portrait painted darkly

April 24, 2013

1825939Crystal clear and warm this Wednesday morning on California’s northern coast and the near-full moon dominates the western sky, creating a sun-up look albeit from the opposite direction.
A full moon due tomorrow — called this month, a “pink” moon, which also will take place on the same night as a lunar eclipse, but will be seen mostly everywhere else except the US.

A most-disturbing, pink-eye aspect of the Boston bombing episode is the near-schizophrenic description of  19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a cool, collected and calm killer without a pause button.

(Illustration found here).

If nothing else, one way-creepy and weird particular of those Tsarnaev brothers is their detached visage on all those pictures at the marathon finish line — standing without a smile and watching the bombs explode, and then apparently without a seeming freakin’ care in the whole-wide-world, just calmly walking away. And Dzhokhar looking into the eyes of a bombing victim as he put down that deadly backpack near the guy’s feet, and wistfully stepping along.
There’s something not right here.

We already know the boy partied, worked out at the gym, carried on conversations — after the horror.
He was also a toker — unlike any pot smoker I’ve ever known.
From USAToday:

Tsarnaev was funny, sarcastic, liked to party and frequently reeked of marijuana, said students in Pine Dale Hall, a sophomore residence at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where the alleged bomber lived.
Several students on Tuesday described a shared shock and disbelief as classmates discovered that Tsarnaev faces federal charges of using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction.
“It’s like finding out your best friend is a serial killer,” said Jennifer Mendez, who met Tsarnaev last year in their freshmen dorm.
“He was really social and hilarious. He was one of those people who would crack one joke and make your night.”

Mendez can’t imagine the motives behind Tsarnaev’s alleged actions.
Like many in Pine Dale Hall, she didn’t connect the blurry picture of suspect two to their classmate.
In the years she knew him, Tsarnaev just enjoyed playing soccer, talked about his years wrestling, and mulled over the demands of college life—professors, classes, and homework, Mendez said.
Partying and drinking filled their days, she said, and Tsarnaev did not show signs that he was becoming radical or changing in any way.
Her best memories are of the two sitting outside Maple Ridge Hall, the freshmen dorm they shared, talking about school and the excitement of being in college.

Tsarnaev shared that third-floor dorm room with another student, said Patrick Yaghoobian, 20, who lived next door to the pair all school year.
“He smoked a lot of pot,” Yaghoobian said of Tsarnaev Tuesday afternoon.
“He smelled like it every day.”
A strong smell of marijuana emanated from the room throughout the school year while Tsarnaev, himself, reeked of the drug, Yaghoobian said.
The smell was absent last Monday when the bombing took place.
But, it was back on Tuesday though Yaghoobian said he hadn’t seen Tsarnaev for several days before or after the bombings.
He said Tsarnaev was a quiet kid who walked around with the same blank , emotionless expression seen in many of the photos released by the FBI, Yaghoobian said.

His good friend, Mendez, last saw Tsarnaev a week before the bombings in the lobby of Pine Dale Hall.
The teen was his regular self, smiling and saying he had been to the politics class she dropped.
Now, she’s left wondering what could have led him to carry out such a heinous crime.
“He was completely normal,” Mendez said.
“That’s not the Dzhokhar I knew.”

Another example of you never, ever really know anybody — but yourself.
One of the brothers boasted to that guy whose SUV was carjacked last Thursday: “Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that.”
These guys knew they were near the end of the line, I guess, and now could trump the action.

Also from USAToday and the result of young Tsarnaev’s handiwork via a veteran ER physician — no pot smell here:

Leana Wen relives the Boston Marathon bombing every day.

“I am glad I was able to help,” says Wen, 30, a physician in her last year of a four-year residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“I wish I could have helped more. But I wish I hadn’t seen it.”

“At some point, I wanted to cry with them, but I couldn’t,” Wen said.
“There was blood everywhere.
On the floor, there were trails of it behind the stretchers.”
There was also soot from the explosions, and the smell of burned clothing, and burned flesh.
One of her most important jobs was triage: deciding which patients needed immediate treatment, which should be first in line for the operating room.
With so much blood everywhere, it wasn’t always easy to identify just where the bleeding was coming from.
Once she located the source of bleeding, she worked to stop it, tying tourniquets on those in danger of bleeding to death.
She performed CPR on patients without a pulse.
She ordered blood and fluids to replace what patients had lost.
Wen had been working since 7 a.m. without a break before the bombing, and she didn’t get a break after.
“I wasn’t weak,” she said, “because my adrenaline was so high.”

“I’ve never seen a shrapnel injury,” Wen said.
“That’s just not something we see in an urban city in the U.S.
“It was very difficult to see so many people’s lives changed in one day.
Seeing all those young people who were my age, who would have very different lives moving forward, if they had lives at all.”
But even after a 12-hour shift, she had no place to go home to.
Because her apartment was so close to the crime scene, police had the area blocked off until late in the night.
More than a week later, Wen still has nightmares.
Every new alarm beep takes her back to the day of the bombing, when it seemed like the number of patients coming through the doors would never end.
Her neighborhood and all the places she usually goes — her bank, her grocery store — remain shuttered.
“I keep looking for lessons from this,” Wen said.
“I don’t know what the lessons are.”

Only inside the brain of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — surreal and most-horrible.

 

 

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