everyone was glued to the tv ... i looked up and saw the ocean, the helicopters searching, the same three helicopters that had flown over my head thirty minutes earlier. a giant oil slick in the center of the screen. alaska airlines flight 261, down in the ocean, ten miles up the road from the office.

and i haven't been right all evening. plane crashes get to me when they're on the other side of the country, plane crashes get to me when they're in kenya. when a plane crashes right off the coast from my office, it more than gets to me.

i can't take this senseless crap anymore. it's almost enough to make me question my belief in god, but i'll never do that. friday i pray for gabby's family cat, put to sleep after losing a bout with leukemia. saturday i pray for an ex-coworker, someone i didn't even like that much, who just found out she has multiple sclerosis. yesterday i pray for myself and reason for trying so hard to make my life mean something. today i pray for airplane crash victims, all over the world, and all over time.

i cannot even begin to imagine what it was like for them ... i shiver when i try. tell me time and time again that we take our lives into our hands every single day just by driving to work, that our chances of dying are so much better if we just stay on the roads, in our cars, that the safest place we can be is in an aluminum tube precarously balanced miles above the surface of the planet. if the hydraulic system fails on my car and i lose my steering, i start worrying about how much the impending collision (if any) will affect my insurance rates. if the hydraulic system fails on my airplane and the useless horizontal stabilizers send me into a 17,000 foot nosedive towards the freezing pacific waters, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. i'm dead, not only dead, but alive for a few nice long minutes of freefall to contemplate my impending and inevitable death. fuck statistics. i'd rather be in a car when mechanical problems hit.

had we had band practice tonight, i might have worked some of this angst off, but casanova forgot about a schedule change and missed it, so the rest of the band just sat around and moped about our no-gig situation. i needed to talk to someone, but no-one felt like hanging around to talk. instead i came home early, found a roach in my nightable drawer, and got myself nice and stoned.

and now i'm talking to myself. aloud. it's time to take it inside.