too much death for one day

What exactly bothered the editor? Wtf is wrong with him or her?

 

Tx: How you doin', dude?

 

The graphic details bothered her. Some of us really needed to talk it out - it's a normal coping mechanism, especially dealing with the bad stuff we have to deal with (I was in court yesterday covering two accused murderers, BTW). This case was especially bad - the wolf-dog crapped out parts of the boy's underwear.

 

Geez. I can understand y'all's needing to talk it out. I would have, too, after something like that.

 

I can sympathize with you, scribe.

Helicopters don't crash very often. But when they do, there's generally not very good news for any involved. I wear a bracelet every day that carries the names of two guys I knew very well.

Venting is certainly a way we deal with death here in my world, and it is certainly acceptable.

 

I turned to my editor yesterday and said, "I wish sometime there would be a story on a killer and have someone say: 'I knew the sonofabitch would snap.' "

 

Our running gag in the office was that the neighbors would always say, "He was a quiet guy. Kept to himself. We didn't even know he owned a chainsaw."

 

A former editor of mine used to work at a drugstore before he became a writer.

He had a customer in a wheelchair that came in every Sunday and bought milk, eggs and a newspaper. One Sunday he came in, bought his stuff then used the payphone across the street. Turned out he had just killed his girlfriend.

Personally, I could never do death stories and I've been lucky enough that we've never had a lot of them. Once though, I was covering a steak dinner for a team that had just got their rings for winning a state championship. I was packing my stuff up when I noticed everyone was starting to act a little weird. In the back of my head I thought I had overstayed my welcome, but I think I really knew it was more than that.

When I got back to the office I found out that one of their classmates was stabbed to death on popular nature trail (I run it quite often). They were all just finding out when I left the school. It was a very small school -- less than 200 kids -- so everybody knew her.

 

In looking at my datebook, I realized that I needed to write a preview of the court mayhem coming up. This will be in our Wednesday paper:

----------
Six men accused of murder, three accused of armed robbery and one accused of robbing a credit union and firing a shot at police officers — all with ties to City A and City B — will be in court in the next week.
-------
These cases are spread among three counties over one week. One of the cases involving two men will be handled by our sister paper there.

Still, holy crap is that a lot of death and other bad stuff in our paper. I've barely been able to write about the City A council because I've been so busy at the cop shops and courts in both cities.

 

That's a lot of mayhem for one paper.

 

Two more men (on top of, what, five others) accused (separately) of having repeated sex with a female under 15 to whom they are related in one way or other.

That's since May.

(Sorry, needed to vent.)