Spring.

Enough, already!

On the flipside of the thing I posted - I've read a number of accounts where a soldier almost kills an enemy, and then after the war they meet again and become friends.

I've read those too.

I just think we (as a society maybe? not tommyrot in particular) have gotten too a point where we too easily say "well, that's war". We know its wrong to kill, right? We're taught that from diapers. And I think its actually true and not some sort of brainwashing.

Then we end up in a situation where they say "NOW you can kill. In fact you SHOULD. This isn't what we were talking about..." which I suspect is a big effing lie.

Because as soon as you personalize someone (you loved the author) or you see their face across a trench on Christmas or you meet them fifty years later at a veterans thing their humanity comes back the lie is revealed. No, its not alright to kill.

Is it better to kill than be killed? Yes. Better to kill an intruder than let them kill your mother? Yes. But you're still doing a wrong thing. You're left with nothing but bad choices and making the better bad choice. You're human and the situation is fucked and you're making due... but sometimes I think we (as a society? a species?) go there too easily.

It's nice by me - I've got the door propped open. We're what, 50 miles? Less?