For me, Friday the 13th started out great… I found a penny on my morning walk and saw this pale rainbow. Somebody paid me an overdue debt, and I was off and running.

After work I went down to my local for a pint, and that’s when the news got to me that Paris had been attacked. Like so many people, my memories of Paris are among my most vivid and exciting… Everything that happens to a visitor there is better… because Paris.

But now, again, some crazies with guns and bombs try to take all that away, for reasons I can’t begin to understand. I love our modern world (he says to his iPhone from his warm house with his full belly) and it doesn’t seem like blowing it up is much of an answer to much of anything.

I hope we find some way to stop this trend of killing and terrorizing, as naive as it sounds to just say that. I don’t think we can reason with these people, and I don’t think we can kill them or isolate them completely. I don’t know what we can do, actually, but we certainly have to keep trying, keep funding the solutions and experiments and ideas for peace and goodwill, keep reaching out. As long as we keep our own values clear — tolerance and freedom must rule over punishment and violence — I suppose there aren’t really any bad ideas.