So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

He could go on for hours like this, weaving every loose strand into a blanket of conspiratorial idiocy as he explained how, at the beginning of every season, NFL officials and team owners got together with TV execs, who handed out scripts for the season.

But in the 2015 Super Bowl, Brady, Belichick, and the brave Patriots refused to go along with the globalist-satanist-liberalist-trafficker agenda, and they struck a blow for the original America! New England! Patriots! Thirteen original colonies!

As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.

huge Internet-size black hole of bad ideas, bald-faced lies, and bullshit, until the literal worst person in America got elected president). There was inside of Kinnick an emptiness that felt like depression.

was he who had failed, he who couldn’t adjust, he who couldn’t deal with this banal, brutal idiocracy, he who couldn’t admit this was the world now.

without this $600 Pop-Tart of modern science, he had no way of reaching any other human being, and they had no way of reaching him. But more than that! This device knew him better than anyone ever had; it knew his weaknesses (best happy hour near me), his tastes (’70s soul and R&B), his worries (erections after fifty), his crude, sad desires (adventurous 40-to-50-something, dates only, not looking for a relationship), even what socks he preferred (athletic, white and black), knew every place he’d ever walked and driven and—

“We’ve got antivaxers and tax protestors, flat-Earth school board members and at least one posse comitatus county commissioner. Oh, there’s also a rural sheriff who sits in the public library all day looking for books about gay penguins so he can confiscate them.

At some point, you look around, and think, I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t want to have anything to do with any of this.”

fanatics who were always skulking around Pride parades and MLK Day marches in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, and who, during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, had shown up for unsolicited security-guard duty at shopping malls and downtown stores, in their Don’t-Tread-on-Me-I-got-a-small-dick pickup trucks and their Kevlar vests over their black T-shirts, their semiautomatic rifles BabyBjörned to their fat guts like the shithead soldier/cop-wannabes they were (even though none of them had the stones to go and join the actual military, or the brains to pass a simple law enforcement test).

Guy thinks he can make pets out of rattlesnakes.”

But then, to be suddenly told your services were simply no longer needed? That your kind wasn’t wanted anymore? That shit was heartbreaking.

“I was happy to be away from the bullshit, the politics and gossip. The division. All the noise I mistook for life. But it sneaks up on you. Eventually, the solitude becomes physical, like thirst.

someone who was a bi, which apparently meant that you thought boys and girls were cute, which he didn’t see why that was a problem. Wasn’t that how everyone should be?