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This is the contest.

It won’t be democrats versus republicans.

No goofecock republican is gonna be president.  The whole bench is so shallow and reviled that the republican establishment is beside itself drooling, sweating and white knuckling their way to a convention they know will be a culsterfuck of such extraordinary magnitude, they’ll be dealing with mob violence and political nuclear winter for years.

The whole GOP implosion is going to sound exactly like the sigh of brain rot, marching and combustion.

They don’t have a candidate.

The general election is in seven months and they don’t have a goddamn candidate.

They would have a failed hotel concierge/real estate tycoon named Trump.

I do worry about just how close Hillary’s unfavorable ratings are to Trump’s.  Either one will have the highest unfavorable rating of any president ever elected. Most sane people in America loath them both. The people who adore them want a cage match.  The low information voters whose entire repertoire is callow slogans and empty headed talking points.

The democratic party is in almost the same trouble for the exact same reasons.

People get red faced and apoplectic over the word ‘establishment’.  I’m glad they do but I’m sad all the dumb ones don’t know why.

Where there’s arrogance there is ignorance. The money says Hillary will be in the cage with Trump. It’s gonna be awesome I promise. They both suck and that thrills me. It’s going to be as ugly and stupid as any wrestling fan could possibly imagine.

Everybody and all the politicians next to them have the hobby of thinking Trump is the shallowest of douchebags they can’t wait to thwart.  They know he’ll try a bunch of really dumb shit that will fail miserably.  All the same people feel that way about Hillary but figure they can work with her.  She’s got principles.

The Donald didn’t actually plan to be president.  I think he’s shitting himself.  Cocaine is a helluva drug.  So is power. He’s crapping his pants but he keeps comes coming back for more.   If he discovers adult diapers we could be in for a very long night.

She made the very calculated decision that releasing the transcripts of lucrative speeches to the very institutions who broke our economy and have been found guilty of criminal fraud is more likely to cost her the election than not releasing them.  Zero consideration of ethics or morality.  She is totally hiding something.

I used to respect Hillary Clinton and hate Donald Trump.

I still hate Donald Trump.

We keep ending up with these lowest common denominator candidates.

A lot of his people won’t vote for her because many of them aren’t democrats. A significant number of right leaning independents will vote for him over her and Trump.  Her people will vote for Bernie though.  This is why virtually every poll shows him kicking far more ass over any given republican than she can.  Bernie understands all this very well.

He’s now tied or beating her nationally.

This democratic primary is the contest because it doesn’t matter who wins the republican nomination. The GOP will hoist a loser, guaranteed.  What we have right fucking now is a choice between fracking all the time or windmills that don’t cause cancer.  Health care paid for by our taxes and affordable education just like every other first world country in the world that we’ll need to to compete with or more war and economic injustice that fills our prisons and bathes Hillary’s real base in the filthiest lucre.

Go Bernie go.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

Yes, Bernie Sanders isn’t an establishment democrat.  He’s not a neoliberal, corporatist, bloodthirsty hawk in the pocket of every goddamn military industrial contractor, weapons manufacturer and bank with tons of dirty money to burn in electing another bullshit democrat.

For this, you are either grateful or an idiot.

Hillary needs to keep talking about Bernie not being a democrat and so does James Carville. Al Franken breaks my heart.  His defection to this fuckery really stings me.  Barney Frank has become the epitome of an establishment democrat.  Shame on him.  Paul Krugman needs to stop his rambling and dithering, listen to Robert Reich or piss up a rope.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be clerking at the 7-11.

Bernie is not a democrat and that’s good.

It’s really good.

Democrats have sucked for a long time.

Hillary, along with the establishment DNC, have become archaic and obsolete.  They cheer the implosion of the republican party while their own demise shows all the same symptoms.  They pay requisite lip service to social issues and line up to screw us over on economic justice.

It’s pretty simple. On both sides there is disgust over money. The way money influences our lives, our elections and our media.  The way ridiculously rich people and corporations control our rights and choices.   Both sides foment common populist rhetoric.

The result of economic drought for regular people has produced dramatically different candidates along with the most polarized electorate in decades. There is Bernie on the left and the blunt bigotry and stupid ignorance of jackasses like Trump and Cruz on the right.  Republicans have all been pissing in the petri dish forever. The vulgarity of the entire post Obama GOP was inevitable.  The GOP has been a bunch of stick up the ass, racist pricks for at least forty years.

