In Which the Second Verse Is the Same as the First

 The mind of a modern American (this modern American, to be precise):

“Indianapolis, now? Jesus, this is three mass shootings in just a few weeks. First, Boulder, then... No, wait, Boulder was the second one. First there was. . .  uh. . . Oh come on! First there was. . .”

Reader, we sincerely COULD NOT REMEMBER. 

Yes, eventually we retrieved Atlanta from our mental database of national tragedies, but for several minutes, we drew a complete blank. And it’s not incipient Alzheimer’s: We can still always find the car keys and recite Doc Gooden’s 1985 pitching stats.  Rather, it’s the unrelenting accumulation of similarly horrific incidents that just keep happening, with only the details changing—and those not so much. Flags get lowered to half-staff with such depressing regularity that the country should just mandate shorter ropes.

And yet nothing will change. The NRA is literally bankrupt, yet nothing will change.

We’ll see the memes from right-wing idiots claiming that there is no gun problem. That it’s a people-problem. That somehow the breakdown of traditional values embodied by—who knows—gay marriage or kneeling during the National Anthem, maybe, is to blame for the breakdown of society, which manifests itself in senseless acts of violence.

Leaving aside their confusion of cause and effect, let’s take up their argument, though: It’s NOT a gun problem. Guns don’t kill; people kill and all that. We don’t have a gun crisis, we have a mental-health crisis. Well, shouldn’t we still do something? Shouldn’t we do something to keep these avatars of a fallen moral order from getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction? Shouldn’t we pour money into mental health services to keep heavily armed people from going over the edge?

We’re not saying anything new here. The news is repetitive, and so is the response. 

In Which We’re Baaaaack!

 Did you miss us? Did you notice we were gone? 

A couple of months ago, we remembered that, not too long ago, blogging was a regular pastime, a daily one in fact. And that people even occasionally read the silly meanderings set down in these pages. We stopped the regular blogging in the face of general feelings of overwhelmedness (it’s a word!) and really hadn’t given it much thought. But then, one day, we got to wondering whether the site still existed. Sure, the internet is forever, but Google must do occasional purges of dormant digital domains, right? How else to make room for the important things? Like porn? 

Imagine our surprise, not to say pride, when we realized that Ye Olde Solipsist could still be accessed! We could start subjecting the world to our random musings anytime we wanted! 

Alas, it wasn’t quite that simple.

While we could FIND our page, we couldn’t actually create any new posts. When we tried to sign in, we were offered the opportunity only to create a new blog—while (reassuringly?) being told that solipsisticmusings.blogspot.com was already taken. We were perplexed.

We went to Google Answers to try to find. . .well, answers. Interestingly, it seemed that ours was a somewhat common problem. So we posted our question, and sat back to wait for a reply.

And we waited.

And waited.

AND WAITED.

Stupid Google! Don’t be evil, my eye!

We had essentially given up on ever retrieving editorial access to our digital soapbox until today, when we had to go to Google to retrieve some information on llamas (don’t ask), and we noticed the little waffle in the upper right hand corner—which reminded us that we had a GOOGLE email address. One we never use. One that would probably be the one to which any replies from Google would probably be sent.

Sure enough, there was a reply, dated about ten minutes after we had sent in our initial question, telling us what to do, and before you could say “Sweet Loretta” we were back to where we once belonged.

When we first kept this blog, we went some five years without skipping more than a few days here and there. The new streak begins today!