A friend of mine, a single mother with a long history of depression and an autistic child, just had someone break into her place and steal all her stuff, including the kid’s favorite toys.

Actually, it happened a couple of days ago, but it’s taken me some time to calm down enough to write about it. The first time I saw it on my Facebook feed, all I could do is stare at it then blindly resume my business because I just couldn’t even. I din’t want to believe it was true. I guess I mentally filed it under “ignore and maybe it will go away” file in my head. To Be Processed Later.

But nope. It happened. And I am beyond angry. I wish I could reach out and crush the motherfucker that did this. I want to beat him or her until they cry like a baby and shit themselves. I want to bash them on the cranium with something jagged. I want to make them pay.

That’s the thing about my liberalism. I have never pretended I was somehow immune to the desire for bloody justice. I am a very passionate guy and when something like this happens, I want the person who did it to burn. Sorry if that makes me seem unevolved to some, but it’s who I am. I am an intensely protective person, and when something like this happens, I lose my freaking mind.

That’s why I had to wait a few days before I was calm enough to write about it.

And there isn’t a single thing I can do about it. She lives far away. Even if she didn’t, it’s not like I am a cop or any other kind of trained investigator. I wouldn’t know how to find the person or persons responsible for this unthinkable crime. And even if I did find them, I don’t want to go to jail for what I would do to them when I did.

I am not saying I would kill them. I wouldn’t. Unless they couldn’t or wouldn’t return the stuff. Then all bets are off.

And because there is nothing I can do about it, I am left feeling impotent and frustrated and helpless. Somehow, no matter how we might tell ourselves that being a good person does not keep bad things from happening to you and that in the grand scheme of things, “deserve don’t mean shit”, injustice of that sort enrages us. Or me at least. We cannot help but think that bad things should not happen to good people, and when they do, we have no choice but to shake our fists at the sky and demand justice.

Back here on Planet Sanity, I had a good day at school. Morning class consisted of watching six episodes of Bob’s Burgers in order to prepare us for the possibility of doing our spec script for it. Not exactly torture – I love the show – but there is a reason I can’t even imagine binge-watching a show : I get sick of things very quickly no matter how much I love them.

In fact, today I overheard some of my fellow students talking about how when they find a song they like, they listen to it over and over again until they are sick of it. And I am thinking, how can people’s DO that? I have to limit myself to listening to a recently acquired beloved song only once a day in order to keep from burning out on it.

Like this song I acquired recently :

Love, love, love that song for reasons I have decided not to investigate. And part of me wants to listen to it over and over again. But I know better. If I did that, I would get sick of the song, and then, to my way of thinking, I would have “ruined” it for myself. If I restrain myself, it will turn into just another song in my collection, and then it will be there for me indefinitely, to be enjoyed many times over the years.

Spent lunchtime in the writing student’s lounge, which is good. The only cure for phobia is exposure, after all, and the more I hang with my fellow students, the more I will be able to lower my guard around them and, god willing, may even be able to let a few of them in. Maybe even make new friends.

I have never known how to make friends. Every friend I have ever had was acquired by sheer dumb luck and the efforts of others. Or at least, that’s how it seems. I didn’t so much make a friend as fail to reject some. The number of people with whom I am truly compatible is depressingly low.

Today was oddly busy for me, actually. In addition to class, I had to do a short interview for a VFS video (they do this for all students), then at 4:10 pm I had my “getting to know the new students” meeting with the head of the writing department, Michael Baser, which was depressingly brief and hurried. I am going to have to take him up on his “open door to students” policy some time because this is a man who wrote for Norman Lear all through the seventies and, well, Normal Lear basically owns a chunk of my childhood because of the shows he made, and I am dying to know what it was like to write for him.

We comedy nerds get stars in our eyes for people like that!

And then I had a “mentorship” with Rick Drew, my fave prof so far, and we shot the breeze for a while. He told me that he thought I was a very deep and intelligent^[1] person, and that he was proud both of and for me for doing what I am doing in coming to school at my age, and that felt super good.

As a result, any other profs I meet have some pretty stiff competition if they wanna be my favorite!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.