The same way republicans began to suck under Reagan, Bill Clinton introduced and then implemented the concept of democrats sucking.  The Clintons fucked this country hard with a particular genius. Engineering it in a way that we didn’t realize until George W. was wreaking havoc on the world stage with a disastrous war that could still end in a global inferno.

Trump does it for free.  By being fact free.  Substance free.  A blowhard.  It guaranteed him the media magnifying glass for free and he knew it.  There’s your free stuff.

As an alternative, the GOP foists Ted Cruz on the mouth breathers.

Both parties getting real serious about getting on with it.  I’m aware of the math but the season is barely over. The establishment is reacting slowly.  Democrats are still trying to figure out which lane Hillary intends to occupy.  Pro Nixon, pro Reagan or pro Bush.

Bernie beat Hillary last week by the same spread Cruz beat Trump and all I heard about is fucking Trump and Cruz. He beat her by 13 goddamn points when he was down 10 barely a month ago. With the alleged inevitability of Hillary and the obscene uncouth of Trump and Cruz, Bernie is still not available on our airwaves but Cruz and Trump are all over my goddamn TV.

He’s won eight of the last nine but you’d never know it by watching television.

There are no real democrats anymore.

I’m here to talk about that.

Hillary and Billary Clinton owe their personal fortune to the same people who broke the economy in 2008. Hillary Clinton owes her campaign to these fucks.  I imagine they they are barely able to spit the words Franklin Delano Roosevelt or even Teddy Roosevelt.

And they feel the need to constantly remind us that Bernie is no democrat.

You’re fuckin’ A he’s not.

She faces a fierce challenge because she is one of the ridiculously rich people in every way. They are her friends. They fund her dirty campaign. They pay her goddamn rent.  She sips champagne in their hot tubs.  They own her.

He’s the only senator who isn’t Beverly Hillbilly rich.

No shit this is a single issue campaign.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inevitability.

It may still be.

I’m realistic and pragmatic about it.

Still, it really chaps my ass.

I was a fan of Bill Clinton. If I’m not mistaken he presided over the longest period of economic prosperity in history at the time. I was naive. The canard of his legacy of course, is that much of the destruction he wrought did not manifest until after he left office.

We now know all too well how his bipolar devotion to deregulation metastasized into economic drought for the middle class.

Hillary Clinton categorically, shows no sign that her presidency will be any different.  One of the things at the top of my list is her disingenuous zeal when defending an obstinate refusal to release transcripts of lucrative speeches to the very institutions that Bill enabled in their efforts enrich themselves while breaking the backs of ordinary Americans and driving the world economy to a near apocalyptic famine.  It only convinces me that she has a lot to lose and more than a little to hide.

This alone disqualifies her in my eyes.

There is so much more.  She won’t even commit to a $15 an hour minimum wage when she knows that even that doesn’t guarantee a hardworking full time employee the opportunity to be self sufficient.  Food, shelter and transportation.

Her stance on fracking is so convoluted and conditional it basically amounts to tacit support.

She won’t commit to expanding medicare and not cutting social security.  I am profoundly disgusted by the fact that she is saying that free tuition and single payer health care are unrealistic expectations despite the fact that just about every first world nation without a bloated defense budget now has some version of both.

Exactly how are we expected to compete?

The status quo if left intact, all but guarantees America becoming a third world country.

It is happening now.

It has been happening for decades.

Her message boils down to not only don’t ask for too much, but don’t dare to ask for what you deserve. Hillary Clinton is complicit in espousing the thoroughly republican message that we as a country are broke.  That we just can’t afford these things.  It’s complete bullshit.  It’s the most egregious and annihilative lie ever forced down the necks of the American people.  It absolutely is because she is a hawk and in the pocket of the military industrial complex, sucking all the money and oxygen from what should otherwise be a robust economy that ordinary Americans should be able to enjoy.

Look no further than her recent speech to AIPAC.

The last thing we need is another Margaret Thatcher.

Don’t get me started on the Clinton foundation’s symbiotic relationship with her backroom deals at the State Department and the illegal server put in place if for no other reason than to deny FOIA act requests.  There are a number of FBI agents agents on the case and a grand jury has been convened.  Immunity has been granted.  They aren’t fucking kidding.

