I have some catching up to do

I'm not sure if people even read this blog anymore. That's not true. I know four people looked at it yesterday, in fact. Weirdly, all of them were viewing the post I wrote about being unhappy with a certain police officer after getting pulled over for what I consider(ed) to be no good reason. I don't know what it is about that post, but it has been viewed four times as much as any other post I've written. I am assuming that people get directed there while looking for other things. I was debating changing the title, but instead I wrote an update at the end of the post instead. If you're curious (and want that post to have even more views), it can be found here: http://almostfreelunch.blogspot.com/2011/05/john-barney-of-ames-police-department.html

With that said, my website statistics indicate only 15 people have read my last post. This feels diminishing somehow. That was probably the most dramatic thing to happen in my life in the past few years, and will no doubt stay with me the rest of my life. I don't know how many people I thought would read it, I suppose. Obviously I expected more than fifteen.

It's weird how things bore out according to my expectations, though. I told my parents that it would eventually feel like just another event in our lives, but that we would always be affected. And it's true. I can think back on it with two separate mindsets. Sometimes I feel like it wasn't even that bad. I can rationalize anything, you know? People die all the time, for all sorts of reasons, and it doesn't make sense for me to take this to heart more than many of the other terrible things that are happening all the time. But if I want to (and this is not all that often anymore), I can remember exactly what it looked like. I can have the image of that boy bouncing into the bumper in my mind as fresh as when I was biking next to him, and see his bloated torso and blood-filled mouth. If I make the mistake of remembering too closely while I'm riding now, I occasionally have to slow down. It's scary, because I know one of the surest ways to make a silly mistake is to tell myself not to do it. When I think don't hit the side wall in handball, I hit the side wall. Not frequently. Maybe one in twenty times I think it, and I don't think it that often. And I haven't crashed yet when telling myself now just don't fall over. But it's still there in my mind, and I hate it.

So that's a bit of an update on where I stand with that. Like I said, I don't think about it very much, really. I just figured since it was the last thing I talked about on here and it's obviously still relevant, it would be a good starting point. Of course, now that I've talked about it, I'm not really in the same mood to write as I was when I sat down.

I haven't stopped taking notes about things. I have plenty to say, but I don't want to write a novel right now. I'll try and write here again soon.