For some unexplained reason I am very happy. No longer in obsession, unable to even remember what that felt like. Relieved from the bondage of self I walk the streets with the little dog unfettered, knowing of course that this too shall pass. For as every bad feeling vanishes every good one does too.
It may have something to do with the fact that I can see an end to the complications, it may have something to do with the fact that I am off to Europe. It may have a great deal to do with my relationship with Venice boy petering out (sexually) or the man in NYC becoming a very good friend with whom I can have a giggle and not a tear.
So, late breakfast with Toby at the Hollywood Farmers Market which feels, on a warm and sunny day, just like a similar market in any part of France. We drank iced coffee and discussed how much joy it gives us to share things we love with people we love. After breakfast I hung with a new friend and this evening Eric and I are going to see Iron Man 2. Will this make any sense if I never saw Iron man 1?
This afternoon, however, I am mostly preoccupied with the British press and their idiotic deductions re. Derrick Bird the Cumbrian taxi driver who shot 12 people dead last week in the UK. Apparently the British press are baffled not by his deplorable actions but that they, in their capacity as psychoanalytic detectives, cannot come up with any plausible motive he may have had on which to hang their hat.
Derrick was, by all accounts, a likeable man. A good father with many friends and rich family life. He was well respected, his friends describe him as polite.
The press, unable to accept that this man had simply gone insane, are rooting around for adjectives to describe Derrick that might make him less like you or me. Unable to use words like isolated and loner they are reduced to using words like quiet. Derrick, apparently, was quiet. Rather than admit to feeling as confused as the rest of us they report that he had squabbled with other taxi drivers for fares. Clues for why Derrick might have gone insane include: once, a passenger ran off without paying his fare and Derrick made a police report and that many years ago he had been assaulted.
I’m assuming that both incidents are common to most taxi drivers.
A passenger running off without paying the fare is hardly motivation for a man to take a shot-gun and kill two people he knew and ten complete strangers in a wholly un British drive by type killing spree.
The press are rooting around for Derricks unknown ‘demons’. The problem is: they cannot get anyone to say one bad word against him. They posit unconvincing similarities between him and the Dunblane murderer Thomas Hamilton who was an isolated, sad man who wrote compulsive indignant letters of complaint.
The inability of the press to just admit that there may not be a familiar motive, that in this evolved society a simple, polite, kind man might just go off the rails is more disturbing than a loner with a gun who had no friends. Derrick is just like so many people that you and I know. To think of any one of them snapping like that without a history of prior infractions, resentments or dodgy relationships is all the more worrying.
Let’s face it, if I randomly shot 12 strangers (no intention by the way-although I know exactly who I would shoot) people would nod sagely and say, ‘I told you so’. Sadly, it would come as no surprise whatsoever to hear that I had gone off the deep end to the majority of people who knew me and millions of people who didn’t.
Tomorrow I might make a list of 12 people I would shoot if I could get away with it.
So, just to update the Derrick Bird story. The tabloid, salacious UK newspapers are claiming that Derrick (ex-nuclear power worker) was obsessed with a Thai stripper. That he had a ‘secret life’ of visiting Thailand and scuba diving. Huh? So, there is still no explanation. If this is indeed true then so what? Many, many men visit Thailand to gawp and fuck Thai women. It’s even more amazing that they use the words ‘nuke’ worker in an attempt to make the man even more sinister.
Like the rest of us the commentators who work for the British Press are struggling to understand how an ordinary man flips from good to bad, from sane to insane, from ordinary to extraordinary. It intrigues me that this is a man who abandoned the fantasy (fantasies we all might share in a frustrating world) of killing those who gave him pain to the reality of picking up a gun and making the world know just how much pain he was in.
The press are terrified of revealing that we are all capable of committing atrocities, that there is a fine line between those of us who don’t and those of us who could. Normal men and women ran the concentration camps, normal men and women took up machete in Rwanda and cut down their neighbours. I am amazed that there are not more incidents like this than there are. From road rage to screaming at the Indian call center worker to Derrick Bird it’s all cut from the same cloth.
Which one of us has not considered taking the lives of others or indeed our own life and make society pay for not understanding our true worth? Derrick felt, as described by family and friends, powerless, frustrated, plagued with resentments..feelings most of us experience every day.
But, there you go, I ended up doing what I loathe most: psycho conjecture. Just my half penny worth.
The Duke of Hamilton died today. A nobleman who was actually noble. I went fishing with him once in Scotland with my friend and dearly departed Dione Henderson.