Iran.  North Korea.  A fresh new look, feel and intellect on the Supreme Court.  A father and refugee from Darfur shot down in his small store in Chicago, leaving his non-English-speaking wife and newborn baby fatherless.  It’s all in a day.

The radioactivity from blast #1 (another weekend in North Korea) should be right over Canada and the Northern United States about now and no one dares upset the madman. He launched another missile last night. The very busy, fiscally frantic “free world” (Who coined that term? And when?) chats.  No one is relaxed enough to yawn.  There’s just not enough Oxygen.

Someone I see little of, but would like to see and talk with more often, had another bully in her classroom yesterday.  The class is at the college level in Michigan. It was the first day of class, summer school. Day one was pretty well wrecked by the attenuated debate and interruption caused by a member of the “entitled nasty” – the bullies of all ages.  The “prof” was left exhausted, debating whether it was worth it any longer.  Teaching. Social psychology, terrorism, political economics, the strong against the weak, balance of power and mutual understanding.

Pressed for time and with calls coming in at both ends, we alluded to other subjects – some delightfully mundane, others ironic and requiring fisted suppression so as not to be painful.  There were allusions to drywall and Alzheimers.

The rat tat tat and continuous hiccupping on the line, the machine gun-like determination with which someone was determined to end the meandering, mutually unsatisfying but hungry muttering between two tired minds and saddened hearts, eventually brought an end to the polite denial, the shared refusal to touch on anything that mattered.  Band aids are flimsy.

Just before ending the tacitly contracted, “let’s not talk about it and it isn’t there” non-communication, the college professor alluded to my blog.

“I see you’re into bullying again,” The colleague blithely noted.

“I always have been,” I answered. I realized she would have no way of knowing about national campaigns, television appearances, heralded books and a truly passionate commitment I live with respect to children killing themselves due to hopelessness, a world gone mad, adolescent anomie, and peer abuse.

We moved on to another subject.

The interruptive slam-banging on the line wore us out.  We had “talked” for seven minutes, feeling everything, saying nothing.  We hung up.

A band aid fell to the floor. I had forgotten I was bleeding from a vein.