I didn’t vote for Obama because he was half black.  I loved that it pissed off rednecks but it had nothing to do with my motivation.  I voted for him because of his message and proposed policies and solutions.  If Hillary gets the nomination and I vote for her, it sure as fuck won’t be because she’s a woman.  It will merely be because of what has become an American tradition of choosing the lesser of evils.

I’m sick to death of that crap.

Susan Sarandon might be right.  If Trump gets elected, the revolution starts immediately and I believe it will be televised.

Go Bernie go.

Drinks for my friends.

He was the first person I ever heard use the word ‘awesome’. He was the first adult to ever utter the word ‘fuck’ in front of me besides my father. When I took my parents to his classroom for 7th grade open house, I figured he was on my side. This was one teacher who really liked me. The first thing he said to my parents was that “Sometimes, I just want to shake the shit out of him”.

It was a sucker punch.

He was the first teacher to ever give me detention, or as he called it “The puddle of puke room”.

He threatened to “Pinch my head off and shit down my neck”.  He once called me to the back of the classroom during the absolute silence of a test to point at a car outside the window with a for sale sign. “Ugly sonafabitch ain’t it?” he said.

Not much later I figured out that car for sale was his.

If I am any good at anything at all today, he was the beginning of it.  Outside of my exasperated parents, he was the first person to convince me I was smart.  That I had something to offer.  To respect and believe in myself. That I could do anything I wanted.  He was rough but never mean.  Never awful.  He walked that line with an informed and intellectual compassion that often confused me but ultimately inspired me.

Everybody has that one teacher.

He was mine.

He taught me the beauty of language and how every word and every punctuation mark matters.  The difference between Hemingway’s austere economy of language and Capote’s rich and evocative prose.  Steinbeck’s pointed but artful technique as opposed to the flowery and loquacious verbiage of Edgar Allen Poe.  He made me see it. He showed me how to understand the similarities and differences.

He taught me about the art of literature and therefore about the art of everything.

I landed in his English class for 7th grade.  I signed up for various English classes instructed by him my freshman, sophomore and junior years in high school.  When I went to sign up for his class as a freshman he said to me, “They don’t fuck around here.  You’re not gonna get away with your bullshit.  Do your goddamn homework or I’m gonna have to spank your face with a brick”.

He got word through my sister that I’d mentioned him in the credits for the first record I produced recorded and mixed some ten years later.  I had every intention of doing so at the time but perhaps fittingly, didn’t get my updated label copy in on time.  I turned in my homework too late.  It wasn’t until the third record I made that I was able to give him a nod.  I regret it because all through the making of that first record, it was his assurance that I could do anything I put my mind to that kept me going through a wilderness of fear and doubt as much as anything else.

But because of this I was afforded the privilege of a kind of second relationship with Nick Tobey.  He reached out to me asking about it.  I wrote him emails and he responded with long, hand written letters in tiny script.  I tried to tell him about the difference he’d made in my life without sounding pious or obsequious and I can only imagine I failed.  He wasn’t having it.  He was clearly uncomfortable with what I was trying to tell him.  I was disappointed.

But it fit.

His humility was something I understood about him even as a teenager.

It’s why I loved him.

He saw being a catalyst for so many students as his job.

Nothing special and certainly not heroic.

He was wrong.

Tragically wrong.

I can still see him.  Leaning back against the front of his desk.  His left hand palm out down the back of his pants with a book in his right hand, looking at us individually and collectively through his 80’s style glasses, reading a passage and then laughing with amazement at the author’s prowess.  Putting the book down and turning to us again to explain the power of the words he’d just read.  I swear, at least half of us were enthralled.  In the midst of an epiphany.

And then he’d pull me into the hallway when no one was looking to remind me I was fucking up and ask me if maybe I was working too many hours at my after school job.

This when I was writing papers for my female employees at that job and getting them an A or at least a solid B in exchange for a delivered fast food breakfast to my bed.

Nicholas West Tobey was the rarest of human beings.  He gave a mad fuck absent hubris entirely. He told me later in life that he didn’t miss teaching and that he didn’t feel he’d made much of a contribution.  It really messed with me and not long after, he ceased all correspondence with me.

