iSelf

Sometimes I could really use a notification system in my own head. Have the Laundry app tell me ‘you have a load in the washer waiting to go into the dryer’, or my Kitchen app tell me ‘the milk in the fridge is about to go bad’. Have an internal Dashboard app which will show me at a glance how much gas is left in my car, how long it’s been since I went to the doctor and what that infernal fucking song is that’s playing in my head.

Come on, Apple. The iSelf. Your move.

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Some Choice Words

Why is it that in so many languages, the words we choose as epithets have to do with sex, body parts and bodily functions?

These are all perfectly normal and natural things. Why do we not use things which are actually negative and stressful when we swear?

Should we not say “go conference-call yourself” or “that’s a crock of rush hour traffic”?

Anyway. I have to end this train of thought. I have a fucking meeting. And not in a good way.

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Society And Society

Another day, another mass shooting in the good old US of A.

Except this one last night was 2.5 miles from me, in a place I know well. I’ve eaten there with friends and colleagues. I’ve played music there. I know some of the staff there. It’s a place I like. And now it’s a place where someone brought in a gun, killed two people and wounded two more.

I am so sick of the sanctimonious justifications, the ‘thoughts and prayers’, and every other layer of complete bullshit which will no doubt be troweled onto this.

And guess what? It’s ten hours old, and already not even the most recent gun-related death in this town – and I don’t live in a particularly dangerous town. I just live in America. The land of the supposedly free.

So here’s the thing about that. If the price of that freedom is measured in corpses, I DON’T WANT IT.

I don’t care how much you love your guns.
I don’t care about your flawed analogies to spoons and cars and hammers.
I don’t care that your father and his father and his father had guns and it’s a proud tradition in your family.
I don’t care about the flawed reasoning that a ‘good guy with a gun’ could have somehow put a stop to this.
I don’t care that you have a constitutional right to own a gun.

I just don’t care.

When 33,000 people are being killed with guns every year, none of that other shit is important enough to make it okay.

Next year, one of those 33,000 could be your child or mine.

Where is the tipping point? How many more people have to die before America, with one voice, says ‘enough’? Whose children have to die for us to take real action?

Constitutional amendments have been overturned before. It’s long past time for us to do it again.

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