Wotta Day (Updated as Planned)

(This post was dashed off in the last ten minutes of the day, June 14, with the intention of adding an update below. You're now reading the June 15 version of what a day June 14 was.)

There are ordinary days...and nice days...and days when one big bad thing happens...and then there are days when it just seems as if badness is popping up all over, and even if none of it's all that bad, you wish you'd hidden under the bed instead of getting out of it.

This has been one.

Start with the blogger getting up around 4 a.m. to prepare for Wednesday Market in Wise County, thinking market buddy couldn't possibly just fail to show up since he was the one who invested in those marked-down Coca-Cola products. Heard a motor around 6:45 a.m. It turned out to be merely a low-flying plane. No pickup truck ever arrived. I waited and waited and waited and missed all chances (a) to spend a full day doing unpaid boring personal stuff I want to get done online, (b) to walk to the cafe before it became hot outside, (c) to walk to the cafe without the sun beating down right in my face, or (d) to catch a ride with anyone going to work.

Then as I walked down the road I heard black vultures squawking, which they don't often do, quarrelling with the crows about what had been covered in mown grass but not cleaned up at the site of a major traffic accident yeterday. One vulture swooped out toward me and circled right over my head. Ominous. I respect the neighborhood vulture family's place in the environment and usually like them, but not when they're in combat mode.

Then I got online, and, well, #Alexandria...so not the way I remember one of the nicest, prettiest, friendliest parts of Greater Washington. I spent a lot of time watching for updates on Twitter. Saw the London fire, saw the San Francisco murders.

Saw what I have in the way of a governor, obviously stunned like everyone else because I can't imagine any other way he'd be that stupid, trying to exploit tragedy for political gain.

Saw other ugly things I do not normally see on Twitter. Polite adults were flaming and sniping at each other; I suppose my comment on my governor's outbreak of foot-and-mouth-disease might have looked like a snipe, if not a flame, but !!! . People who usually tweet or retweet one or two things a day were following the news on Twitter and zapping those flames around. My Twitter stream (of things people/sites I follow have tweeted) is broad and moves fast, but it looked as if it were standing still because things were popping back up, retweeted by yet another Twit, every ten minutes.

It was a really weird feeling, hard to pinpoint. I don't feel that discombobulated merely because I woke up before daylight. I don't feel that discombobulated by people not wanting to work an outdoor market on days when it may be hot, rainy, or both by turns, nor by roadkill, nor by maniac outbursts of violence in places where I know people. It had to have been the combination.

I kept plugging away on the personal stuff, but by five o'clock I wasn't sure whether I was eager to go home or apprehensive about what else could go wrong...let's just say that all that went wrong in the evening was that it finally rained just as I was walking home.