Long hiatus, I didn’t mean to leave this blog dormant for three whole years.

Busy with work, and stuff. And I have been trying to get some novels done. The plan has been to get several ready, and then start to publish again so I can keep some sort of schedule going. But it has been damn slow going, and there are only a few done now, and they still need a lot of edits before they are even close to publishable.

I can do this… (whimpers).

On a more serious note:

One thing which did stop me almost completely for nearly two years now was an experience nobody thinks they will get because it is so damn unlikely.

I was an eyewitness to a terrorist event in my country. A Moroccan man who had got here pretending to be an asylum seeker from Near East decided to go for an amok run. For ISIS, it seems, at least according to what he said in his trial. He used knives, and started stabbing random people on the local market square, then running towards an other square in the city, while attacking people on the way.

He killed two, wounded eight before the police got there. I saw one of the stabbings, of one of the victims who lived, and the useless resuscitation efforts of one who died.

These things happen now. And they scare us. But most of us still think that it will be something you read about in the papers, not something you see with your own eyes. After that one somebody made a calculation online that you had a somewhat higher probability to win a lottery than to have been there – much less end up as one of the victims.

But somebody always wins the lottery too. Why else would we play?

This is not a political blog so I am not going to write any more of this. Just this: if something is unlikely it does not mean it will never happen to you. So be prepared. Even for the highly unlikely. Think what you would do if it DID happen to you. Set aside some time to think up a few plans. It has been said that the ones who survive in the unlikely accidents or anything – ship sinking, your house burning, something like this, anything – are the ones who did. Don’t scare yourself to death, but make up a plan. Be at least some sort of prepared.

One of the victims who died was an older woman who was said to have just stood there, looking, when he went for her and hit her with his knives (he had two, one in both hands. Common kitchen knives, bought from Ikea if I remember the news stories correctly). Maybe she did just stand and wait because she just couldn’t process what was happening. Who knows, but I assume it’s likely.

So have a plan. Even for the most unlikely thing happening. So if it does you have at least some idea what to do, and don’t just stand or sit there or flail around in a panic.

I just stood there too, and he ran right past me. So I got lucky.

And I don’t much like the idea that I am maybe alive just because of random luck.