It occurs to me that he was a disappointment to himself for other reasons.  He was a reluctant artist and intellectual.  I can only guess at that.  All I can say is that for me, it doesn’t matter at all.  There is no way to measure the difference he made in my life.  It would not surprise me at all to find out that he was less than perfect to people closer to him.  It should not surprise them when I say it does not matter to me.

Rest in peace Mr. Nick.

February 21, 1939-February 25, 2016.

Drinks for my friends.

We all know that blaming anything other than the republican establishment for the ascendancy of Trump is either just plain stupid, willfully ignorant or an audacious fucking lie. I am fascinated by their born again reluctance for their own dogma.

I adore the bogus revulsion and amplitude of their denial.

The irony and hypocrisy are gorgeous.

What we’re witnessing is the assholes who set this controlled burn of hate and bigotry four or five decades ago, now running from a total conflagration like the bed wetting political arsonists they’ve always been.

Let’s say the “short fingered vulgarian” wraps his digits around the brass ring.  The damage to America’s brand throughout the world will be complete.  Fear of America will usurp respect of it completely. Embarrassment will eclipse pride.  Apology will replace the hubris of nationalism.

It could be good for us.

He will face a house and senate that loathe him thoroughly regardless of party affiliation.  He will accomplish nothing.  He will be the single most spectacular failure of a president in the history of this country. He won’t get any funding for his ridiculous proposals.  He won’t get any legislation passed to support them.  If he gets a chance to veto anything it will be overridden.  He’ll be mocked, despised, ridiculed and dismissed by media, leaders of our allied nation states as well as those who oppose us.

It will be chaos.

He’s waiting to be a punchline.

And, somewhere over the rainbow, the parties will finally unite behind a common cause. Imagine the bitter partisanship and enmity waning while cooperation and bipartisanship finally blooms.  Imagine a good deal of the current congressional leadership finally admitting that this is just obtuse and absurd and it’s time to marginalize a sitting president.

Maybe we need a jackass president that is such a jackass that nothing gets done.  So that maybe we’re forced to confront what jackasses the rest of us have become.  Rock bottom.  So addicted to rage and hate and blame that we end up with this fucking jackass and find it impossible to move forward because we can’t until we look in the mirror and contemplate how we got here and what we need to do to change.

I guarantee he will barely be a one term president.

After which they will all hit the restart button and the bullshit starts all over again.

Or maybe Hillary will get elected and nothing at all will change.  No meaningful reform anywhere.  More war, more income disparity and economic, social and racial injustice.  We’ll be dining on the exact same shit sandwich we have for decades.

I guarantee she’ll be a one term president.

And who knows the caliber of sociopath that will be waiting to take the throne.

Vote for Bernie because fuck this shit.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

Hillary said the other day at Nancy Reagan’s funeral that Nancy Reagan was a “very effective, low-key advocate on AIDS/HIV”.

You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

Like she didn’t know.

I am done with this woman. Nancy Reagan told a dying Rock Hudson to talk to the hand and Hillary knows this at least as well as I do. What the hell did she think she was going to get away with? Then she said she “misspoke”.

Give me a break.

She’s killing me. I just can’t get past this one. She’s noisy like a fish flopping on things like the TPP.  She won’t even commit to things like a $15 minimum wage, opposing fracking and not mitigating social security or medicare. She voted for the Iraq war and blamed it on bad intelligence when even I knew it was a lie that would turn into a shit storm.  She just might be the most responsible for Libya becoming a clusterfuck of chaos and a nucleus for Islamic terrorism in Africa and the entire Middle East.

She made her donors an ass pocket full of money on that one.

She’s not a progressive or a liberal.  She’s the new disgusting version of neoliberal. I can’t stand her anymore. She’s a goddamn establishment democrat, barely better than neoconservatives and in some ways worse.  A republican save for requisite lip service to social concerns.

I don’t give a mad fuck about her emails.

It’s amazing how many people she gets over on.

Wherever she is, she says what she thinks she needs to say and it’s getting harder and harder to watch.  The parallels with Trump are chilling.

How is it that Bernie is worth a mere $300 thousand and she’s worth somewhere north of $25 million and that isn’t an issue?  How did she get that stinking rich in a life dedicated to public service?  I have yet to get an answer to this question from a Hillary supporter.  They simply don’t want to talk about it.  It’s because they know I know the answer.

