I was at the post office the other day. The line was painfully long, crawling in fact. All I needed was stamps. I was kicking myself for not having ordered them online ahead of time and saved myself the torture.  It was a week before Christmas and all around me people had holiday packages stacked up to their chins, or resting on the counter before them. We were all miserable waiting.

Standing there, I began to imagine that a gunman was about to walk in and begin shooting at us. And when he did, I wondered, what would I do? There was a frail old woman just to my left, her hair a sculpted frozen wave, a Certs jogging around in her mouth, appearing sporadically between her ruby lips. Would I help her first? Pull her down behind the island? Throw my body in front of hers? Or would I knock her out of the way and hurl myself over the counter to escape the rapid spray of automatic weapon fire as it peppered the plywood and people started screaming?

I wasn’t imagining this is the typical day dreamy way you do, when silly thoughts come into your head. When you see your reflection and pretend you kind of look like Harrison Ford, or wonder if it’s too late to become an astronaut. For a few seconds, I full on expected it to happen. Right there in my local post office, it seemed entirely plausible.

A few nights ago, I took my wife out to dinner and a movie. We ate like royalty, then saw “Silver Linings Playbook,” which is great, by the way. Same thing happened as at the post office. The theater was crowded. Packed nearly to capacity. And as the movie began playing, the thought came to me again: what will happen when one of these people stands up with an automatic weapon and starts shooting at all of us? Will I be able to protect my wife? Myself? What will it sound like? Feel like? Will I ever make it home to see my children? How many of us will die before he either shoots himself or someone takes him down?

This is dark terrain, I know.

But that most recent shooting at Sandy Hook is pinballing around in my subconscious and I can’t seem to make it stop.