2 January 2016

Loss of the past . . . is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose. In cases of severest trauma, forgetting is gain, a step outside the basement room occupied by foreign fighters or dirty grandfathers. Ecstasy is now used to ease depression. When I told my student I take anti-depressants he said he loved to swallow lots of them with alcohol. He'd tattooed an AA mantra on his arm. Someone told me he sang like an angel. The journalist found a white woman in western PA who couldn't afford her anxiety meds. Her red white and blue cap reads “Make American Great Again”: “finally someone who thinks like me,” she says of Trump. Spends her time on the internet reading stories about how Hillary killed Vince Foster and ran a child pornography warehouse at the back of a DC restaurant. The man who came to “self-investigate” was arrested before he used his semi-automatic. In a video of the Istanbul attack, we see one man start shooting, others duck under tables. A small black and white dog wanders inside the bar.

--2 January 2016

Washington Post: http://tinyurl.com/z6ubybq