Now here’s the thing that is most galling, I acknowledge that both Bernie and Hillary camps can be more than a little vociferous and irresponsible, but I am sick and fucking tired of being called a misogynist for asking reasonable questions or pointing out glaring inconsistencies regarding her record or policy history.  I resent the fuck out of it.  I have a vagina, Hillary has a vagina, you don’t, so you’re automatically a he-man woman hater.

It’s cheap and lazy.

Why is this a contest?

Donald Trump actually conducted a press conference/infomercial the other night with his products on display.  I went ahead and vomited all over my frilly liberal blouse. He’s a goddamn phony and so is she.

They both care more about winning than governing.

How the hell did we get here?

Drinks for my friends.

Progressives are in real trouble.

Ever hear the expression ‘We need to stop making stupid people famous’?

Democratic turnout is anemic while Republicans are showing up in angry violent mobs. They are crushing. Organizing liberals is said to be like herding cats. Organizing conservatives, tea baggers, whatever the fuck, merely requires handing out Viking helmets with silly horns.

Then they go forth and multiply.

With torches and pitchforks.

It’s far easier to motivate the dumb.

It’s not all of what this contest is about but it still applies.

They are so much simpler than we are.  So much easier to get over on. We’re picky, prickly and idealistic. They thrive on bigotry, hate and fear. They love that shit. It breaks my heart. So much easier to sell. Trust me, I know, I’m a salesman. I like to shower in the morning instead of when I get home from work.  My sheets should be dirtier than my job.

Trump scares the fuck out of me because he is obviously not exclusive to republican voters.  There are more self identifying independent voters now than ever before in this gilded age of righteous information.  Way more self hating republicans.  He is dominating every demographic and social strata available.

Hillary won’t be able to beat Trump because the people behind this swell will choose him over her.  Bernie owns half of the liberal support in this country and they simply will not vote for her. Her support is broad but shallow. Trump and Sanders support is broad and deep.  Her support has nothing at all to do with this new sensibility.

Her trust and favorable ratings are an indictment.  Too many voters just don’t like her because she is a liar and a hypocrite.  What’s up with those triangle tunics she keeps showing up in?  I had no idea she was from planet Vulcan.

Hillary Clinton cannot beat Donald Trump because she does not inspire.  Trump does.  He inspires the racists, the xenophobes, the ignorant, the people who believe we need an even bigger military and the people who believe we don’t actually deserve the things our tax dollars should afford us.

You know, the general welfare.

It always comes down to just us. Donald Trump, this weird orange colored bigot who appeals to the worst in anybody and everybody, has got a populist head of steam that is formidable and frightening.  Because he is perceived to be authentic.  And because so many Americans are really fucking ugly.

He doesn’t want to be president, he is authentic in that he just wants to win the contest for president.  The same can be said for Hillary.  She doesn’t believe her own shit. She cares about what sells. She cares about winning. She cares about showing up in alien pajamas.

Donald  is as full of himself as a grown man and filthy rich narcissist can be without getting the shit kicked out of him everyday.  He has bodyguards and now Secret Service.

This won’t change.

His  zombies are loose.

Bernie Sanders actually wants to be president.

What absolutely matters is that he wants to try.

Not me. Us.

We can’t just elect him and take our seats.

It’s the only way it ever get’s done.

We the people.

If we don’t show up, we will lose.  Hillary will get the nomination, the old, establishment democrats won’t be enough to get her over and the the pissed off vikings will hoist Trump on us all.  It will be dark days and it will be our fault. Because we are a bunch of lazy, complacent, ideological pussies.

Maybe, like drug addicts, we need to hit rock bottom before we rally.

Maybe we’re just not there yet.

Chris fucking Christie, endorsed the Donald yesterday in the most bizarre act of callow lying cowardice this campaign season.  The cruelest political irony, and punchline yet visited upon us. He wouldn’t be able to win a run for sewer engineer in his own state if the election were held this week. He may be the next attorney general of the United States.

It’s perfect. Seriously. A blowhard bully to warm up the crowd for the blowhard bully king.

Creepy obsequious though.

Serious asshole ballet.

I loathe this motherfucker Trump.

Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump and Bernie can. Because Bernie is authentic and Hillary is not.  He wants to be your president.  He’s honest about wanting to be good at it.

Our last option before rock bottom.

Drinks for my friends.

I remember the first music.

Warm air escaping windows and seams out into winter while playing a phrase.  Piles of snow lodged against us. The slow hiss of life in an aluminium box.  Sheets greasy with menthol eucalyptus.  The melody of the furnace.  The humidifier aspirating the bottom note for my asthma. A cheap clock with glowing hands ticks the anchor to each bar in a trailer that whistled and sang according to season.

The wind always blows where I’m from.

Some of life’s best and strangest moments are right before you wake up.

A ridiculous symphony plays before my dream breaks and I am all the sudden here.

Sticky eyes like with glue.  Stuck shut so I’m afraid and confused.  They are snotty and I can’t wipe it all away.

I’m off the top bunk smearing at them and out of my bedroom with the urgency of pissing and it’s still cold and dark.  Tammy the sister dreaming and snoring her own tune from the bottom bunk.  The kitchen glows the narrow hall.  I teeter at the beige porcelain bowl with my gherkin in my fist.  Trickling.  The humidity of my fathers shit, shave and cigarette just keeps coming.

Out and barely left, he sits in the kitchen, coffee down front and wafting.  Hands huge.  Newspaper crackling.  Plastic lunch pail and concrete encrusted hard hat on the Formica.   Zippo flaming a wad of toilet paper for the toss into the ominous red hatch of furnace.

Cigarette smoke coiling.

The ritual is familiar.

I smell the newspaper he grips.

There is his sideburns.

He is giant.

Down that hatch and furnace hole is the devil and hell I think.

I am five years old.

Gas stove.  My Mother with a cast iron frying pan in a frayed robe.  Avon lotions.  Red hair.  She worries after how fierce he is. Freckles everywhere.  Potatoes, onions, peppers, fuel oil, bacon and eggs.  That and coffee.  It will sting my nose when I get home from school.

Delivered by the bus.

A barrel leaks amber in the ice and snow out back.  The dawn is purple.  Bruised clouds out the kitchen window.

The black cat is coming in the back door where his work boots are.

Her back foot bleeds. Her front toes are torn.  Chunk of ear missing.  She’s been in a fight. Midnight the cat.  She bleeds on the white snow looking to get inside. My father, in his heavy wool socks flannel and jeans calls her an old rip. He laces his boots ferocious and quick.

My mother tells him to be careful.  She always said that. She means what he’s done and what he just might do. Maybe not what might happen to him.

My dad showed me to fear the violence of men. The sound of another man hit hard is the sound of my father to me.  Breaking glass and snarls and bodies crashing to the floor.  Women shrieking.  The smack I would come to know on my own.  After hitting my first time.  After being hit the first time.  The whole movie of adult violence in my head still stars my father.  The entire testosterone fueled one act play that ends with him punching someone either before or after some amount of humiliation and intimidation.

My old man was a predator.

I learned to fish and swing a hammer.  I learned my way around a rifle.  The importance of integrity, honesty and a work ethic.

I saw his violence in the eyes of boys I knew and it scared the shit out of me.  He was fearless.  Different than brave.  Reckless. He didn’t care.  It didn’t matter whether it was his blood or not.  I saw the same thing in the eyes of his friends.

They didn’t give a shit.

Before I was born he lost an eye in a bar fight.

I was always afraid for him because I realized that as big as he was to me, he was so small.  He loved to pick a fight with the biggest bastard in the room.

I fought a boy once when I was very young.  Seven or eight years old.  He just kept hitting me. I lost badly. I had no stomach for it. The guilt of violence.  I was a pussy.

Until one day when I was in the sixth grade

He said said if there’s gonna be a fight you don’t hesitate.  You hit as hard as you can and as fast as you can.  So I did.  I talked myself into it.  I convinced myself.  As soon as that kid stepped off the bus, I hit him with everything I had.  He pulled my hair out. The curb and gutter was thick with it but his face was bleeding.

I kept hitting him and there was an audience.  I hadn’t really counted on that.  They cheered and groaned. It was sick and awful.

