On the way over to your kindergarten I passed that playground you like in summer.

For a second I thought I saw a charred baby corpse, but it was a black tree branch. My father was obsessed with checking the news and I have inherited this disease and made it my own. Your grandfather never got used to the internet, so he bought two, sometimes three, newspapers per day. One for the murders and car accidents and one for politics. I don’t know much about my grandfather, but I do know he read Der Spiegel and my grandmother once told me that he neglected the work on the farm because he got into discussions with anyone willing. I imagine that his business would have failed faster if he had had access to Twitter.

I have been seeing and reading a lot about dead kids in places you don’t know yet. Today I read about a father only finding the shoulder of his three year old son in the rubble. I rub your shoulders almost every day, so I know what your shoulder feels like and then I imagine finding only that amid your pulverized toys and children’s books. These are things that should not happen to any human at all. Obviously. But clearly it is not so obvious to some other folks out there. I carry you home from kindergarten. About two miles in the rain. Love makes 40 pounds weigh considerably lighter. You say your ankles are cold. Your pant legs are crawling a few inches upwards because of the way am carrying you and that makes the wind get to your shins a bit.

I want to make the way less boring for you so I tell you about everything we can do and you tell me I don’t have to list all that, you know anyway. Yesterday you told me you already have enough toys and you would like me to work less. You ask if I was teaching today and I say yes. You have some understanding of what my job entails, but of course I can’t tell you about the stuff I read online or about increasingly sillier discussions about what happened in 1948 and who killed who then and who is right to kill today. This is only one of my obsessions, but it’s more on the foreground because of what is happening. Because of the topics am irresistibly drawn to there is always a heaviness to me, although I can be very goofy too. Your mum is different luckily and has no need to know about any Mufti meeting with Hitler or what was said at Camp David or what the Oslo accords are or why Arafat was in Tunisia from 1983 to 1993.

She thinks it’s terrible what is happening and doesn’t need to remind herself of how dire the situation is every ten minutes. At the root of this is a lack megalomaniac drive that could convince her that checking and sharing ten news articles a day somehow helps to stop the carnage. If it’s a choice you’re better off choosing to be like mum than like me. It would be nice if you could inherit my memory, but then use it for nicer things than to store dates of battles. It doesn’t help the world much if you know what happened on the 17th of September 1862 or on the 20th of March 2003 or who was born on the 15th of Augustus on a tiny island not from from the French coast.

My dad told me the same when I told him how many ships Napoleon lost in Egypt. ‘In the end those are all just useless facts’ and then he continued filling his head with some more. Like I said, it’s a disease. I have tried to stop it many times, but unsuccesfully and let it be now. ‘Am addicted to sad news and horrifying history’ is not taken seriously in group therapy. Yes, I have tried. Lately I have tried to not deal with anything related to cerebral masturbation (maybe now am being too self-derogatory) on Thursday afternoons and Friday afternoons. I have already stopped teaching on weekends to have more time for you. One of the best decisions I have ever made. Anyway, I can’t really slide through a tube with the innocent lightness of your mum, but the fact that I wanted to be there to film it for you also says something. So don’t bomb people and try having cooler hobbies than your dad, grandfather and great grandfather.

I hear kitesurfing is nice.