Where were you when you heard the news of John Lennon's murder?

It has been a long week, the first full week of my new job. To make things worse, I’ve been fighting a cold that I believe Fiona brought to the house. I’ve been tired and when I’ve gotten home, often gone straight to bed. My personal writing and my visit to friends blogs have suffered considerably. John from Ask The Blogster left a nice comment yesterday mentioning that I was missed from the Adgitize community.

I describe it as a community, instead of an advertising network or some sort of blogging network, because that is what it is. It relates back to any sort of good social media activity. It is about the community.

Dick, another active member of the Adgitize community, over at Dickster’s Random Thoughts asked in a recent blog post, "Where were you when you heard the news of John Lennon's murder?”. He talks about getting dressed in black and heading off to open up the store he worked at.

I’m a few years older than Dick. I was living in an old spice factory that had been converted into artists’ loft spaces in Brooklyn, NY. One of my loftmates was a photographer supporting himself working for CBS news doing food service. I remember that he told me that Lennon had been shot. The details are now a little bit blurry in my mind. My recollection was that at some point, he had gotten a call from work. He was told that Lennon had been shot and that it was going to be a busy long cold night at CBS news, and he had better get in to make sure there would be enough coffee and hot chocolate for people working long hours.

I had moved to New York to be a writer. I was supporting myself by writing computer programs for New York Life Insurance company. In the morning, I got on the subway into Manhattan. I don’t know if there really was a strange hush over the crowd in the subways, or it was just my reaction to all the people. I remember seeing a poster for some movie titled something like “The Starmaker” and I thought about how we deal with stars, making stars, killing stars. I stopped and wrote a poem about it in a park on the way to work. I suspect the poem was lost a long time ago, and it was probably a proto-emo type poem that is just as well lost.

Now, thirty years later, I’m still writing. I’m writing my blog posts. I’m working on using social media to improve communities’ health, and I’m tired. I’ll post this as is, rest, visit a few other blogs and head off to some social engagements for the day.

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