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cyclobenzaprine and a low-information voter
Sunday, July 3 2016
I had a mid-grade hangover when I woke up this morning. Gretchen had gone to work and I knew that eventually Mark and possibly other people would be coming over. But that is never something you can really plan for, so I decided to take a cyclobenzaprine to take the edge off my discomfort. Under my personal rules, I only allow myself to take one depressant pill every two months, and I'd decided that today was the day. Unfortunately, it wasn't long after I'd taken it that Mark showed up with his brother Mike. Mark is infuriating in a lot of ways: he tends to be bossy, paranoid, and given to absurd conspiracy theories. But I find him fun; as I put it last night to Susan & David, there's a damaged kid in me that had to make peace with burnouts and rednecks back in high school, and that kid occasionally needs socializing and entertainment too. That said, there is evidently a limit to my ability to relate to such people. Over the course of this afternoon, I found Mark's brother Mike completely insufferable. He's loud, ignorant, paranoid, stupid, and right wing, though he's also slightly self-deprecating and personally humble. Infuriatingly, he's the quintessential low-information voter (to the extent he votes at all) and all he seems to know about the workings of the world come to him through second-hand conspiracy theories to which he applies zero critical thinking. He didn't seem to know anything about Hillary Clinton except that she would "take our guns," something he actually lives in fear of. Mike has guns, and he really thinks some day a democratically-elected government will take them away. He's also concerned about freeloaders (particularly in the immigrant population) taking advantage of welfare. It's impossible for someone like me to have a meaningful conversation with such a person, since he completely lacks the logical framework and semantic references to process or otherwise absorb anything I might tell him, and there aren't enough hours in the day (or attention span on his end) for me to build such a framework. So all I could do was say things like "I don't care if Hillary takes our guns" and "I don't care if there are lazy people on welfare; hell, there's hardly even a welfare system left these days." Ultimately the only thing the three of us could do together was smoke dope and drink beer. Actually, Mike doesn't really drink beer; he seemed to be in a state of perpetual hangover whose symptoms only fade with sips of distilled liquor. I led us and the dogs on a little walk down the Gullies Trail and back, but there is evidently something wrong with Mike's musculoskeletal system that kept him from being able to walk much further than that. Also, some idiot had started shooting down at the bus turn around, which is uncomfortably close to the Gullies Trail.
At some point I needed to pull a ripcord on the afternoon, so I made up a story about needing to meet Gretchen in Woodstock at 5:00pm. So after watching a few videos in the laboratory (especially "Balls to the Wall" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), they took off. It wasn't long after I lay down on the couch that the cyclobenzaprine knocked me out completely. That stuff is evidently a strong sedative when combined with alcohol and tiresome people.
The laziness induced by the cyclobenzaprine kept me from going to a party that Gretchen went to after work. Later, our old friend Susan the German Translator came back from that same party with her new boyfriend Richard to spend the night in one of our basement guest rooms.
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