STRAY DOGS & CREDIT CARDS
Written the morning after the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, summer 1996. I remember waking up rather early that morning, turning on the news, and very quickly being submersed in this kind of media shellshock, the it-can't-happen-here-although-it-happened-here kind of idiocy that morning anchors and on-the-scene reporters (among others)descend into when they suddenly realize that something terribly important has happened, and yet there's very little they can say about it. Very shortly I realized that the bomb, which turned out to have been not all that powerful, was pretty badly designed and blew most of it's force escaping it's container. Most of the debris fell down rather than thrust outward. There was one fatality: of a heart attack, the following day. The news people, nonetheless, kept referring to it as "the fatal Centennial Park Bombing."