photo by Finn Rowley, age 13, taken this morning

I always choose the topic for the Zephyr towards the last moment

so the transmission is fresh and I don't have to perform the vibe, as it were, after the impulse for a topic has passed.   School shootings can't be counted on to skip happening during the window in the week where the topic gets chosen.  One horror or another always makes the window—hello, new abortion laws, you just missed it, but your horror status is so insanely hot you must be named—but the general mission around here is some kind of tonic lightness, a refueling. Some weeks make that hard to square, though.

Colorado won the toss this time. (Georgia and Ohio, I can't yet.)

The pictures of those elementary school kids evacuated from their school, in particular, they demanded the spot here. The little ones trying to deal.

It's hard to keep the words fresh when you're talking about school shootings and that's an underrated worry. We're used to the tones and sounds and feelings, the calling or not calling our congresspeople, the donations or no donations, the mournful/rageful posts, etc, that follow one of these.

School shooting, everybody. Places, please. 5, 6, 7, 8...

                       Urgency, grief and rage are three very important things that we are going to step right around this week, as absurd as that seems.      Urgency and rage shoot us into action but then they drop us off somewhere else away from the crime scene.

They're hot and fast: virtues when they're virtues, which isn't 100% of time.

Grief keeps us at the crime scene but we're at the scene afterwards. And: we're kind of focusing on ourselves, the sad grownups.    Can we just hang out with children for a while? Can we visit them at school for a minute in our minds, on a non-school-shooting day? Just consider them, as beings.  There's no shortage of that in the clinical sense and many places cater to them, and many entities market to them   But if we're not teaching, parenting, treating, catering or marketing to them I don't believe we consider them much.  Can we be with them for a minute not in the way where we're grownups deciding what's best for them but as aficionados? Can we appreciate them like hikers appreciate mountains for a second?   I don't know if you've hung out with one lately but that's certainly worth doing if you get the chance. You're probably going to start by noticing their faces. The eyelashes on a lot of these people, my god. The luminous skin, like they're elves or fairies, something NOT WHAT WE ARE.    Then if you get into conversation and it gets going pretty well, that's a whole new cucumber-fresh situation. The mind of a person who hasn't amassed ten tons of information, manipulated/compacted it for years and called it "home" is a real wing-dinger.   If you're someone who thinks it's boring to talk to kids, you just stopped too soon.

You don't talk to an adult in an elevator about the weather for 45 seconds and rule out ALL OF ADULTS for further talking. You surely rule out plenty of adults for plenty of reasons but brief elevator conversations are not why.

  Their drawings are invariably the bomb. No exceptions.

Okay, few exceptions.

  The most casually pooped-out answer to a written homework or test question is going to both look and feel charming on the page in a way we could *never* and that's before the idea gets over. And even if it's a one-word answer made with obviously minimal effort, it's still somehow rad. You have to at least respect the marshaling of their energies. If you didn't earn enough drops of their life force for two words, too bad for you, dink.   I'm a fan.  

photo by Fred Rowley, age 9

Do you remember being a kid in school?

I was maxed-out at all times, I don't know about you.  So many fronts.

dynamics with the other kids * dynamics with the teachers * abilities and feelings about abilities, scholastic and otherwise * things going down on the playground * clothes * lunch box contents  The actual lunch box. Q: Is it good enough? Is it weird? How good is this lunchbox? Should I worry about it? Sure, I'll go ahead and worry about it.   

learning CURSIVE

That was a goddamned era in and of itself. Consuming. Some of the letters were fine but capital Q was a pure mind fuck and capital F is, you what again? This looks like a SWAN. That can't be right.    That wasn't fake trouble, it was real trouble. Heart rate up, struggle.              

    every day but now with death in the corridors

         an old FB post from last February, post Parkland

(I'll repost the text at the bottom in case this print's too small in your current reading venue)

When Fred was a baby, I went and got a massage from a special healer person I'd been tipped off to by a friend. Some guy named Scott, I think, who worked out of his apartment in Ballard. He was supposed to be the business and he was, yes, he was really, really good. I lay clothed on the table while he worked, as was standard, and told him about my bum hip and he told me about how your mom affects one hip and your dad affects the other hip and how the loud hip and the quiet hip mean different things and I marveled at how the hips lined up with my parents in a surprising but apt way.  He asked about my kids and I told him about Finn and the new guy, Fred.  Scott offered up his psychic impression of Fred, laughing, and said,   "That guy came down to this planet for some excitement. He's like a surfer, he likes the big waves."

The thing I hope all the time is this It's not even "hope"— can you pray in reverse through time?

I pray-hope backwards with max force, constantly,

that a generational army of big wave surfers came rushing down here keeps rushing down here, mystifyingly, w/their future surfboard bodies under their what else can I call them but arms    knowing what they're getting into wanting it for some reason I don't fully comprehend    because they're going into the waves anyway        so I hope they're built for it  and I wouldn't even know where to begin to give thanks right if they actually came for it.

photo by Finn Rowley

I don't want to say the obvious thing  but someone will want it so I'll give it that even if that's true our obligations remain the same not advocating passivity just praying for some context to help us all keep on swimming    nothing like an extra chord after the song is over oh well 

"Acting training came in handy today as I grilled Fred about the lockdown training he gets at his elementary school (threw in some Qs about fire & earthquake drills) in the most easygoing way I could muster while he played Animal Jam on the computer. He told me about the hiding plans and the locked door and the lights off and everybody very quiet. I asked him if the plan stopped there, or if they talked about what they would do 'if a person came into the room'. 'Oh, like the bad person?' Yeah, like that. 'Oh.' He thought about it. 'We would probably just go crazy.' Crazy, like... 'Like we would just be running around and yelling and trying to escape.' And what if it's tough to escape, do you know about throwing things? 'Throwing things??' Fred's eyes lit up. Yeah, that's a good time to throw things at the person. 'I'd throw my chair! And William's water bottle!' He brainstormed like that, laughing in shock at the wild permission of it all."