You win; just try to sound the sirens for me

Remember that scene in Roxanne where Steve Martin buys the paper? Well for you that didn’t see this pinnacle of a story rehashed every five years, you really have missed out. The scene play out that Steve’s character goes to a newspaper machine to buy, amazingly enough, a newspaper. He gets it out of the machine, starts reading, screams at the top of his lungs, and rushes quarters into the machine to put the damn thing back. Watching the news of late has given me just that kind of feeling. Then something else happened.

Things are getting to the point where I’m unfazed by any horrible thing I hear. I hear of the deaths of good people in Iraq everyday and I just add it to the number in my head. I hear of the vast corruption of the subcontracting of the rebuilding of New Orleans and can only think “Well, at least we will know where to locate a majority of our undocumented workers this fall.” There is a volcano erupting in Indonesia and I start to wonder how much press Vesuvius will get when it decides to relocate its inhabitants. I heard a horrible story that both of a woman’s arms were found in an alligator in Florida last week, and all I wonder was if she lost the first arm shaking her finger at the alligator when it took the first one?

I think I am done for a while. I don’t want to watch them tell me that I have a chance to be brutally murderd every fifteen seconds or that my cat is running a meth lab. I don’t want to hear that my government is torturing people in other countries and they know I surf the web to find action shots of squirrel fights. I don’t want to know that my grocery store is dropping prices on avocados to put my neighbor’s fruit stand out of business. I just don’t think I can take much more right now.

So, in short, I may not be the one to ask about what happened in Iran in the next few weeks. If you could please, make sure my local civil defense sirens are operating so I will know to get laid one last time before I have to go put in my job application with the Morlocks.