Caterwauling

Honestly, what the hell is going on this week? It’s not a bad week, by any means, but man, it’s off-kilter.

My friend just called to say her cousin is in the local burn unit. Turns out that he was trying to fill a lighter with butane, while he was smoking crack. Burned off most of his face and blew up half of his apartment, while he was at it. Brilliant.

I have no problem with self-destructive people. Really, don’t share your stupidity with the world. It’s those assholes who think their life’s mission is to ruin yours that I have a problem with. (Like that Virginia Tech shooter — man, how many creepy assholes have we come across in our days? That could have been us, at any time. Some nut with a few screws loose and look what happens. It’s a wonderful *snerk* case study for the counseling field — oh wait, they couldn’t help him either. Blah blah blah I’m not blaming anyone but the little whackjob himself, but really, why doesn’t society listen to not only the crazy when they cry out, but also the perfectly sane who try to alert people to it? Why do good people have to die because someone’s on an imaginary warpath?)

I digress.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, back to my friend’s cousin. Look, the crack-smoking? Stupid. Really fucking stupid. But blowing up himself now has his family going berserk, trying to figure out how to advocate for him in the hospital while wondering if he’s even worth saving at this point. You can’t burn bridges while you’re standing on them and expect people to rally around your sorry ass. And that little habit of his? Endangered the lives of everyone in his apartment building, because there was a bona fide explosion. Not to mention that his family members are fairly prominent in the area — lord knows we house the bulk of the nation’s elected officials in our various suburbs. I hope this bullshit doesn’t get out, because it’d be a freaking mess.

My friend said her cousin has these charred boxes on his arms. She asked the medics what that was all about, and they said it was burned skin. *shudder*

I don’t know what’s worse — people with evil intentions or the dumb idiot who has no freaking clue how his actions affect the world around him. Well, bad intent is definitely worse, don’t get me wrong, because you can choose to be civilized and if you don’t, you’re walking away from your God-given responsibilities to the world. You can try to forgive the happy idiot who’s oblivious to the rest of the world, but either way, it feels like people have no freaking clue what their actions (or inaction, depending) does to throw the world off its axis for the unfortunate few who happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time who either tried to help or didn’t even know to run when the anvil was hurtling toward their heads. …

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 5:27 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.