A Dark Crime Comes to Light in South Carolina

I woke up this morning with a head full of ideas all without an angle. Finding angle is the starting gun for composition. Some refer to that starting gun as inspiration.

I was looking at the blank page, waiting for the smokey fog to clear when Lynn called me into the living room by declaring “something important is happening on teevee right now”. I got up from my desk. Maybe the fog would clear.

The fog didn’t clear. The fog became a black mirror. The faces on teevee were talking about the ex-NFL player "who murdered all those people". The heads were talking as if everybody knew about the murders.

Lynn had been watching the news break which was concerning itself with the cause of the murders and how they could be and probably were related to the number of concussions that the murderer had contracted during his playing career.

The folks on the teevee were reporting about the analysis of the murderer’s brain after autopsy on that brain revealed an extreme presence of CTE.

CTE is short for the debilitating brain disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. The disease is linked to concussions and head trauma suffered during contact sports and sports entertainment. CTE is a gthrat not only to the players in the NFL but to the NFL itself. Who wants to support a spolrt that features a bunch of minority guys belting themselves into insanity? Look what happened to boxing.

Anne Mckee, director of the Boston University CTE Center led the examination of the murderer’s brain and found severe damage to the frontal lobe section that she compared to what was found in the brain of Aaron Hernandez, another NFL player who was convicted of murder in 2015 and committed suicide in 2017. 

I immediately became concerned about my own brain and how I and we have been figuratively concussed over the years. I thought that my memory had slipped through a black into a black hole. God knows what else was hidden in that darkness which threatens to devour whatever light we have gathered during our lifetimes. Was this the beginning of the end of my recall? Can't deny that I'm getting older.

I had never heard of the Carolina crimes being described by the talking heads or if I had, they had disappeared.

The only reason I was hearing about this story now was because we live very close to York County South Carolina where the murders took place. The news break was local rather than national.

Everybody in America knows about OJ Simpson and Charles Manson. Everybody knows about Lizzie Borden. Almost everybody knows about Chris Benoit and Aaron Hernandez  These are humans who are forever associated with rampaging homicides.
 
Phillip Adams?

Who the hell is Phillip Adams?

I had never heard the man’s name before.

I couldn’t have missed the story.

The murders occurred eight months ago.

Either I’m losing my facilities or the NFL and the media have been hiding the light of this horrendous crime.

Up until today, Up until Right now have you heard of Phillip Adams?

Are we all going dark?

Here’s the belated scoop. Adams went on a rampage and shot to death six people before killing himself. Adams shot a prominent local doctor, his wife and their two grand-children. Then he walked outside and killed two men working on the doctor’s home before killing himself with a self inflicted gunshot wound.

In his NFL career Phillips played for six teams all of them major news outlets; New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks, Oakland Raiders, New York Jets and Atlanta Falcons. In other words North, South, East and West.

Yet here I am, a rabid sports fan who watches and listens to sport shows every day and contributes to the billions of dollars that are bet in the NFL every week. Inexplicably I had never heard mention of the South Carolina crime nor the criminal. How is such a thing possible. What else am I not hearing about? How much have I missed. How long have I been out?

Darkness and Light

So that’s my angle and my story for today. We don’t even know how much we don’t know even when we think we know it all or at least some of it.

Now, for sure, you and I both know a little bit more abot a particular outrage or two for whatever good it will do us.

In the dark room

Looking for the light switch.