> Aaaaagh,
>
> Joanna
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I was going to write something but it was too insanely tedious to wade through the ads and the one minute videos with flashing ads. Really what you are looking at is the total breakdown of US media. I decided to muse over it in my journal instead.
Just superficial glances at the facts of Adam Lanzo's life said it all to me. Another well off busted family with older kids going nowhere. Dad remarried and is a VP at the local GE Financial Services division. Take it from there.
Could have happened in the long ago where I spent my teenage years in Northridge. Lots of fucked up families and twisted kids. I tried for a long time to figure it out.
Nobody is going to get it without a story.
One night, I was sixteen and asleep and I hear this noise at the open widow. It's my friend call him Robert. He wants to come in, so I open the screen and he gets through. What is going on Robert? Long storied history between us, which is why he came to my place. His sister who I had onced dated came home early with her date and caught him doing something pretty outrageous ... funny actually. ... But this wasn't funny. It would make the rest of his days in high school hard to live.
I heard about it on Monday in the lunch area. I rolled my eyes and walked away. His rotten sister had told everybody she knew. He did indeed become an outsider and never had a date as far as I know. He took up his studies, read Ann Ryn and tried to get me to read her. I tried, but what bullshit. I preferred science fiction or maybe Steinbeck, something funny and soulful like Tortilla Flat. He got other friends including some kid who lived in a really interesting Bauhaus designed place from the 1930 out near Box Canynon. This is an historically weirdo area that included Charles Manson at a later date...
Robert got into UCB as a freshman in 1961 and totally rejected all the student left. By the time I got to Berkeley he had graduated and got into UCLA law school. The last I heard his first job was in the LA District Attorney's Office. I never saw or heard of him again. It's chilling to think what he became. In my fevered imagination, his saddistic features loom, given the power of a prosecutor's office. Keep Robert away from small furry animals. Actually, it might be the other way around. He might be quite kind to animals. It's the people he surveys that worry me. I had no doubt he voted for Bush and liked it.
The Robert story is my way of understanding these fancy places with semi-rich people, their weird families and the kids who get a glock. Somehow these places are toxic. It really is a sociological mystery. I thought my experiences were unique. They were not. They were average.
CG