Some days I feel the weight of every nanosecond of the 71.5 years I have spent on this planet.
I’m so old that when some fresh young bit of news rears its pimply head, references from books — yes, books! — leap to what remains of my mind.
For instance, there’s P.R. Deltoid, the “post-corrective adviser” to the ultraviolent 15-year-old Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess:
“What gets into you all? We study the problem and we’ve been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no further with our studies. You’ve got a good home here, good loving parents, you’ve got not too bad of a brain. Is it some devil that crawls inside you?”
Or the bruiser in the cowboy hat in Thomas McGuane’s “Something to be Desired,” who, upon seeing a used tampon land on his windshield at a drive-in movie theater, steps out to make a few inquiries among the usual suspects, which include the hapless Lucien, who had been preparing to continue a mutual infidelity with a casual acquaintance until a rare burst of discretion — “spraying ancient drive-in gravel” in headlong flight — came to seem the better part of valor.
“I got my fiancée here!” shouts the cowboy. “She don’t want to know about your little world!”
Alas, it seems that to gain some insight regarding the suspect in the Charlie Kirk killing I must leave the library and take a deep dive into the wonderful world of … Helldivers2?
In addition to everything else, I’m supposed to worry about whether the asshole on my six with two wheels in the bike lane is “a Nick Fuentes groyper and gamergate 4chan douchebro?”
No thank you, please. I just finished an oldster’s breakfast of oatmeal, fresh fruit, and tea. It looks like rain. And I’m feeling the cowboy’s confusion here, with a geezerly side of These Kids Today.
I remember when games meant Monopoly, Scrabble, or just tossing the ol’ pigskin around. I don’t want to know about their little world.
Mad Blog Media 
I’m sure our grandparents felt the same way about us, as theirs did about them, but, damn, it does se
Seems like another case of Internet Brain Poisoning Syndrome (IBPS). Unless this guy really thought taking out Charlie Kirk was like taking the keystone out of the Trump-MAGA bridge, which seems a little over the top.
Strange daze we live in.
Jeebus. This could have been me growing up.
Raised in a Republican home in Utah. Why would saying that even be necessary? Just adds to the division. Dog dammit, a closed mind can develop anywhere. And, when it gets filled with digital hate, anything can happen.
As far as contributing to brain rot, IBPS seems right up there with fentanyl.
They really, really, really wanted you to get the message, too:
“… raised in a Republican home in Southwest Utah …”
“… raised in a Republican family …
“… from a conservative family. …”
I’m old enough to remember when newspapers had a few employees called “copy editors.” Unsung heroes, they were, overworked and underpaid, rarely an “attaboy,” never a byline. Drank like fish, smoked like landfill fires, and for good reasons, too. We shall not see their like again.
What the hell is a “Republican home,” anyway? Occupants who live beyond their means, don’t pay their bills, let the property go to hell, call the cops on the neighbors for sporting a skin tone that didn’t come from a tanning salon or a plastic tube, and blame all their fuckups on the guy who lived there before they did?
Well, you gotta have someone to blame for your situation. The guy who is responsible for much of your situation tells you the person who picked your tomatoes or roofed your house is to blame. So you vote for the first and hate the second. Or as Forrest would say, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
I have no idea what it is these days. Back in college, when the glaciers were melting back, I met a girl who took a shine to me and me to her. Politics had nothing to do with it, shall we say. There were other….pressing priorities.
Turns out her whole family was what used to be called Main Street Republicans. Owned their home, paid the bills, did civic and church stuff. Her old man was an architect and a WW II combat veteran; landed on D+3 and had PTSD to show for it. Was a city alderman in some Upstate NY town. He campaigned for Dole/Kemp. Girlfriend was a hifalutin rank Girl Scout as a teen and her brother an Eagle Scout. One brother didn’t fit in. I’ll get back to that.
I grew up in a blue collar home, UAW, moderate Democrats except for my mom, who was just politically off in the deep space of idealism. I never got into scouting or anything that involved wearing a brown shirt. Did too much reading about the Third Reich to wear one of those. Was a terror on ground hogs with a rifle, though.
The political differences in girlfriend/Wife 1.0’s family never mattered to me in those days. Their Presbyterian Church split asunder having something to do with liberalization; her church was more conservative but not crazy. I liked their pastor. Her family considered me an odd duck, but had no idea what to expect from a geologist in a Ph.D. program.
Conservatism finally hit me when her younger brother discovered he was gay, while in college and in seminary. Had to keep that deeply closeted from everyone (family, the Church) except me (given I was not a conservative Presbyterian Republican). He finally came out to his social circle in NYC and took a job at GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center) but kept his family in the dark to avoid having the shit hit the fan. Funny story. His mom told me he worked for GMHC and I thought it had something to do with General Motors Health Care. Spent an entire day trying to track him down in NYC. Told him about that when we finally met up and he almost died laughing.
Then he got sick and withdrew from family. The pain that caused him was substantial, and the pain it caused the family when he died alone of AIDs (rather than tell family he was gay and sick) was pretty bad too, causing deep guilt. Made me sick, since I knew the score but was sworn to silence.
But now, I have no idea what it means to be a Republican Home, given so much is wrapped up in the MAGA-verse. At least then people I knew were sane, even if I disagreed with them. I suspect a fair number of Republicans are not crazy, but the ones I know who are not crazy are pretty quiet about things.
Here’s a possible explanation from a native Utah person.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/spencer-cox-charlie-kirk-trump/684203/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo