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a mass shooting affecting people I know
Saturday, October 27 2018
This morning (even before I'd brewed french presses of regular and decaf coffee), we learned there was an "active shooter event" in Squirrel Hill, the Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh where Gretchen's brother's family live. "Active shooter" can mean lots of things. It's often just a crazy guy holed up with a gun. But as the morning turned into noon, the details of the situation gradually gave indications that a historic-level mass shooting had taken place. For starters, we learned that three, then four, responding police officers had been injured apprehending the suspect. Then we learned that the shooter had attacked a bris (a ritual circumcision of an infant) at a conservative synagogue and shouted something to the effect that all Jews must die. "I hope his name isn't Allahu Akbar," I'd said. It turned out he was a white guy with an ordinary non-ethnic last name. There had been some initial concern that perhaps Gretchen's brother and his family might have been impacted, though the name of the synaogogue was unfamiliar. Later, though, we learned that Gretchen's brother had recently changed synagogue and that the shooting had indeed taken place at the one he and his family attends. There are apparently several congregations that meet in the building, and, in the case of Gretchen's brother's congregation, there is no rabbi, and members take turns in that role. By some stroke of luck, nobody we (Gretchen and I) happen to know had been at services this morning. But the guy who had been doing exactly what Gretchen's brother occasionally does, in his same congregation, had been shot in the stomach. He was expected to live, but by the end of the day the death toll from this shooting was ten or eleven. Between this, the recent pipe-bomb-mailing spree, and the racist killings recently in Kentucky, it's been hard for Fox News and Donald Trump to demagogue a caravan of poor brown people supposedly making their way to Texas (but still over 1000 miles away).
This afternoon, I had a landlording chore at the brick mansion on Downs Street. One of the tenants on the second floor had tried to adjust the heat on an old cast iron radiator and water had started spurting from around the stem of the valve. I showed up and quickly stopped the leaking by tightening a nut around the stem, though it seemed pretty clear that the stem was also broken, since it could be turned infinitely in either direction and could even be pulled out of its retaining nut if enough force was applied. Replacing it would require draining the zone, not something I wanted to undertake today. But with the bleeding (of hydronic water) staunched, the emergency was over.
Later, at Home Depot, I bought some replacement plumbing equipment for whenever I get around to fixing that radiator valve (and a similar one in the bathroom). I also bought a wedge a second splitting maul so I can have two separate wood-splitting stations: one in front of the woodshed and one at some distant salvaging spot in the forest (one doesn't want to carry such heavy equipment back and forth). Then I got a bunch of grocery staples at ShopRite, particularly breakfast cereal (corn flakes, Special K, and cheerios), frozen burritos, and lots of canned beans. I checked out with the automatic teller, which is always trouble. The problem is that I bring my own bags, and it's hard to maneauver groceries into cloth bags without lifting them a little. But every time the robot registers a decreasing weight, it complains, often going into a mode that can only be reset by the human employee it hopes to one day replace.
I went out of my way to swing by the Tibetan Center, though there was little of interest there for me. I bought a nice little circular mirror that I thought was parabolic (it wasn't) and a three old-timey silver-plated butter knives for $4. I wanted the knives to include in our cars' toolkits for use for things like spackle application and various mechanical hacks (such as removing the paper jam that has afflicted the receipt printer I've been cursed with at work).
Back at the house, Gretchen wanted us to go out tonight to see the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man in Saugerties. While we were there, I thought it might be nice for us to get dinner at Rock Da Casbah. But if we were going to be doing that, I wanted to go get a backpack full of firewood first. A cold rain had been falling all day, but now it had sort of ground to a halt. So I grabbed my chainsaw and the wood-hauling backpack and set off down the Gullies Trail. The dogs came along; it was their first walk of the day. I found some reasonably-dry maple pretty far (about a quarter mile) from the house. I added a little dry oak to that, and it came to a fairly heavy load.
On the drive to Saugerties, our falafel-making friends Cathy and Roy called to say they were headed to Woodstock Pizza Theatre for dinner and wondered if we wanted to join them there. Gretchen convinced them to meet us at Rock Da Casbah instead. This was an easy change for them, since they were just crossing the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge at the time.
At Rock Da Casbah, we all sat in the booth back where the band plays (the music would start shortly after we'd be leaving). As always, Gretchen and I ordered the Hey Jude pasta dish, though it wasn't quite as good as usual. It definitely needed salt. And pepper. We discussed the today's synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, though it's hard for Isr&elig;lis like Cathy and Roy to quite comprehend how freaked out Americans get over mass shootings and terrorist incidents; in Isr&elig;lis are used to shrugging such things off. The difference, at least as I saw it, was that at least in Isr&elig;l there's an understanding on both sides what the conflict that causes such incidents is all about. In the United States, on the other hand, such things tend to turn on some individual's mental health issues multiplied by the easy accessibility of guns.
In another part of our dinner conversation, Cathy revealed they she buys special expensive "humanely-raised" meat-based dog food for her dogs. Gretchen, who feeds our dogs vegan dog food, was horrified.
At the Orpheum Theatre, I had a hankering for coffee, but the nearest thing they had to that was iced sweet tea. So I got a cup of that. To me, it tasted like flavorless sugar water, but that might just because sugar (which I eat very little of) now overpowers all other flavors I can sense. As for First Man, I'm a sucker for reality-based space movies. It wasn't nearly as beautiful as something like Gravity, and I found the use of handheld cameras jarring and excessive. But there were plenty of beautiful and exciting moments, particularly the scenes of real-time trouble shooting of space gear and the transcendant views of the moon (both on it and near it). It was amusing to watch a Lunar scene that clearly had been shot on a Hollywood sound stage (how did that they shoot that low-gravity hop?) and to think of all the conspiracy mongers who think the original footage was shot that way too.
Clearly a lot of attention to detail had gone into the reproduction of the period spacecraft and spacesuits, but none of that stuff would've been as dirty as it was shown on screen. Back then it was brand-new and it would've gleamed. Instead, it seems the set designers had taken pains to dirty things up. True, all those artifacts are dirty now. But it's been fifty years.
Another interesting thing about First Man was its depiction of, well, white people. Back in the early 1960s, before mainstream America had absorbed much black culture, white people didn't behave like they do now. From our vantage point in 2018, they even seemed a bit alien. This struck me in an early scene when Neil Armstrong and his wife Janet are shown dancing to Lunar Rhapsody, a song that is to modern pop what Australopithecus robustus is to modern humans. During that scene I'd turned to Gretchen and whispered, "White people!" It made her giggle.
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