“We do have significant mental health problems, there is no doubt about that. …We don’t have enough mental health providers, facilities, treatments. It’s the way that we have facilitated killing ourselves that leads to death with firearms, where we take this to the extreme.”

Yessir, Mr Police Chief. A madman takes three guns to a house where his eleven year old daughter is staying and blows away her and her grandmother and then kills himself. The dying child managed to drag herself to a neighbor’s porch, but ultimately “succumbed to her wounds.”

Quite a way to go. Shot by your father, and probably witnessing him killing your grandmother and then himself. Bleeding out on a neighbor’s porch.

He’d been on leave from his job at Cornell, and he and his ex-wife were having custody disputes.

He showed her. Killed her mother and her child.

See any red flags here? The local police chief didn’t (the police were called to the grandmother’s home by the killer just one day before the shooting – did they contact Cornell and ask why he was on leave?), so the guy took the guns from a relative and did his thing. Why three? (One source says four.) Why not take one? Cuz he wanted to be a hundred percent certain he’d kill everybody, so he needed backup weaponry.

Oh – and here’s a source that says the police had had multiple contacts with the guy but “all encounters before 2025 were medical-related interactions and were not linked in any way to domestic violence.” What’s that mean? How often do you have encounters with police when you have medical issues? Were these mental illness related?

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So let’s see. How do the child’s schoolmates deal with this insane family massacre in a healthy positive way?

Well, let’s look at how Cornell is coping. The guy was a dean. Cornell hired him as a dean. Cornell has erased his name from its website as its major coping strategy. It hasn’t said anything. It won’t tell anyone why he was put on leave.

Maybe the kids can do something similar. Pretend she didn’t exist. Don’t say anything. Don’t ask why an obviously troubled man easily got hold of three guns (why weren’t they secured so that – I don’t know – a madmen couldn’t grab a bunch and shoot his child to death, letting her bleed out in the snow on a neighbor’s porch?); don’t ask why you live in a country where manifestly insane people have no trouble getting hold of many guns.

The Humiston daughter – also eleven – was also shot to pieces by unsecured guns, and she also ended up bleeding on a neighbor’s porch, but she managed to survive. Her fifteen year old brother killed her whole family (five people), but what’s important is that she cope with this in a healthy, positive way.

The attorney representing a gun club where members get all drunk and shoot all over the place acknowledges all the bullets neighbors are complaining about on their property. But hey it’s Texas — there are bullets effing everywhere, babe, so who’s to say they come from our drunk shooters club?

Gunnies hate the idea that there might be ways for states to have slightly better chances of discovering insane mass murderers with immense personal arsenals before they massacre half their town. Nuts like Robert Card are the price of liberty or some such bullshit; and licensing/registration rules are oh so burdensome. Surely our Trumpian Supreme Court will see that.

Well ha. The court has gone ahead and left UD’s state alone as it works hard at not being Mississippi. The court has said that it doesn’t care if the poor citizens of MD are overwhelmed with the burden of rational gun rules.

Marylanders depressed by the rules can make a dash for SOOOOpergunny Montana and blow their heads off.

This just in: Airports suck, and nine hours of flying over the Atlantic is no fun.

This just in: Robust travel when you’re certifiably old is different from the same when you’re young. Hence: UD is proud she held up pretty well.

This just in: Nothing like being back in your comfortable bed after more than two weeks of Euro-wandering. “Hello, beautiful people,” our friend and neighbor Doug just greeted us as we shoveled the car and the driveway/front steps. Word is out in Garrett Park that we ditched the snowstorm and went to southern Italy instead.

Back to regular blogging later today.

UD has constantly been in very high places on this trip: A dizzying Neapolitan hotel balcony; the insanely steep cliffs of Matera, where crumbling walls alone fence out death; an outdoor restaurant in the Matera town center, where you twirl your pasta inches from oblivion. Of course your eyes are supposed to fix delightedly on the massive views of caves and churches, while your mind bothers itself not at all with the intimately close drop. Yet UD seems to suffer from (what fun to find a name/diagnosis) High Places Phenomenon, in which you feel “that you might jump off [a great height] despite the fact that you don’t want to die.” Sometimes, at great heights, “your mind is actually saying, ‘You’re in an unsafe situation—back up from the ledge.’ People usually obey that signal and back up. But we can misinterpret that and think, ‘I must have reacted that way because I wanted to jump.’”

“It might have something to do with how easy it would be to do something so irreversible and absurd, that the mere thought that it’s possible exerts some weird fascination,” [one person] said. “I [also] don’t like to sit in emergency aisles in planes because of that big red lever that looks so easy to pull. It probably isn’t, but I start obsessing over … what would happen if my hands just pulled it before I realized what I was doing? I would never actually pull the damn thing, but the obsessive thoughts are no fun,” she said. 

The theme seems to be a human attraction to/fascination with the sheer possibility life sometimes affords of doing something absurd, radically and madly free — we’re in the realm of Andre Gide’s acte gratuit, in which you act without meaning or motivation, but simply, and somehow defiantly, because you can. Because, in this case, the amazing, immediate facility with which you could move into, er, an entirely other realm weirdly and excitedly enthralls you… There’s a hyperdramatization here, a melodramatization, of Stevenson’s insistent point in his great essay Aes Triplex, and of Mrs Dalloway’s thought as she walks through London on an ordinary day:

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

It is very very dangerous to live even one day; but we rarely feel and see that danger; and anyway, as Stevenson points out, you’d be stupid to miss your chance at a rich life by being always, as it were, on edge. Millions of people live cheek by jowl with volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, flood plains, and earthquakes, and they transact perfectly wonderful existences. We all happily carry around with us scads of internal organs, any one of which could turn sour on us at any moment. Bah! There’s a life to be lived.

And maybe this weird HPP of UD’s is just that – a distillation, in a moment of obvious peril, of the love of life, the immediate pulsing stuff of life, a life which includes the absurd fact that, in some twisted way, witnessing the ease with which we could lose life turns out to be a moment of wildly gratifying affirmation.

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I wonder if it all resonates in some way with ‘Brian Eno, who talked of “idiot glee.” Idiot glee is a kind of sheer joy at the mad fact of the world.’

It’s hard to beat Operation Sudden Fall, but practically incinerating one of our frat pledges at an illegal party comes close. Scummy frats and don’t give a shit administrations remain central to the life of the mind at SDSU; expect more good shit from our school’s unique perspective on higher education.

Without them veils I'd be a goner.
I must have taken too much bourbon ...
Quick!  Lend me PDQ your turban!
Ah.  Now I feel at peace, and calmer."

Promoted to a Principle?

And all because of his firearm skills.

… postmodernized.

UD will always admire the monologue he gave Fulvia Morgana, the way-rich, sybaritic Italian Marxist in Small World:

Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.

In 2022, the church began to require that clergy vouch for new [Brigham Young University] hires’ agreement with [church] leaders [on all faith matters] and affirm the candidate hasn’t used pornography recently.

What’s the procedure for proving to a clergyman you haven’t used porn recently?

His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane” were for many people repulsive.

From our hotel room balcony.

Trip today to Pompeii.

… study the Grecian urns in the Naples archeological museum. With Keats’s lines echoing in her head, brilliant mosaics underfoot, sunlight through veiled windows, and the urns themselves – objects UD considers among the most beautiful things in the world – your blogueuse found herself in tears.