The city of Boulder is about a half-hour drive from where we sit. It’s a college town to Denver’s metropolis, population around 106,000.

We grew up in a town like that, in Oregon. It’s how we figured out Colorado when we moved here almost six years ago: College town, metropolis, vast hinterlands, snowy mountains. No ocean, of course, and plenty of other differences when you look closer, but good enough to be getting on with.

We were still living in college-town Eugene when one of the first school shootings took place, next door, in Springfield. Everyone remembers Columbine (twenty-minute drive to our south), but West Paducah, Kentucky (1997) and Thurston High School (1998) preceded it.

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The first thing white people did upon hearing about the latest slaughter was to argue whether it was racist.

You’d think that was a no-brainer: While male murderer, Asian female victims. You’d think, after a year of a racist President racializing a pandemic, after reports for months of random attacks on Asian Americans, something like this would be easily, if sorrowfully, understood.

You’d think that. Unless you were white, apparently.

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We doing this? Really?

We’re all for a Return to Normalcy, and sure, millions of Americans are getting injected with spytech nanobots by the day, but we thought the party doesn’t start until this summer when the Roaring Twenties come back, or, to use a more personal reference, the Disco Seventies.

Just you wait. You’re thinking Flappers, but our bet’s on Toga Parties.

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• Trees of green
• Red roses too
• Skies of blue

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We watched Jungle Book the other day, the first time we’ve seen it since it came out more than fifty years ago. We’re deeply familiar with the soundtrack — we wore the grooves off the album as a kid — but the movie itself, just two viewings, bookending our life to date.

A lot has happened in between.

So much so that Disney+ felt compelled to post a content warning before the movie started, saying not only that some character depictions were less than salutary, but the creators should have known better at the time and did it anyway.

That got our attention.

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The funniest thing happened last week, and we were afraid to talk about it.

It falls under the category of Inappropriate Laughter, or seems to, anyway. Laughter at someone else’s misfortune, however funny it is. Laughter at something with very real consequences, fatal consequences, tragic consequences.

Actually, that’s what’s funny about it.

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A famous American radio personality died last week. And we rejoiced.

We didn’t just rejoice. We had fun with his death. We fantasized about it. We added him to our Great American Tour of Ignominy, peeing on graves across the land.

We weren’t alone — “Rest in Piss” became an instantly popular expression. Those souls incapable of the full urinary imagination settled themselves with the thought of dancing on his final resting place.

Great fun was had by all!

And then, surely as night follows day, the scolds came out.

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