Email to a guy I’ve roomed with a couple of times at Sundance: “All I noted in a certain quickly-deleted conversational post was that the Atlanta shootings (by a 21 year-old white guy with stringy chin whiskers) didn’t appear to be racially motivated as much as by some kind of weird sexual addiction thing.

“I didn’t associate the Oscar race with the shootings. A person I occasionally speak to did…big deal. I just listened and thought ‘hmm, that’s an unusual angle but whatever.’

“And this person may have had a point, really, because of the way everything gets associated with everything else these days….it all mixes and swirls together in a big cultural whirlpool. Anyway it seemed like an interesting exchange at first, but then Twitter weighed in with shock and horror and I took it down.

“It’s just words and opinions, man….words and musings and associations. If you had been engaged on this particular angle or topic at a party somewhere, you would have listened and chimed in. You might have disagreed or told the person who shared this perspective that it was insensitive or whatever, and maybe you would have had a point. But because you’re a Twitter hyena, you tried to make it into a big thing.”