Plan A for me tonight was to write about either of the two new movies I’ve seen in theaters over the past week. I have a few Plan B’s stored up in case of mental short-circuit. Tonight, I just…can’t. Nothing I want to enjoy sharing is working.

Ever since I got home, I’ve found it impossible to concentrate on writing because I first had to spend a while catching up with online anguish over the San Bernardino shootings. And, bringing up the rear in all news roundups, the smaller shooting in Savannah, dwarfed and nearly invisible next to San Bernardino, like that time The Love Letter opened the same weekend as The Phantom Menace. That’s a horrible, boorish comparison, to say the least. But that’s where we seem to be headed, into a future in which so many are growing up to become disgruntled, corrupted, fundamentally broken, spiritually deformed gunslingers that the career track has become overcrowded and they’re now vying for public attention like some lethal breed of fame-starved pop idols. Soon they’ll have to start hiring black-market publicists to coordinate their outbursts with each other so none of them overlap and each shooter can have a chance to dominate the news cycle for a minimum number of hours before the next shooter steps up to the range.

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