reduced and recycled

I retreat to the blog in utter frustration. What else is there? There are times when stringing together thoughts in a coherent paragraph just isn’t the way to get a little piece of mind.

Ugh. The thing about writing is, you get to see what you’ve just written and you sorta feel the pauses between the sentences. It’s like the mind is thinking one thing and then it’s thinking another completely different thing - the result of which is a paragraph full of discontinuities jumbled in a patchwork of words. Maybe I’m confused, that’s all.

I woke up this morning to horrific news. My father was glued to the TV set, and for a brief instant I had a feeling of deja vu; the last time my father was this intensely focused on the news was when two planes struck the World Trade Centre in 2001.

I peeked around the corner and watched men in black, white and blue on TV carrying what looked like a blood-streaked body from the entrance of some building. This was CNN, so that clip of body-bearing men were framed by snazzy columns of red and white with little words marching across.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was the Columbine massacre all over again.

“Thirty-three shot dead and others wounded,” said my dad.

“Thirty-three?!” I said. I suddenly lost my appetite.

“Dunno what’s wrong with these Americans, got guns they keep kill kill killing each other,” he said. “It’s been ‘break news’ since morning twelve o’clock.”

I suddenly got tired of hearing Wolf Blitzer talking and talking and talking. They then played a clip recorded on a Nokia N70. I know it’s a Nokia N70 because the kid who recorded that clip said so, this Palestinian kid from a famous family, apparently. I just got tired of it all. It’s a fucking Nokia N70 but on the other hand we’ve got thirty-three dead students. I wanted to slap that kid silly.

I arrived at the office early and booted up the computer. It was still warm, since the air conditioners were not running as yet. The roar of the cleaner’s vacuum machine irritated me, and the sanitized non-smell of the office just made things worse. I browsed to CNN’s webpage and read their developing story.

Interspersed between the paragraphs were links: ‘see footage of the shooting’ or ‘watch student reactions’ or some such. I’m paraphrasing. I get the whole hyperlinking content thing, sure, but there’s a thin line between hyperlinking content for its own sake and feeding our largely amoral curiosity. Bad news is like good gossip: you can’t get enough of it, apparently.

Or maybe I’m just projecting. I felt like a vulture feeding off the news. I didn’t like that feeling, and oddly enough, I get paid to be a vulture in my job. A scavenger. News portals are like scavengers going after newsbits after the fact. (Do reconstructions of an event trivialize said event? Shurely not, right?).

Maybe it just narrows the perspective? Like how many lives were lost in Iraq just yesterday? No one knows. It’s a newsbit not worth reporting anymore, maybe. But perspective sucks, too, doesn’t it?