Gray.

Yesterday morning started off badly. First off, it was Monday, which we can all agree is never a good thing. Still sore and achy all over from whatever bug I had, I sat down at the computer to try and scare up something to blog about, and wound up reading Bill Whittle's essays on "Seeing the Unseen". Still smarting from that heartening reminder that a large part of my fellow inmates in the monkey cage possess reasoning skills that would do a disservice to a lobotomized Shih T'zu, I sat on the porch with my current reading material, Radical Eye For The Infidel Guy. It should have been funny; it had been the night before, at least. Now it just left me feeling hollow. Yeah, yeah, it was all obvious, but that was the worst part: It was all obvious. Obvious that people can do evil things because they apparently like to believe insane stuff.

I gave it all up for hopeless, showered, and drove to work. I walked in the door and was immediately asked if I'd had my radio on. Setting down my lunch sack and hanging my carbine on the wall, I answered "No, why?"

"Mass shooting. Virginia Tech campus. Twenty-something dead, and counting."

The bottom dropped out. I'm afraid I probably owe my employer whatever he paid my body for being there yesterday, because my heart went home sick right about then. I did my best to phone it in, but it all felt so hollow when one of our regular customers, a retired Winchester engineer, came in to shoot that evening.

"This is a hell of a way for my alma mater to make the national news. We had pistols in our dorm rooms back then. I carried mine on my hip through the cafeteria more than once if I was on my way to the range after eating. We never shot anybody. Why this? Why now?"

What could I say? "Gee, I'm sorry that the human race is crazy, and getting crazier by the day"?

Now comes the media-fueled search for blame, the hounding of the victims and their families, the search for political advantage preached from atop a rostrum built of still-cooling bodies...

If only, if only, if only... If only the killer didn't have a gun. If only Professor Librescu did. If only... If only the killer hadn't chained the doors. If only the students had rushed the killer instead of the exits. If only...

It's days like this it all turns gray. It's days like this I just don't want to play anymore. It's days like this.