I want to thank all who replied - and hope that I can in the coming weeks. It may be that we need to create a new lexicon to speak to the degrees between courtship, which involves all sexes, harassment and abuse, exclusive to the male sex (I believe). Speaking as a bisexual man - with a penis - I have never felt harassed nor abused by a female. Hurried and expectations of glorious performance? Yes.

Valentines Day was supposed to be a good day. I had plans. As the news from Florida came in, I lost the day and the plans seemed of little consequence. I crashed, I burned, I have been sick, and I cannot stop crying.

It has happened, again, and has unfolded as it always does and we can expect the same. Already, the news coverage has fallen away and we’re going to allow news of our president’s infidelity to overtake the murder of your children - the child that might have been mine.

How long must it take to sufficiently mourn the murder of a teenager approaching adult years? One day? Two days, it seems, is the rule. That is our attention span. Murder isn’t permanent any longer and fretting over having a conversation too soon (meaning: We never need speak of this), speaking around murder (snitch on the queer teen who is probably acting out rather than genuinely violent), and editorials that might mention the last indiscretion when the next emerges? This is what we do. This is all that we do. This is what we do time after time after time until all murder lacks meaning; we have become unindicted accomplices.

We - I - am a co-conspirator. Anyone who might read this also conspires, by containing the grief to two days.

LISTEN: I was first hospitalized for mental disorders on April 14 (or 15 - I don’t remember the exact day), 1999. I didn’t react well to the events that occurred in the following week. A switch was flipped from “how could this have happened?” to a Holocaust-like “never again.” And I could not do anything but throw up and cry.

Right now, today, as much as I think of this topic as being crucial to the manner in which humans court, I cannot do anything but throw up and cry.

Our president tells us that we need share violent-ish behavior with authorities. The FBI was not up to the task, we’ve learned.

My knowledge of What Can Be Done is limited. People much smarter than me say that this National Treasure of ours is Too Big To Be Confronted.

I don’t believe that.

The sickness and weeping will pass, I’m ashamed to say. Single-minded fury will come and go and I will find less complicated indignities to champion.

But. Now. I am grieving for lives cut short and grieving with the grieving.