Please excuse me for I have a small headache as I write this. It could be that I jumped off the gluten-free wagon over Easter and had bread, crackers and whatever flat gluten objects are necessary to help carry food into one’s mouth. It seems that whenever I indulge in gluten the veins in my head constrict and add a flush of temperature that carries down my windpipe. It is a sort of low-level pain that no ibuprofen seems to reconcile. That’s one theory. The other theory is the feeling of exhaustion. Not from the road. Not from working out with a gluten-laden body. Not from feeling the pressure of getting a lot of tasks “done and dusted.” But another shooting here in America. If you are the counting type, this is 146 for the year. Mass shootings of people by people who now are so acclimated to the idea that killing people with an AR-15 is just the right way of extending the middle finger on whatever is getting them angry. My head started throbbing once I heard the latest from Louisville. I have sat in many a Monday meeting in my past life and the idea that someone could burst in and burst a semi-automatic and kill people who do not want to be present at a day-after-Easter Monday meeting is as alien and strange as anything. Except now, it isn’t here in America. It is as routine and American as a Currier and Ives print of an old-time barn raising. Or if that goes back too, far, a Big Mac.
Or perhaps it is that we are experiencing summer weather this springtime. No nuanced, slow capitulation of winter to spring to summer. Now it is the fast-food-season change. And even though a warm day is so welcome here in Chicago, it is now riddled with angst. Mainly the idea that all of this should not be happening. That we are causing warmer weather to take over what would have still been 30 years ago in my memory, slowly melting snowbanks in northern Illinois is something that gets my temples throbbing.
It is hard to celebrate warmer weather when the media reminds us again and again that it is a sign of changing climate, higher sea levels and ultimately, if not remedied, our collective demise.
Sure, it is the job of the media to let us know of all these things, climate change, mass shootings and even gluten being bad for certain people. The common thread is that all three can be changed by committing to changing things. And perhaps it is that knowledge, coupled with the fear that we as a species are incapable of such change, that truly has my head throbbing.
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