…down by the banks of the river Charles
that’s where you’ll find me, ‘long with muggers, lovers and thieves
(yeah but they’re good people)
well I love that dirty water, oh Boston you’re my home
This is always a big day for Boston. The Red Sox have a dispensation from Major League Baseball to always play at home on Patriots Day and to start at 11 AM so the game lets out in time for the crowd to see the marathon pass through Kenmore Square behind Fenway (even if the scheduling has been screwed up some in recent years). It’s a state holiday, it’s a three-day weekend, it’s the essential sign of spring. And now, this shit.
Twitter is how we find out about these things now, and I’m not checking Twitter every five seconds since my thumb joints started to hurt in the afternoons, so it took a text message before I pulled away from a busy and annoying day at work to see what was up. And I know what day it is, and my first thought was Oklahoma City. Then Judge Vance, before that. Olympic Park. The women’s clinic in Birmingham. I mean, comment-section idiots can say what they like, but I’m from Birmingham, and when a bomb goes off? Spoiler alert, my first thought isn’t brown people.
It’s all speculation, of course, idle and ill-informed (but given the anniversaries that Patriots’ Day commemorates in New England, it’s better-informed than the typical Facebook poster) – as much as it hurts to admit, we won’t know anything worth knowing for at least 24 hours and more like 48. Until then, you can only do the usual: pray, and line up to give blood. As badly as they butchered my apheresis for platelets a couple weeks ago, I’ll probably be lined up with everybody else tomorrow or Wednesday, sticking out an arm still purple with bruises, because it’s important.
I’ll also be steering clear of TV news. TV news is like my mother: they may not have anything useful to say, and what they have to say my be wildly counter-productive, but far worse would be to preserve any kind of dignified silence. So I’m going to spare myself the annoyance of mouths running for the sake of running them, and I suggest you do the same. Hell, a blog post is probably too much.