This happened a few days ago, but I find myself sporadically still thinking about it.

Earlier this week, there was a shooting at the corner of 8th and Washington, a block up from where I work.  One of my coworkers was outside in our parking lot at the time, and heard the *pop pop pop!* when it happened.  The rest of us peered out the front door’s window shortly thereafter and saw the cops barricading the corner, and the gentleman from the ambulance pulling out the dreaded white sheet to cover up a body.

It’s not the incident itself that I keep thinking about – there was another one at 8th and Lincoln, the other way up the road, this past last Saturday night, too.  These things come in waves and of course one should be abhorred by senseless violence, but what I keep thinking about is:

I would have been walking RIGHT THERE the other day, at around the same time as the incident, had not happenstance taken place.

Weary of working and ready for lunch, I was just about to go eat something and then take a walk to loosen up the ol’ back and get some fresh air, when I got dinged on Facebook IM by one of my friends.  More interested in talking to my friend and also overcome with a lunchtime lethargy, I ran downstairs, grabbed my lunch, and came back to my desk to spend the hour eating and chatting and catching up on some blog-reading.

Shortly before my hour was up, the Incident occurred.  I backtracked the timing in my head and that was when I realized that, had my friend NOT dinged me on IM, I would have been walking back up 8th Avenue to work and thus would have, more or less, been wandering right on by roughly around the time that someone decided to shoot someone else.

Crazy, that old lady Fate and her man, Timing.

Now I’m just frustrated because I STILL, several days later, can’t find anything on the news about it.  Anywhere.  It would be nice to know what went down in my ‘hood.