A friend from Georgia called me this afternoon to ask if I was OK? 

“Fine”, I said. “Why?”

That’s how I found out about the Boston Marathon bombing.  Oddly enough, about 3pm I was looking out the bathroom window and saw the flashing blue lights and heard the pulsing sirens of many emergency vehicles heading north towards Boston. Accident at the Rte3/Rte128 juncture I thought.

I turned on the TV and was immediately looking at video of frightened people running down Bolyston St., the first of the endless replays of the smoke raising from the detonation point. Two years ago when wife died suddenly I remember the complete shock and grief so intense I felt light-headed as if all the blood and senses in my body had suddenly gone somewhere else. I realized that right at that moment hundreds of people in my home state were feeling just that.

A few years ago, when I was employed, I would have been one of those people racing into Boston.  As a senior engineer and Call Center specialist, there would have been trunks to re-route, voice announcements to re-record and (unfortunately) idiotic conference calls to sit through. They just announced that Cell Phone service in the City of Boston is being shut down (someone is thinking with something other than their mouth), more re-routing, additional re-programming.

Nothing I can do now, no one that wants me now. The rest of the day and this evening will be a constant loop of the same images, the same (re-hashed) comments, wall to wall talking heads. I invoke my 72 hour rule. Nothing we get served up for the next 72 hours will hold up over time. The truth will take months.

Now the big question is; Foreign or Domestic? From the botched timing (three hours earlier 2x to 3x the causalities) I’d guess domestic.  We have been training the foreign terrorists in the school of hard knocks for the last 12 years, all the bad bombers are dead or in Guantanamo.

Of course, it goes without saying. Barack Obama will shamelessly use this for his own purposes, “Never let a crisis go to waste”.