No, I haven't mentioned Zack Bowen's murder/suicide. Nor have I written loyally or regularly or much at all. I found tiring all of the focus on that gruesome event, and the suggestion that it somehow had to do with Zack and Addie's being "Quarter Rats". As if moving to New Orleans from out of town and choosing to extend one's adolescence (arguably for too long) makes one crazy and therefore capable of murder. More than anything, Addie's murder seemed to me to be the result of the dangerous psychological scars that her boyfriend bore from his previous military days.

And then there was another murder—this one on the UNO campus—that involved a veteran of the military. He was a former chaplain's assistant, and now we're hearing suggestions that his demise may have been the result of meeting with a male prostitute. My officemate and I talk about this and he says simply, "Men can be scary," but I find the undertones darker. It seems that the men in the military are not just "uneducated," as Kerry would have them, but perhaps they are also compelled to volunteer by histories of their own that they feel they can't discuss openly. It's moments like these that make me grateful for my husband, the passive Brit. I often tire of his logical debates, but I'll take that any day over violence and secrecy.

When I talked to my mom about the Zack and Addie murder/suicide, I told her that we, here, found it all very awful, but that there was something about the way we've ALL been psychologically altered, post-K, that makes us a bit more able to understand how one's disappointment or disillusionment can quickly and uncontrollably turn to rage. No, we do not understand what compels one to murder and cook one's girlfriend. We understand how irrational reactions to anger can seem to possess you. I know this, at least. I've mentioned in entries past my own struggles with rage. A broken window. Screaming and banging and saying things that, when I think of them later, appear to have come from a woman speaking in tongues. This is a post-K thing for me. Before, it was more sadness than rage, and I think I'd rather the sadness, thank you.