This is a tough month for me, even before taking into account national news. It's the Looper birthday month, with Corey's on Jan. 5 (our paternal grandma's was on Jan. 4), and Mitch's today; Corey's been gone since November 2021, and Mitch has only been gone a few months. Mitch's daughter Sarah had her birthday Monday, and mine was Tuesday. (I spent the afternoon of Sarah's birthday renewing my license. What fun.)

Birthdays bring remembrances, both good and bad. They also remind us that we're only here for a short while, and our end could come sooner than we imagine.

I'm sure Renee Good certainly didn't anticipate her end coming so soon.

Whatever else you believe about what happened in Minneapolis last Wednesday, there should be no dispute that it shouldn't have happened. A mother of three, a wife, and a poet was shot dead through her windshield.

It didn't take long for competing narratives to appear, but even in the cellphone video of the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good, it's difficult to find what seemed truly threatening to him, enough for him to apparently switch his phone to his left hand so he could pull out his gun.

I mean, other than Good's wife smarting off to him, which is about when he appears to switch hands (and before he crossed in front of the........

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