I haven’t felt well the last couple days; it’s either a low-grade bug or allergies. I suspect the latter since everything in the world is blooming right now. I went to Target (a mile away) around noon to get cat food and litter and so forth. Normally on Sundays I do that kind of errand in the mid-afternoon, and I also needed to hit the grocery store and MicroCenter over on the Kansas side, but the cat food was kind of urgent. So I blew off the other two stops until later, did my daily Target run early, and a couple hours later laid down on the couch and fell asleep. I played a really smoky bar Friday and Saturday nights, didn’t get much sleep, just didn’t feel good, so that was it for about an hour and a half.

Some time in there I heard a whole bunch of sirens. I woke up enough to think, “Man, that’s a lot of sirens,” and conked back out again. Not long after I woke up, Elise called, worried and making sure I was okay.

It turns out there was a gunman over at Ward Parkway Shopping Center, where I shop at the Target every day. As Elise said, “Naps are a good thing!” If I had been on my usual schedule, I’d have likely been at the mall around then, especially if I had done the other stops first.

I went ahead and did those other errands a little while ago. I have to drive by Ward Parkway mall to get to those other places, and State Line Road is still blocked off from 85th to 89th. All the mall entrances are blocked, there is yellow tape everywhere, a helicopter was hovering overhead (hmm, that was probably a news copter, since there was a weird little boom on the underside and I bet that’s a camera), and a camera crew was interviewing somebody by the side of the road. Traffic coming up State Line was diverted to Ward Parkway (the street on the east side of the mall—State Line is the west side). Still, it’s Sunday evening so there wasn’t a huge amount of traffic.

I watched one of CNN’s video clips about the shooting. Ah, the inanities of the 24-hour news cycle: the CNN interviewer was talking to an eyewitness, and after getting her story asked something like, “So things are usually pretty calm at that mall? Is that some place you feel safe as a shopper?” Whaddya think, woman, this is Kansas City! We have tanks and bazookas rumbling down the aisles, grenades rolling between the cars. I have to take a steel umbrella every time I go to the store, because otherwise the shrapnel fills up the sacks before I can get back to the car! Good grief.

I get so sick of the networks having to wring every ounce of drama out of every little thing. There are three people dead. I think that’s enough drama.