let doomsday begin.

so today someone shot and killed 30 people, then himself at virginia tech. another shooting occurred at the dorms where two more were shot dead. the largest shooting in US history, school or not. i recall walking around campus here one afternoon and remarking to myself how easy it would be for someone to take out a ton of people very quickly on our campus. you wanna piss some people off? why not hit america at its heartland, hit some innocent students, hit a large group of people at once? its such a scary idea to entertain.

i think these kinds of things easily affect me. i become glued to the tv as the facts of the disaster unravel bit by bit. i imagine myself in the scenario, a young life taken so quickly. i think of the nickelback video for "saving me" where the people are walking around with the countdown clocks counting down the years, months, days, minutes and seconds left in their lives. to think that we are predisposed to a certain length of time in life, a mystery length that we can never know, that is until the string runs to the end, the final and unrepentable knot. it often takes real life situations and living vicariously through others' trauma to remember this fact.

the doomsday clock now sits at five minutes till midnight. i see the way the world is going and its not a pretty picture. when i think about how i perceive the state of the world to be at this time, i think about the night of september 11, 2001. i remember walking to the window and looking at the dark night sky, not a plane in site. i reflected on all that happened that day. on the innocence lost. on a new world view. on an outlook of fear in the future. on the feeling that maybe everything i had once thought was true or right no longer existed. on the world for what it truly is: scary, uncertain and illusive.