Briefly

Sophia was only 5 years old when I met her and her 9-year-old sister, Bella, one day when they were bored and needed somebody to entertain them. Their dad was a casual friend who worked as a manager at a restaurant where I used to go and they had to come to work with him one evening while their mom was recovering from some dental work. Those girls and I hit it off and we had a great time that night. I ran into their parents again tonight and got a great report on the entire family. The girls are 10 and 14 now, which is hard for me to believe, and they looked beautiful and full of energy in their recent photos. The family seems to be doing much better now than they were five years ago, so it was really a joyful update for me. There’s something magical in watching children grow up in healthy and happy ways.

I’m having dinner Thursday night at a restaurant where I haven’t been in awhile and I’m sitting at the same table where I had my first date with a woman about six or seven years ago. (I might be a bit off on the time frame.) I’ve never told this story publicly, but I might as well. This was a woman I met online and everything seemed great. We arranged to meet here and things went well enough that she invited me to her house, which was nearby. I’m going to skip the details, but the key fact is that she finally told me — hours later, at her house — that she is married and her husband was out of town. She wanted to keep seeing me when he wasn’t around, but I left her house and never spoke to her again. It was a very odd experience.

The man in the suit here is a malignant narcissist. When I first saw this picture of Donald Trump giving a “thumbs up” sign as he posed with a baby who survived the murderous monster in El Paso a couple of weeks ago, I assumed that even his supporters would be horrified. To anyone who understands normal human reactions, it is a shocking demonstration of a man who believes the world revolves around him, but I’ve been surprised to see some people say his reaction was perfectly normal. The truth is that it’s the pose of a man without empathy — someone who is so accustomed to trying to promote his own empty false self that he doesn’t even know how to fake the proper response to such a horrific event. An emotionally healthy person would focus on the child at such a moment, but Trump looks as though he’s at a campaign event with the child of a happy donor. This has nothing to do with ideology or party. The man is mentally ill.