When writing becomes part of a daily routine, and you’re in your later 40’s, what do you write about? My life is pretty quiet and uneventful most days. It’s really a fairly simple routine that is performed over and over again.

During the week it goes like so:

• Wake and shower and dress for work.
• Make coffee, make breakfast, read the news, peruse Reddit, or read whatever book I’m into.
• Walk downstairs to my office and “go” to work. Work until five.
• Have dinner, talk with Erin, and if it is the week we have Juniper, with her as well.
• Work out.
• Shower, talk more with Erin, maybe watch a show. Say goodnight to Erin.
• Read or write until I take the dogs out and then put them down for the night.
• Read or write till bed.
• Sleep.
• Repeat routine.

Today is one of the days when the routine differs slightly as my in-laws come for dinner. We settled into the living room after eating to talk. At a point the conversation turned to the shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. We traded different tidbits of information we had discovered and then a notable silence hung in the room. These atrocities have become so common that talking about them brings an exhaustion, a complete depletion of energy and ability to say much more about them. How many times can you express your outrage before it begins to feel like a waste of breath, a pointless expenditure, empty posturing?

We know how we feel. We’ve said the same things so many times before. Is this acceptance? I’d like to think otherwise, but I have to admit, when the lunatics are running the asylum, it’s hard to feel like there is anything you can do. My vote doesn’t seem to do anything. My protest falls on deaf ears.

I hate the feeling of despondency this brings. I hate that I can read, practically on a daily basis, of another handful of innocent people gunned down. As I drink my morning coffee, and eat my breakfast, as I prepare for work and then go about my day, these communications of lives being snuffed out just fold into my routine.