The freeway is closed, the hills are burning, a marine shot up a bar, and the wind went awol for a few hours a knocked a powerline out on my street, ffs. I could feel fear or worry or sadness but mainly I am concerned the city will be too busy to fix the power ...

Our neighbor was at the golf park with her dogs when the shooting happened, and she heard the gunfire as it happened which rattled her greatly. What does a person do in a situation like that?

There is no noble or heroic way to get your brains blown off...
No graceful way to die a gory death or run for your life in sheer terror.
It’s not dying that would be the worst though, it would be the terror of realizing that you aren’t in a nightmare. I think it would be the twisted recognition that a person is deliberately erasing both dignity and existence with no discernible reason except the desire to make the unthinkable real for an unfortunate few.

Have you ever experienced a moment where you were laughing and laughing and suddenly realized the person your with is crying and your stomach drops? I can only imagine it would be like that, but unspeakably worse. And you wouldn’t have time to decide how you’d prefer to react to imminent death. You’d pee and scream like any other animal.

I think people need to believe that there is a reason for the trauma of a death like that. If there was a deeply complicated backstory, some kind of crusade that motivated the guy, at least it would make sense. Or if he was psychotic, schizo, something. But he wasn’t. There was no message, that was the clearly emphasized warning. A person with no reason to live that eventually becomes confused about whether or not they exist. A person that would rather become a final answer than allow the permanent existence of a densely looming question.

Is the ghost caught in a piece of time, somewhere between death and the place they died? Maybe they get scattered in the impact and shards of who they were remain glowing like faltering lanterns, replaying a broken moment until it realizes that nothing else is left and goes wherever it is gone to.

What happens to the people that do that to other people? I sometimes like to think they end up becoming the essence of the emotion they forced others to have. Unspeakable horror and alienation from being human is very dark...escaping it by showing others how it feels is a one-way street into an underworld where nobody human belongs...

By the time they are numb and alien enough to kill a group of strangers, the world of the living is long gone. The feeling of human comfort is being sucked out by the ugliness that can’t ever be wiped off the akashic slate. Every hello becomes the shadow of a permanent goodbye. Every smile is an empty skull. The perpetrator can never forget enormous density of consequence he forced the world to endure. Once day the true burdan of that becomes evident, there is no escape from the truth.

I think people can escape every justice system, including hell if it exists. But there is no escaping the watcher within. It can’t be called justice, because it is simply whether existence is suffering or joy, whether we have someone to live for or if living is the suffering of gradual decay and death.