Rogan Josh and Robin Williams and Mumbai

Robin Williams is showing on a rerun of Letterman that aired just hours ago. He is wearing a shiny suit and a bizarre tie. Maybe shiny isn't the right word. Words seem to be failing me right now. He is insane, though, and the crowd is roaring. I haven't heard background laughter like that before.

One of my roommates is cleaning up after the boxed jambalaya meal we shared an hour or two ago. The dirty rice is dried to the ceramic bowls. He is scraping it clean in the kitchen. My other roommate is watching Robin Williams with me. We aren't laughing, just sitting in silence with the wide screen flat panel television blaring too loud. The water is running in the kitchen and I can hear the scratching of steel wool.

We just watched Terror in Mumbai, the HBO special on the attack on Mumbai. It will be one year ago two days from now. It's an interesting concept: thinking about the past in terms of the future. Or is it the future in terms of the past? I guess it doesn't make much sense however you put it. The attack made sense. It made sense to someone.

Robin Williams was just bleeped out for something he said and the crowd is roaring. Now he's speaking with a Scottish accent. Now with an Irish accent. Something about Obama and wasps. The water is running in the kitchen. Steel wool and ceramic. Silence and television.

The Terror in Mumbai special depicted the murders as they were happening. CC televisions recorded an unbelievable amount of horrible footage. It recorded a man shot through the window of a train station and the 15 policemen that fled as innocent people were murdered. I probably would have fled too. It must have been scary. Scary. That probably isn't the right word. Words are failing me.

Jimmy Fallon is on now. He is wearing the same grey suit and solid charcoal tie that he always wears. A bit about Twilight raking in $150 million its first week at the box office. The audience is laughing, but it sounds like chuckles compared to the roars on Letterman. The audience must prefer the insanity of Robin Williams to the scripted Fallon.

The steel wool has stopped. There was interrogation coverage of the sole remaining gunman after the murders in Mumbai. He was bandaged at the neck, laying stiff, answering every question with honest clarity. He wasn't crying or praying to a god or being uncooperative. He was probably the same age as I am or maybe younger. Maybe 20. His father sold him to Lashkar e Taiba. His father was a street vendor that sold potatoes and snacks. His father told him he would get rich.

The documentary ended about a half hour ago. We are sitting in silence. The roommate that had been cleaning up after our dinner had returned to the couch. There was a part in the special that showed five of the nine gunmen in a posh hotel. After murdering as many people as they could, they called their controller to ask for directions. He wanted them to set a fire. The CC cameras of the hotel showed the gunmen, the gunboys, circling the hallways of the hotel. They weren't setting fires. When the recording of the phone call with the controller resumed, he was asking one of the gunmen, the gunboys, why they hadn't started the fire. The youth sounded absorbed as he spoke: "There are 30-inch televisions here. The windows are so big." In the CC camera recording we could see the Louis Vuitton window, the marble floors and leather couches, the gunboys circling. They had probably never seen these things. I see them everyday. "Throw some grenades and light a fire," the controller was saying.

At my internship today I had to figure out how to use social media to target wealthy audiences to invest in our product. I spent five hours thinking about what the best way was to advertise. I still haven't come up with something worthwhile. I really hope that tomorrow I can come up with something worthwhile. Maybe they will start paying me if I come up with something worthwhile. At least they pay for my lunch. We had Indian today. I had a Rogan Josh and garlic naan.

Over lunch an elder man that I see there all the time sat with us. He had a strong accent. Either Israeli or Iranian. I think it was Iranian. I don't know exactly what he does there, but I see him whenever I work and today was the first day he spoke to me. He told me a story about two best friends that had very much love for one another. One was Muslim and one was Jewish. When the revolution happened, one told the other that the other could stay with the one, but if the one was told to, he would have to kill the other. I asked ignorantly if they still speak to each other. The elderly man laughed at me and said no. I wondered if he was laughing at my ignorance or if he thought I was being funny or if there wasn't any other reaction he might have had to such a ludicrous question except to laugh.

The documentary said that the one gunboy that had lived through the attack would be hanged if found guilty in a secret trial. When he was telling the interrogator about his father he started crying. Not sobbing or blubbering, but crying because he realized that he had failed at his mission. Or maybe he was crying because he had figured out that there was no martyrdom, that his fellow gunboys weren't in a heaven or hell, that they just weren't anymore. Or maybe he was crying because he was thinking about his father or his friends that had just died.

My roommate showed me a website earlier where you can make your own dialogue and a program will turn it into a movie for you. I made one about him and a girl and we all laughed at it. It wasn't very funny, but we all laughed anyways. The Indian food I ate for lunch was delicious. The jambalaya we had for dinner was very good as well. I liked that we all ate together. That means a lot to me.