It may be that the law has no remedy for the injustice done by George Zimmerman. Technically, he may not be guilty of murder or manslaughter or even negligent homicide. He may have a right as a private citizen, under the law, to stalk a teenager late at night while carrying a loaded firearm. Perhaps there is no way to punish a man for shadowing a boy he thinks is suspicious, even though the teenager had a perfect right and reason to be where he was.

And if Trayvon Martin, spooked by this close pursuit, turned to protect himself, well, it is then George’s right to stand his ground and fire his weapon. That is, after all, how the state law reads.

Perhaps the U.S. Attorney, seeing the injustice done in the criminal courts of Florida, will decide to charge that Trayvon Martin’s civil rights were violated or perhaps that he was the victim of a hate crime. The Martin family may file suit against Zimmerman for their son’s wrongful death. It’s quite possible, however, that none of these efforts will result in justice being done.

There is clearly a racial component to this story, but let’s set that aside for now and view this incident simply as an interaction between two citizens, one carrying a gun and one not. Each was doing what he was lawfully entitled to do. One was going about his business, and the other was making that business his own. Something made George decide to force the issue and play out a script he had written in his head about Trayvon. What’s more, he was prepared to back up his fantasy with a deadly weapon.

I can’t imagine Zimmerman being so brazen as to openly follow someone at night if he weren’t armed. To do so would be to subject himself to the obvious danger that his quarry might turn and confront his stalker. It was the gun that made this foolish idea become reasonable. After all, if things get dicey, you can always shoot your quarry dead.

It is obvious that Trayvon Martin would not have died if there had been no gun. In fact, he wouldn’t have been followed in the first place. It was the gun that emboldened Zimmerman to follow the boy. It was the gun that gave him the will to act on his misguided suspicions. It was the gun that fulfilled its own prophecy and discharged a bullet into Trayvon’s beating heart.

Stupidity is one of the constants of human existence. We are all stupid. Carrying a gun, since it clothes us in feelings of invincibility, magnifies our stupidity. In this case, we see that sometimes the gun can even move to fill the void between our ears and start doing our thinking for us.

Don’t believe the gun advocates. Guns do kill people. The stupid humans are only there to pull the trigger. If it’s justice we’re looking for at the end of this story, then we should move now to keep these weapons out of the hands of stupid people. And that means all of us, citizen.

I found that thing yesterday. You know, that thing I lost two years ago. I remember being frantic about it at the time — not because I needed to have the thing, but because there was absolutely no way I could have lost it.

It couldn’t have happened, but I have to admit that these little episodes do occur. What’s more, they tend to undermine my self-image as a place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place, thoroughly together kind of guy. I can deal was this, but it will force me to spend a lot of time gathering evidence to contradict the growing mountain of data showing that I am not that guy. This will surely be exhausting, especially with all the time I’m already spending to prove that I am as young as I used to be. I’m beginning to suspect that such efforts may, in fact, be futile.

There had been a place for that thing two years ago, but the thing wasn’t in it when I looked. I am forced to admit that it had been used (by me, it seems, and not by my wife, who is always the prime suspect in these mysteries) then carelessly set down and forgotten. When I finally found the thing, it had been sorely abused by the elements. It had once been a nice thing; now it is shabby.

I have found a new place for the thing (it had long ago been displaced by a new version of itself), a place more suitable to its degraded condition. It will be a sheltered place, I have decided, but with plenty of the fresh air it has become accustomed to. Now I have to decide whether to make the new place clearly visible or to banish that thing from my sight.

My concern is that a prominent placement would constitute a further affront to my self-image, a constant reminder that I am not what I present myself to be. If I see it every day, it might even encourage me to abandon the hopeless task of proving the unprovable and to accept that I am flawed, weak, and unworthy of love. Such a realization would be healthy, no doubt, and signal the onset of some long overdue maturation. As with most advances toward maturity, however, this process would be painful and humiliating.

Right now it seems better for me to continue being immature. I suppose I might miss out on some deeper happiness, but I can’t imagine that it would be worth all the hassle. Life is simply too short for agonizing self-appraisal. I will conceal the thing in a less obvious place, then, and thereby avoid an excruciating confrontation with my own inadequacy.

I don’t see any harm coming from this choice. If I do forget where the new place for that thing is, I’ll just ask my wife a few pointed questions about when she last saw it and her whereabouts at the time it went missing. I am confident that she will have the maturity not to feel threatened by my accusatory tone and just tell me where it is.

