I knew it was going to be another beautiful day in paradise, paradise being the popular description of this self-indulgent little burg, when I picked up the daily paper and saw the following headline:

'OH MY GOD'

Under that headline, which was set in about 56-point type (I estimate) was the sub-head Police try to reconstruct ex-postal worker's bloody trail, and under a dimly lit photo of people described as postal workers embracing one another, the further assessment that the Shooter had a history of erratic, disturbed behavior.

You don't say?

Anyway, three-quarters of the front page featured news on Monday night's shooting at a nearby postal sorting facility, as did four pages inside the front section of the paper.

I skimmed several of the articles, trying to determine whose quote, in single quotation marks, made up the headline, and I did finally find it: they're the words of a worker at the postal facility, quoting his own reaction to seeing a body lying in the parking lot, after the shooter went by. The worker did not know the shooter, but said he's convinced that if she'd seen him, he also would have been shot. He attributes his survival to daily prayer.

On days like this I think back on Yeats's Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and Joan Didion's essay of the same title, and the idea that the center cannot hold.

I don't know what to make of the editor who chose, in crafting a headline to describe the murder of six people and the suicide of the murderer, to write only the words 'OH MY GOD', the words of a man quoting himself, unpunctuated except for the single quotation marks. At first it seems inarticulate, and then, inevitable.

Star of the day. . .Mr. Pearl