In lieu of writing about my daughter’s increasingly disruptive sleep patterns, I spent yesterday writing an essay about the bombings at the Boston Marathon. One that I’m not exactly happy with and probably won’t publish anywhere. And that’s fine. It came from the heart, but it just felt too self-serving to show anybody else. The world is filled today with people using the bombings for their own political, social and religious agendas and I’d prefer not to be a part of that. My piece was supposed to be about how this has affected me as a father of a 9-month-old daughter. Rather than try to rewrite it to not sound as wooden, I’ll strip it for parts. Here are the couple thoughts I had that I think are worth sharing.

• I’m thankful my daughter is of an age where she doesn’t understand what happened and I don’t have to figure out how to explain it to her. I’m not there yet and I don’t envy anyone who is.
• This bomb was placed in the stands and set to go off at the four-hour mark. This guy knew there would likely be kids and families in the line of fire. That’s a real messed up kind of sickness.
• I’m happy so many people enjoyed what Patton Oswald said on facebook about how the good people outnumber the bad and we always will. And he had some eloquently presented points, but I never really felt that we didn’t outnumber the bad people. This was never an issue for me. But I’m still happy so many others found something about it that helped.
• I’m sick of people saying that we will come back from this stronger. Maybe that makes some people feel better, but I feel like it’s the most disingenuous phrase out there. This was a terrible tragedy committed by someone who got his wires crossed and that sucks. Hopefully we catch him and there are less sickos in the future. That’s actually something from Patton’s diatribe, so I guess it did have an effect on me.
• I’m not going to let this stop Mabel from experiencing things of the like. I’m just going to pray to the God of probability that this doesn’t happen to us. She’ll just have to learn that there are people who don’t value life like they should and cannot ever put themselves in the shoes of someone else because they are too self-absorbed. I look forward to the day where she understands that.