Talk to an Angelino, and before long you’ll hear a reference to freeways. They are central to life, and especially travel, in Southern California. As it is with most metropolitan areas, the art of choosing the right route to your destination has become highly refined there. In Los Angeles, this savvy mostly involves choosing among a snarl of high-speed expressways.

What is also different in such discussions in L.A. is that freeways are given a special linguistic status. Interstate 5, for instance, is simply called “5” by the rest of California. South of the San Gabriel Mountains, however, you will hear it called the 5. You will also hear allusions to the 10, the 110, the 134, the 405, and even the 1. Not just the number of the highway is used, then, but the article “the” is also attached to it.

This practice has long troubled me. Perhaps the roots of my agitation can be traced to my slight revulsion at all things L.A. (go Giants), but I think the issue is bigger than that. In one sense, I have come to understand the impulse to tack on that article. It grants to freeways a standing as edifices separate and distinct from their surroundings. It is a prestige they clearly deserve. They connect to city streets as part of a larger transportation system, but they are clearly their own things — like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Still, I am troubled. As I have said, the issue here is bigger than regional naming conventions and petty conflicts between cultures. This is about the language we speak and the triumph of reason over the forces of chaos.

So it is that I must reject the Angelino fashion of adding the to the titles of numbered freeways. Not because it’s an L.A. thing, but because of all the “thes”. There are too many of them. Not just on our freeways, but in our language. It is time we rid ourselves of them.

Thes serve no real purpose in our language. Oh, they may provide a little clarity now and then, but does Golden Gate Bridge really need one? Or Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or World Champion San Francisco Giants? Their identity as nouns is secure with or without this archaic appendage. Dump them, I say.

The operation will not be painless, I know. There will need to be some exceptions, some nouns that will be out of focus without their linguistic crutches. But such variances should only be granted when they are genuinely needed.

I will continue, certainly, to refer to Los Angeles’ baseball team as Da Bums, if only for the sake of clarity.

There are some public figures I don’t like. And by “don’t like,” I mean I hate their guts. The way they smile, the way they talk, the way they part their hair… I feel the revulsion knotting up my viscera just thinking about it.

This is the kind of attitude, we all know, that can lead to purely ad hominem attacks —cartoons that have no other purpose than personal vilification. And I’m not just talking about character assassination by way of ugly metaphor; I’m talking about caricature, too. When I draw Newt Gingrich, I try to make him as loathsome and vile as the art of cartooning will permit.

These feelings might be grounded, I admit, in the hate object’s politics, or in their willful ignorance, or in their propensity to say they know things that they know they don’t know (otherwise known as lying). But I will not lie. Though I draw cartoons that are attacks on what these people do, the drawings are often designed to dehumanize them. I have made judgments about their character as human beings, and I have let those judgments color my satire (in bile yellow, mostly, with envy green highlights).

In my defense, let me say that I am not proud of myself for feeling this way. In fact, I hate myself for hating. It’s wrong, it’s counter-productive, and it’s certainly not life affirming. Normally, I’m for affirming the hell out of life, making the world a better place, and all that kind of high-minded crap. I’m dead set against hatred, particularly in others. Let the record reflect that I think hate is bad.

Not only is all this negativity corroding my aura, it’s diluting the credibility of my satire. The billions of readers who look to me for perspective in making their most important civic decisions are being denied a truly detached take on the world. How does it help them to know that I hate the Koch brothers (David slightly more than Charles, in case you’re wondering)? Why should they care if I claim that Ted Cruz is not qualified to be president because he was born in Transylvania? And let’s face it: no matter how personally detestable Mitch McConnell is, an attack on his character is as much about me as it about his sorry, obstructive ass.

See? The hatred is creeping in even in the middle of this prayer for forgiveness. But please believe me; I am working on my feelings — trying to change and become a better cartoonist, if not a better person. Perhaps this confession will help. I’m hoping that laying my soul bare might exorcise this demon of personal animus and allow me to produce satire that actually makes a difference.

After all, aren’t public figures human beings, just like you and me? Aren’t we just as apt as John Edwards to have a child out of wedlock while our champ of a mate is dying of cancer — all while we’re running for president? Of course we would; we’re only human.

So I’m sorry, okay? I promise to do better. I vow never to take part in the cartooning of personal destruction again. I only wish I could take back all those vicious ad hominem attacks I’ve made over the years.

But not the Newt stuff; I hate that son of a bitch.