Bad news day...

Woke up to the horrific reports out of colorado.   Nothing like that surprises me any more.  But I do have a question:  WHAT THE FUCK were babies, six year olds, twelve year olds doing at a midnight screening of fucking Batman? 

Now I KNOW I'm old...  really fucking old.  When I was a kid, I was allowed to see a matinee...  which was actually early afternoons, not mornings, as the name would suggest.  If I earnced the money for it running errands for the elderly in the neighborhood.  But going in the evening?  Holy Sacrilege, Batman!  Unthinkable.  When I was 14, bedtime was 9:30 pm, and there was no way around it.  Except my brother, who was 3 years younger, got the same priveleges when I got them, which I found unfair...

I broke the rule of being home in time for supper, by which we meant evening meal only once.  Attended a double feature, and the first one was very long, but hey, I paid my money, and wanted to see the second.  It was Town Without Pity.  And there was a big clock in there, and I had half an eye on it, but the film was engrossing.  About a rape of a German girl in an occupied town in Germany.  Just about everyone had left after 'The Devil at 4 O'clock', which was cool...  but this was sort of mind blowing.  And you know how kids think:  'just five more minutes, what's gonna happen next?'
And of course I overdid it...  and before I knew what was what, The Ven was in the aisle and practically dragged me out of there.  It was suppertime.  They were so sour...  no movie priveleges for two weeks, which killed me...  I thought.

Especially when I paused over the meat loaf and veggies and mashed potatoes to remark, 'well, now I know what rape is '  I was always good at conversation stoppers. 

I had crazy ideas...  I wanted to see Peter Paul and Mary sing and there was no WAY, no way I was allowed to do that, even tho I had saved the money.  Ditto the 'Trapp Family Singers.  Children had to be in bed by 8 p.m. at that time.  And despite protests of not being tired, we did sleep.

So how and when did that change so drastically?  A family takes an infant and a 4 yr old to a midnight showing of Batman?  Because they couldn't afford a baby sitter, or don't trust anyone with their progeny?  Anne Curry found the lamest excuse I ever saw...  'It was family time, and the children were asleep.'  Reallah...  If I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of noise in that film.  In dolby.  Way to go.

And under 18, I wouldn't have been able to do that and be in a cinema...  unless I was working there. 

Something is very wrong with the whole picture...  and if a family can't afford both a baby sitter and the tickets, they shouldn't have been there. 

As above, I am sooo  old, and find some things hard to understand, esp. when all reports you see on Today, or Dateline are exaggerated concerns about protecting children.  Well that didn't work out so well, did it?

But I see it here as well in a lot of ways.  People allow kids to stay up way too long, and when I see them getting breakfast in the supermarket in the mornings, they look sleep deprived and like so many little zombies.

Dark rings under the eyes, etc.

I pity the poor people in that theater...  their lives will never be the same, and it will take many years for them to process it.  Wanna bet they won't ever wanna see a batman film again?

I still can't watch anything pertaining to Munich, and it's been forty years.

Locally, to add to the bad news, we're about to have a 'thirty year event', some say the event of a century. 

We've had severe weather.  Two weeks of extreme heat, comparable to what was in the US.  Where you just 'swim away in your own sweat'.  And thunderstorms of ferocity, with hail.  Not directly in Graz, mostly upstate.  So there were lots of landslides, blocking roads, in two cases trapping people in their cars, and it was dramatic...  Mostly you get avalanches in the west of the country in the winter, but yesterday it went to a new level...   and a huge fifteen foot high landslide pretty much decimated the center of a little town upstate.  I haven't seen the pictures yet, but over 50 houses got totalled, and people got trapped, and access was cut off.

Whatever, I live near the river Mur, which runs from Salzburg into Slovenia.  And tonight sometime, it's gonna go over the banks two blocks from where I live.  sheet.  I've always had a thing about living one flight up from ground level....

Up north, the river is already at the 15 foot level...   and it's still raining.  I really should have invested in a canoe.

But the radio ist playing it down...  no danger to the citizenry.  Really?  If I get my feet wet tomorrow, the radio is gonna get SUCH an e-mail from me... 

But at least I don't have to worry about people running around with guns looting and killing people.

Just sayin'. 

And I still say, children have no business being in a movie theater at midnight.  That's for crazy adults who make a cult series into a life style.