"Are you OK?"

To tell you the truth, I am not sure

We were out celebrating an old friend who had gotten her dissertation subject approved, which her husband called “congratulations on getting permission to do a f*ckton more work!” It was Cinco de Mayo, and she wanted pizza, so things were already a little strange. I’d gotten the shingles vaccine, and I was already beginning to feel some woozy side effects. We talked about everything else before my dear friend Max turned to me — we were sitting in a corner booth, S and Karie between us — and asked, “Are you OK?”

He wasn’t asking about my health. Rather, he was asking about the last few editions of this newsletter where we’ve discussed our intractable political divisions, school shootings (twice), how ChatGPT has turned life into a Black Mirror episode, and, of course, dirigibles. Normally, I’m determinedly optimistic. It’s not quite right to say that Max was not asking about my health. He wasn’t asking about my physical health. My mental health was his concern.

Max offered that we’ve survived worse. I saw that and raised him World War II.

“Sure we lived through it, but at what cost?”

“Not all of us lived through it,” noted Karie, who is Jewish.

I spent the night in misery, thrashing in puddled sweat.

I did not watch the news on Saturday, binging Netflix and popsicles. Getting sick confuses me. The experience is all effect while the cause remains invisible, leaving me uselessly questioning my reality. Nothing was making sense, and not just because Amazon skimped on writers for Ghosted. Am I supposed to believe women would find an emotionally needy Chris Evans repellant?

I scrolled Twitter, which did nothing for my funhouse relationship with reality. That doesn’t make any sense, I insisted. Why would someone need an AR-15 at an outlet mall? Is it tax-free weekend? As authorities sorted the carnage, they marched the surviving shoppers out single file, hands aloft to show that they didn’t have guns. Because, obviously, if they had guns, they’d be dangerous.

The politicians were no help helping my addled brain figure things out. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is unfortunately a name I can now correctly spell from memory, noted that the shooter “appears Hispanic with what looks like a gang tattoo on his hand.” (Turns out, the shooter appears to have engaged with white supremacists online.) The Governor went on Fox News to say we should address mass shootings by doing something about mental health, which sounds a bit inveighing against the objectification of women while tucking a twenty into a stripper’s G-string.

All this political tommyrot makes as much sense as canceling a field trip to see a production of James and the Giant Peach because some of the actors would be cross-dressing and an insect would use gender-neutral pronouns. This really happened, or, actually did not happen. The play, said the school district, was not “age appropriate” and contained “movements that could be perceived as suggestive,” but everyone knew what was really going on. There was trouble in River City (or, in this case, Spring Branch), with a capital “T” and that rhymes with “D” and that stands for drag. Also, derp, because my virus-riddled brain can’t make sense of any of this.

“More senseless violence near Dallas today,” tweeted a Republican congressman from southwest Texas. “Something has to change!”

“Pendejo—we have told you since Uvalde—what does it take?” replied a family member of a child who died in a schoolroom in Uvalde surrounded by dozens of good guys with guns. How many … lives [have to be taken] before legislators do a fuckin thing about the guns????”

The guy who killed all those kids in Robb Elementary waited until his eighteenth birthday to buy his AR-15 because that’s state law. The Uvalde families have been lobbying the legislature to raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21, something three-quarters of Texans support. The politicians, whose job it is to do popular things to get re-elected, seem reluctant in this case, and my head hurts, trying to draw a curlycue line between what is needed and what is wanted.

This is not to say that the legislature is doing nothing about school shootings. A few lawmakers have introduced a bill “relating to the regulation of bleeding control stations in public schools,” which can’t be right. Bleeding control stations? The bill imagines that starting in the third grade students would annually receive instruction on the use of “tourniquets approved for use in battlefield trauma care by the armed forces of the United States.” The words I’m reading can’t mean what they mean. There is no way the world can make so little sense, though battlefield trauma training would have come in handy for those shoppers who provided first aid in Allen, though the local paper didn’t call them “shoppers.” In the headline, they were called “civilians.”

Joe Biden put out a statement after the outlet mall shooting that included his repeated phrase, now shopworn with use: “Too many families have empty chairs at their dinner tables.” His statement ended with a plea.

Once again I ask Congress to send me a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Enacting universal background checks. Requiring safe storage. Ending immunity for gun manufacturers. I will sign it immediately. We need nothing less to keep our streets safe.

Nothing, of course, will happen except another mass shooting. Am I OK? Best I can say right now is that I currently enjoy a high unlikelihood of getting shingles, which ain’t nothing. With any luck, I’ll live long enough for the world to start making sense again.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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