In August I moved to a new town and by December I was sorely in need of a haircut. I found the place to get my hair cut by first finding an Irish pub. That I found by first finding a new trail, and hiking on it until sunset. Which had given me a thirst that needed quenching. Life is complicated. But living is simple. One thing leads to another.

The early evening was cold enough so that when I entered the Irish pub its warmth fogged my eyeglasses. I navigated through the fog, past two musicians playing guitar and mandolin, and past tables where old men and women sat, weeping. Why did they weep? Because the musicians were singing about angry young Belfast men throwing Molotov cocktails at scared young British soldiers armed with machine guns. Which led to everyone becoming dead.

After rehydrating with pints of Guinness, I floated out to the sidewalk and walked off my happy buzz exploring this new part of my new town. I enjoyed looking in the windows of restaurants and watching people eat and drink and talk and laugh. I was amazed and delighted with the mechanical contraptions displayed in the window of a store that sold vacuum cleaners. I was equally amazed and delighted with the mechanical contraptions displayed in the window of a small shop that sold sex toys, not to horny lonely men, but to women and couples. Which, apparently, had led to the store now having a Going Out of Business Sale.

Half a block away I saw, like a lighthouse on the sidewalk, a red white and blue swirled pole. Reaching that beacon, I peered through the dark windows behind it. I saw walls cluttered with road signs, car license plates, faded photographs of athletes, and 99 bottles (empty) of beer. I had found Andy’s Barbershop.

In the coming week one thing led to another and early Saturday morning I was inside Andy’s Barbershop, with a guy actually named Andy cutting my hair.

After paying Andy for my excellent new haircut, I foraged. That is, I drove down random streets looking for a place I could get breakfast. Waiting at a stoplight, I watched a man on the far corner walking on the sidewalk in a small circle. He wore four layers of dirty ragged clothes and he yelled at the air while chopping it with both hands. Passersby pretended he was not there, but at the same time granted him as much of the sidewalk as he needed to perform his monologue.

“Homeless,” I thought.

Which led me to wonder why we call such people homeless. For all I knew that man lived in a mansion on a hill. Or in a decrepit aluminum trailer atop cinder blocks on a quarter-acre of rocky dirt in an unincorporated part of town with no sewer system and with propane tanks to fuel the apparatus he used to manufacture methamphetamine.

My socio-economic musings evaporated when, simultaneously, the traffic light turned green, and I read the green letters on the side of a building behind the shouting, air-chopping man: Starbucks.

The barista was maybe 21, maybe of Mexican heritage, maybe weighed over 300 pounds, maybe was five feet and three inches tall, maybe had a mustache, and maybe was a man or maybe was a woman. In a castrato’s voice, he or she greeted me with a question, “What can I get started for you?”

Outwardly, I gave my order. While inwardly, I filed this question in my memory, just in case one thing led to another and I found myself single again and alone in a bar and in need of a provocative conversational gambit to break the ice with the attractive woman seated beside me. I could ask her, “What can I get started for you?”

I sat at a tiny round table just big enough to fit my laptop, a 20-ounce cup of cooperatively-farmed shade-grown fairly-traded Peruvian coffee, a toasted spinach, feta and egg-white wrap, and seven sun motes. Seated at the tiny round table to my right was a guy dressed in sharp-toed boots, tight jeans, and a heavily starched and ironed checked shirt that had swirls of fancy stitching around the buttons and over the shoulders. His left leg was bouncing straight up and down as constant and steady as a piston in the engine of an idling pickup truck. He folded the sports page of a newspaper into a small square, using his gnarled, tobacco stained fingers to pinch the edges into sharp creases. He then held it at arm’s length and stared at it so intensely I thought the newspaper might catch fire.

Looking back at my computer screen I, like 1.2 billion other people would that day, went to Google. Recently something had happened in Connecticut, the state where I was born and raised, and I intended to read about it, even though I did not really want to read about it. As I clicked on a link, I also noted in my peripheral vision that the person at the tiny round table to my left, a thin teenager with shaggy dyed-black hair, was staring straight at me.

I read the news story on my laptop.

A 20-year-old man used his mother’s Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle to shoot her dead as she slept in bed. He then drove to an elementary school where she had been a teacher and shot his way through a locked glass door. The school principal and psychologist were in a staff meeting and when they heard the shots they rushed to the source of the sounds. The man shot and killed both women.

“I dee-jay at the ice rink.”

I looked at the young man at my left. I said, “Ice rink?”

“Yeah the ice rink.” He pointed out the windows. “You know the ice rink.”

“I’m new in—

“It’s just one of my gigs.” He scratched his shaggy hair vigorously. “I dee-jay other stuff, too.”

“Like parties and wed— ”

“Check this out.”

He thrust the black rectangle of a phone into the space between us.

“I’m streaming video on my phone right now.”

Maybe it was this sudden change of topic that led me to make a snap judgment. I decided this shaggy teenager was playing the game of Life with an incomplete deck of cards. In spite of his having a short deck, he was choosing to play, not to sit the game out. He had, after all, struck up a conversation with a stranger in a café.

The video playing on his phone appeared to be of a heavy-metal band on a smoke-filled stage. But the image was small and the connection jerky and there was no sound. Watching the stuttering video was like watching a flip-card animation.

“The connection’s a bit slow,” I said.

“No way this is a 4G phone.”

I nodded down at the phone. “The video’s stopped.”

He pulled the phone away and stared down at it in his hands, mystified that it was not doing what he had expected it to do. He began massaging the phone with both his thumbs.

It seemed that the school psychologist, before being shot to death, managed to turn on the school’s intercom, trying to alert others in the building. A nine-year-old student would tell how he heard over the intercom the shooter say: “Put your hands up!” and someone else say “Don’t shoot!” and people yelling and many gunshots as he, his classmates, and teacher ran to hide in a closet in the gymnasium.

In the meeting room that the principal and psychologist had run from, a teacher pressed her body against the door to keep it closed. The man with the gun shot her through the door. In a first-grade classroom, a substitute teacher was shot in the face and killed. Fifteen of the sixteen students in her class were killed. The sole survivor, a six-year-old girl, lay on the floor among the bodies and feigned she was dead. When the building grew quiet, she ran from the school, covered in blood, the first child to escape the building. She would tell her mother, “Mommy, I’m okay, but all my friends are dead.” She described the shooter as a very angry man.

“Look at this.”

I turned to the young man beside me.

“Look at the video.”

He held the phone up in my face but at the same time leaned away from me as if I was threatening or had offensive body odor.

“There’s no video,” I said.

His eyebrows raised and the corners of his mouth turned down. He pressed both thumbs on the surface of the phone. “Wait.”

The young man with the gun went to a first-grade classroom where the teacher had hidden several children in a closet and cupboards.

I remembered how, when I was a six-year-old boy in Connecticut the wood cupboards in school seemed a good place to hide. Not that I ever did. Not that I ever had to. I just liked the quiet scent of the things stored inside; the books and crayons and sculpting clay and blank white paper ruled with faint blue lines and golden pencils waiting to be sharpened to perfect points.

The teacher told the man with the gun that the children were in the auditorium. But several of the children came out of their hiding places and tried to run away. The teacher put herself between her students and the shooter. A six-year-old boy in that class later told how he and some of his classmates had escaped through the classroom door while the man with the gun was busy shooting their teacher and the other children.

“Watch this.” The young man was pressing on his phone while explaining to me, like a salesman, that the phone could video-conference with other people, but only if they had a phone as capable as his, and no one he knew did.

The homeless man I had seen on the sidewalk entered the café. He was not yelling now, only mumbling softly and walking in a tight circle near the counter. His hands were safely in the pockets of his sagging pants, not slicing and dicing the air. Everyone pretended he was not there, yet gave him the room he needed to walk in his circle.

The 300-pound barista came out from behind the counter carrying a white paper bag and used it like a carrot before a horse to lead the homeless man back outside. I watched through the windows as the barista took a cup of coffee and a sandwich from the bag and put them into the man’s hands. And his hands, for the first time I had observed him, stopped. The barista was talking to the man but I didn’t know if the man heard him, because his own lips never stopped moving.

As I drove home I thought about my girlfriend, whom I love deeply, and who is a third grade teacher in my new town.

I spent the evening with my girlfriend doing something I had not done in many years, Christmas shopping in a mall. It was odd how the longest lines were for soft pretzels, and for giant barbecue tongs and spatulas that had the names of National Football League teams burned into their genuine hardwood handles.

We went to a restaurant, one link in a corporate chain, where a sign on the wall in the crowded waiting area said, Maximum Occupancy 348 Persons. Rather than wait one hour and twenty minutes for a table, we walked down the 50-foot long bar and just as two people got up from their stools to leave, we sat in their places.

I looked out over what seemed a half-acre filled with 348-plus living breathing talking laughing angry sad buzzed happy people eating and drinking at tables and in booths and coming and going and leaning over to shout at the person across from them who was pretending to understand whatever they had said. There were dozens of large and larger television screens on the walls and suspended from the ceiling and there were small screens tucked in nooks and corners. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, the dozens of screens were not all showing the same program. I felt grateful that my new town was not one of the places on this planet where such a vast and confined crowd of people would have attracted angry suicidal bombers wearing homemade explosive vests.

I shouted our drink orders to one of the four bartenders as she leaned close to hear me. While waiting for our drinks, I looked at the seven-foot high by 15-foot long blue-lighted freezer in which dozens of bottles of vodkas imported from all over the world were displayed. High on the wall behind the bar were four television screens, each five-feet long, arranged in a giant rectangle. The vivid clarity of the brilliant screens was stunning. And each screen was flashing a different program or commercial. I tried hard to look at only one screen. But I could not. Against my will, my eyes jumped from screen to screen, distracted by the constant motion and choppy camera cuts, hopelessly trying to catch something that was always just getting away from me, like a dumb mark certain he could win at Three-card Monte.

Sitting at that bar and being bludgeoned by the chaos of noise, smells, sights and sensations, I ran away. That is, I retreated far down inside me to a quiet place. The day I had lived through passed in a silent montage. The battered man walking in circles on a sidewalk and shouting syllables at the air, the urban cowboy with some inexhaustible nervous energy making his leg pump like a piston, and the shaggy teenager fixated on the workings of a phone with his pale face at once blank, and startled. Like a camera, my imagination followed a scrawny young man moving through the halls and classrooms of an elementary school shooting bullets that ripped apart the bodies of small children and their teachers, and turned Life into agony for those who loved them.

I wondered, are we born with, or into, this madness.

The indifference of the cosmos seems absolute.

Nothing cares, one way or the other, individually or in whole, if or how we live and die.

That’s for us to work out.