My friends ask me these weird questions like

if you feed rice to birds will they blow up

and

if You eat Pop Rocks and drink Coke will your Spleen explode.

If in your life you have worked as a Mortician and you write stories about Vampires who accept proposals of marriage at a drive-in then you should be patient when people ask you questions that they probably Google in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep.

So the question of the week, for me,  was the story about the guy in Cananda who was riding on a bus and for reasons that only he might be able to understand- he took out a knife and then stabbed and killed his seatmate.

After

he decapitated his victim.

One of my friends asked me if I had heard about this and I said yes I had.

And then I thought I was going to get questions about knives and do I think demonic possesion was a possiblity in this case.

But for once I got a real question, ” So, I’m not asking how he did it…like, why would he do it? “

And then I realized this wasn’t a conversation about a macabre crime…I was having a conversation with a friend who rode the bus everyday to work and we were talking about an incident that did not happen on a movie screen or in a computer game or on the pages of a ‘graphic novel’.

This terrible crime happened on a bus to a real person like us.

The victim and his murderer- were just two guys on a bus going to someplace else and then their worlds ended the minute that knife came out.

I can’t explain why- from the darkest places in my imagination-that place where all of my strange stories come from-

I just can’t imagine

why.

Today there were some Railroad Guys picking the trash that now collects along the railroad tracks that run just outside of my warehouse.

In the old days the trash would either blow up along side my building ( thus becoming  ‘my problem’ to clean up) or enterprising individuals looking to supplement their incomes would spare me some of the grossness by collecting the aluminum cans ( well, you know beer cans ) that the homeless people would pitch from the street to the railroad tracks below.

( what I see everyday-lucky me )

So these guys are out there with these harpoon things and garbage bags and they’re not happy-

because before the fence went up they never had to do this.

The fence went up because somebody somewhere decided that if they put a fence up here terrorists wouldn’t be able to get next to the tracks and ‘ hate America’.

Personally I think that if somebody is going to hurt you a chain link fence isn’t going to stop them from doing it.

HOWEVER.

All I know is that since the fence went up to ‘protect America’s Freedoms’ I  haven’t  touched a single pair of vomit stained pants, speared a single beer can or picked up syringe with a blood stained needle and tossed the entire mess into the trash where I had to look at it until the trash was collected or I found something to toss on top of the mess so that I DIDN’T have to look at it.

What can I say besides

God Bless America

and

USA
USA
YAY!