My readers come to my blog for one thing and one thing only: to learn about themselves. Reading "The Boca Union Sentinel" for one minute a day is equivalent to a few hours in the company of a wise old aunt, the sort who worked as a chorus girl back in her youthful bohemian days (if you want to feel you're in the company of a former WPA photographer or a Rivington Street seamstress who organized labor unions, go elsewhere). So, I just want to say one thing, and if I'm wrong I'll take early retirement, perhaps in Florida. In other words, no more blogging in Boca! Actually, with that introduction, perhaps my finest, I'll say two things:

1. Vets are smart. Logic should have told me that $95 was a bit steep for a six-month supply of flea meds for a cat who doesn't even have fleas. But how else can I show my cat I care? What else can I do to remind her that she should live to see me grow up, get a job bagging groceries, board that greyhound bus for the bright lights of the- what? They don't let cats on the bus? Where's my dream go?

2. Steve Martin's "An Object of Beauty" is like Judith Krantz meets junior level art criticism. In other words, it's fun. But he was funner when he was funny.

3. Whatever transpires about today's tragic massacre in Arizona, the one which has so far left six people dead, it will not "unite Americans" and we won't find a way "pray for each other and support each other" in the abstract. The level of discourse about the crime on television and in dusty random corners of the internet is not encouraging. I don't care what the murderer was angry about, and I don't care where his political sympathies lie. Most of these mass murders seem to be committed by young men between seventeen and twenty-five. The language of anguish about these events might have more of a point if there were a point, and why can't the point be criticism of our extreme openness about bearing arms? The fundamental intention of the second amendment is to assure that citizens are able to arm themselves against a standing army and overthrow an unjust government- as part of a militia. A deranged young man could see himself as part of a militia- but a militia does not attack unarmed people.

The second amendment is treated in this country like the bible, and the comparision is apt: in some ways life has changed as much from 1776 to now as it has from ancient times. The constitutional framers did not envision untrained men (of course we can use the term men here) using firearms independently, and they certainly did not foresee the technology of a gun which can take out twenty people in minutes. But there it is again: the hand wringing against something shadowy, and if it must be named it's called something stupid, like a "liberal" or a "conservative".

It's alienating to see that the dominant culture does not speak for me. I do not want to have a gun. On the bright side, of course, my alienation will hurt no one, though it could give me an ulcer.