Horrors of horrors. Brentwood's claim to fame heretofore (at least in my mind) has been in connection with the slaying of Nicole Brown Simpson and her boyfriend whose name escapes me at the moment. Was it Ron something? Oh yes, and Ben and Jerry's on San Vicente, along with late night walks with my wife that we used to take up there some years ago. Anyhow, so my friend was walking down Wilshire Boulevard near his office during busy mid-day traffic and CRACK, he heard something strange. A moment later he looked down and saw a blood spot in his pants, somewhere north of his knee. He immediately thought "I've been shot," and then tried pulling up his pants cuff to reveal the wound. He quickly realized that he would need to lower his trousers to examine it so began running toward his office building, and his car in the parking garage below. When he finally got a look it didn't appear too serious, but he drove himself to Cedars Sinai. He'd been shot, drive-by style with a b-b gun. Just weird, no? Apparently another guy had been shot, but the other victim was lucky to be toting business cards in his shirt pocket which blocked the shot from breaching his skin. My friend will have a b-b lodged in his thigh muscle henceforth.
So his wife telephoned mine and they rather seamlessly implemented a child-care plan, just to situate the kids until such time as we knew all was back to semi-normality. Yeah, normal. A guy's flesh is pierced by a projectile in broad daylight on a major metropolitan thoroughfare with no apparent rhyme or reason. Normal? My wife and his were joking "this now concludes the Los Angeles portion of our lives," as if to say 'okay, we're outta here." I have to say that although my logical mind (yes, sometimes it rears it's boring head) sees this as random, there's something more creepy about it lurking in my irrational blogger head. This somehow straddles the line between random and, well, not.
The pinprick focus of events; the confluence of occurrences and incidents and accidents and intentions - all makes me feel very out of control. Perhaps the shmuck who fired that b-b at my buddy's leg yesterday was attempting to arrest control in his or her world (why do I assume that a "his" did this?) Maybe he was out on parole but couldn't resist the urge to just be naughty. Or maybe my friend's kippa was just too offensive to him and he had to assert his dominance as a whatever over him at that moment. Or perhaps this was a trial run for some bizarre, upcoming mass shooting spree, Washington DC style. Perhaps Al Qaeda has turned to b-b attacks in Los Angeles. Seems they haven't found the West Coast on any map yet, but I should probably be counting my blessings. They certainly know where the London Tube is.
Utter pandemonium across the pond. People turned toward walls, weeping on cell phones. Smoke rises from an Underground stairwell. The smell of burnt rubber and hair and flesh fill a tunnel. Lives lost. Families lost. Property ruined. A bus is ripped apart like a cardboard happy-meal prize. Fingers in trees. Spouses and lovers forever separated. Moms and dads who will never see their children again. Businesses damaged. The leader of the world's most powerful nation seems to not be able to ride his bicycle and tumbles off - right into a policeman. Sorry, but that last one's kinda funny.
It's easy to pop a human being. I've heard casual banter among gangsters on the streets of Los Angeles referring to shooting as "popping" someone. That's the sound of the gun? Or is it the fact that each of us is kind of like a balloon filled with stuff that just pops when you prick it? Tens of thousands are popped in Iraq. A bus explodes in Jerusalem or London. pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop My friend has a hole in his leg. Pop. That word seems to undervalue all the things which occur in its wake. It's not nice to reduce all those important, sacred and beloved things to a three-letter pop, is it. It belittles the suffering and the worries and chaos left in its wake.
Last night I felt a whole other sensation regarding the impact of Nasa's little probe on Comet Temple 1. It was a big pop. More like a smash or a boom, probably. We're touching other worlds, and in the meantime our own is falling apart. Eighty three million miles away. Everything we've ever known, cared about or thought about is after all just a star from far away. Sinai, Hiroshima, and the birth of my daughter. A pinprick of light. Some little bacteria on my friend's leg experienced his host's b-b shooting as a major cataclysm. George Bush should remember that he's just a prick on pinprick.
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