It’s been a bitch of a week. Something I ate on Sunday wiped me out from Sunday night all the way ’til Tuesday. It’s amazing how little it seems to take to take the human body out of commission. Thus it only makes sense that instead of having another day to recover from said bug, I then got called up on Wednesday and then selected to sit on a jury for the rest of the week. Shit. All of that would darken anyone’s mood, but it was more some of the things that I heard in the courthouse that gave me greater pause.

Obviously I can’t say anything specific about the case I’m currently serving, but as we went around the room and shared general information I was surprised at the number of individuals who seemed to be around my age who identified themselves as single and/or single without children. It’s probably one of those things where you don’t notice all of the silver cars on the road until you start thinking about buying a silver car, but I’m not used to hearing person after person list themselves as single. I mean, in my day-in/day-out existence everyone seems to be either married or in a relationship by a factor of eight or nine married folks for every single solo person (usually solo “guy”). Anyway, given my continual blues about what seems like endless Friday nights alone, it sucked some of the hope from me that at least the rest of the world was having more to look forward to in their lives than empty apartments and microwave food.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, so many of these people have also suffered some loss in their lives by the loss of someone through murder or having been robbed. And then on top almost none of these cases resulted in the apprehension or conviction of the criminals who did these things. How does one deal with that? Why is it a modern fact of life that unsolved crime happens all the time, and we expect the victims to just go on with their lives? I’m reminded of a scene in a very bad Arnold Schwartzenegger film where the bad guy was surprised that cops didn’t immediately show up after he shot off his gun. Well, okay, they do seem to show up in a reasonable space of time in “real life,” but, based on what I heard from my fellow jurors, getting the bad guys just doesn’t seem to happen. So, besides living lonely existences, one can expect to not only suffer at the hand of some criminal, but for that criminal to go unpunished. Happy Friday. JBB