Dear Bossman

In the olden days, the fading of summer was seen as coincidental with the fading of life. The ultimate passage seems to be a common theme lately.

I always enjoyed the glares, the incredulous stares of the neighbors, of the cops, the whispers of “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” or “scavengers,” as the reporting pack circled a family of five charred bodies on a smoky deck, a little boy’s tarp covered body by his crumpled bike, the corpse of a wrong-way driver still dangling from his safety belt. I almost enjoyed those glares and stares as much, the vacant eyes of the lifeless asking, “why?” as we smoked and joked about somebody giving somebody a blow job at a party.

As we watch the "bleeds it leads" grim faces of our 6:00 bobble heads, we rarely think of their graveyard humor - a reflex mechanization, evolutionarily specialized to such occupations as doctors, firemen, the po-lice and ambulance drivers. For those who wade into the grim on a daily basis, it serves to detach the humanity. Most of the times it works. Sometimes it doesn't.