St. Patrick’s Day in America has always been more of a celebration of Irish-American immigrant culture than it is of Ireland itself.

Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.

I used to get up early on Saturdays to watch cartoons, and remember being really bummed when they weren’t on because Saddam Hussein was invading Kuwait.

And I can sort of mentally mark when I started to sleep in later because by the time I got up all I managed to catch was Saved By the Bell before the broadcast switched to a golf tournament or a fishing show.

And ATMs charge fees, which you don’t pay if you use the teller.

“Real old heads”? Blu-rays are older than Silly Bandz.

My bluetooth headphones still do this when I use the microwave at work. I have learned to stand back from it when it’s in use.

Apple IIe’s in the computer lab at school, magazines with whole programs in basic that you could type in to make the computer draw something.

Road trips with Prairie Home Companion on tape, Dad was at the wheel, and Mom flipped the tapes. I didn’t quite grok that there was a big plastic case full of cassettes, so hearing “turn to side eight” mystified me, because surely tapes could only have two sides, right?

That smell is Christmas to me. That was the only time we typically got new NES or Super NES games, and lord I loved that smell of fresh print and plastic.

I remember always resenting Prince Valiant for taking up valuable page space that could have gone to Calvin and Hobbes or something else that didn’t suck. Good lord, Prince Valiant was fucking terrible.

One of my first vehicles came with an aftermarket ten-disc cd-changer someone had installed in the back and hooked into the sound system, with a separate control panel up front. It was such a pain to use (and would skip constantly) that I usually just listened to the radio anyway.

And you didn’t have to update it constantly with patches that might change its functionality.

It was channel 4 for us, because channel 3 was the local CBS affiliate and it would interfere with the signal from the NES. There was a switch on the console to flip between 3 and 4, because it varied depending on location which channel was optimal.

Channel 3 was CBS, 5 was ABC, 12 was NBC, and that was it.

The ABC affiliate would also broadcast Sesame Street because for most of my childhood, we didn’t have a local public television station. When we finally did get one, you had to get cable to pick it up where I lived. I have vague memories of having cable in the house for a brief time around the time the ABC station stopped carrying the show, but my parents dropped it pretty soon afterward when we started to want to watch exclusively Nickelodeon. At least I always assumed that was the cause, but the cost of cable was probably a bigger factor. They compensated for that by recording movies that came on network TV with the VCR, and we happily rewatched those constantly instead of whatever we were missing on cable. We had whole shelves full of just VHS tapes full of movies recorded off the TV.

If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.

That’s a good one. Love the art style of all their videos.

When the discourse goes in circles and gets nowhere, it becomes a perceived waste to continue it. The people who profit from gun sales – including the politicians who reap campaign contributions from exploiting misconceptions about it – like it this way.

He didn’t exactly need accuracy when there was a sea of targets in front of him, especially if his objective was to hit as many of them as possible before they could disperse.

But it also does raise the question: why did the shooter think he needed a lot of guns?

Be as detailed as possible in your report, and focus especially on any specific threats against individuals or groups that he has mentioned.

People have been studying the psychology of mass killers since the 70s. Without an actual living subject at hand in this case, it’s hard to do anything more than speculate. I tend to agree that it would be useful to know more about what pushed him to such an act, but how do you suggest going about this? Should we round up and interrogate everyone he knew in his life? Would that even be productive?

Motive isn’t as mysterious as we like to pretend it is. All it really required was a loss of fundamental empathy for his fellow humans. We see that everywhere these days. He’s not unique in that respect. What’s unique is the lengths he went to to commit this act. He seemed to want the spectacle of it. Like many serial killers, perhaps the idea of murder gave him a rush of feeling he couldn’t find anywhere else in his life, and so he figured why not get as much of that as he could?

Again, it’s all speculation. And it’s also not hard to trace it back to a sickness eating at the roots of our society. What do you do with that knowledge? What can any of us do but try a little harder in our own lives to be kind to others and generous to those who might be quietly slipping down into the lake of poison seething under the world?