I kept swinging.  His bloody face still spooks me.  I hated it because I was not afraid during it.  Horrified before and after.  But not during.  I don’t remember how or why it ended.  My neck and shoulders were sore for a week from getting my hair pulled and tossed everywhere. I kept hitting him.  I hated him.  I imagined hot copper cables from my shoulders through my neck to the base of my head.  My knuckles were raw from punching his head and face whenever it bobbed in front of me.

I’ve never done anything like it since.

It might just be the worst thing I’ve ever done.  To agree to even do it. Because I had no problem with him. We weren’t enemies at all. I am casually acquainted with him to this day and he’s nothing but a sweet man.

I told my dad about it reluctantly.  I couldn’t say I won.  He volunteered marvelous energy to make sure  I did not become like him, the way he was.  There is always a way to walk away, always, he said.  You don’t have to do that.  You don’t have to be like me.  He was beside himself.  He was afraid for me.  He was fucking fierce and he knew I just wasn’t.

My Dad’s friends fought each other and bit each other’s fingers off and then laughed about it over whiskey and beer. I feared that insanity. When I was a little boy my father was a giant man. He tried his best to make a man of me and I believe was relieved when he realized that the one I’d become wasn’t in his image.

We all lived in a two bedroom, one bathroom, twenty by forty foot trailer with a kitchen, dining and living room.

We had a beautiful Zenith black and white console television with a built in Hi Fi stereo and that’s my first memory of the perfume of simmering vacuum tubes and Johnny Cash.  Marty Robbins.  Patsy Cline.

It was too warm in the summer and too chilly in the winter. We lived in this trailer with everything we needed at the very edge of a small town in the high desert.

We were rich as far as I could tell.

Drinks for my friends.

What if the absolute horror in Flint Michigan was an accidentally discovered vivisection that is part of some big plan?

What if other cities are being poisoned in similar as well as other ways to dumb us all down and get us to vote against our own interests? This evil isn’t isolated.  You know, fracking, methane leaks, dumping of toxic coal waste into our ground water, our mouths and internal organs.

Breathing it.

Bathing in it.

What if that explained why local governments, state legislatures and political contests on a national level have become so dominated by powers that have no history of supporting the will or the good of the people?

Since when did the EPA become a pariah?

What if, in conspiracy with dirty political fuckery, we’re actually being turned into a third world country by shaving our collective intelligence with deliberate poisoning?

To make us all dumb enough to vote against our interests and keep working like bastard rodents on a wheel.

What if this is the real reason there’s enough Americans dumb enough to support Trump and make him viable?

Fukushima isn’t even being discussed anymore while it remains an open, puss leaking sore. It makes the scab of Flint look like kindergarten.  Yeah, it was the result of a natural disaster but no one is talking about the radiation pouring into the Pacific Ocean that hundreds of millions of people share because nobody has any idea what to do about it and it just might be part of a bigger picture.

They don’t have an answer so they bury the question.

I’m not your average tin foil hat rube.  The whole chemtrail thing is bullshit if only for the obvious reason that there’s much more efficient and target rich ways to accomplish that kind of diabolical command and control.

What if the undocumented environmental disasters across this country aren’t just allowed to occur but are part of some fiendish plan to make us so stupid that we cheer lead and vote for motherfucking Donald Trump?

I had this whole thought in the shower the other morning and it made my ass pucker.

I smeared hair conditioner on my face and began to shave.

I got dressed and had some cranberry juice.

Nuked a bean and cheese burrito and smeared some salsa verde on it.

Put this laptop in my briefcase and headed to the elevator.

As I drove to work I ruminated on just how dumb these poor fuckers supporting Trump must be.  His message could not possibly be simpler.  The good white people of America are horribly oppressed by political correctness and religious persecution and should therefore be afraid of everything and everybody not like them.   So he’s going to fix all that and make the good white people of America the dominant race again and really, really great again. So great.  So fucking great.  Nevermind how he’ll do it but the good white people of America will be very, very happy again.  It’s going to be great.  So great that the good white people of America might just get sick of being so great again.

I imagined an America so great that I’ll feel really, really great about giving my spare change to the minorities unfortunate enough to be minorities.  I’ll have plenty of spare change again.  Or I might feel really good about shooting them and putting them out of their misery because I get to carry my gun anywhere and they won’t be able to afford one because they are losers. Because once again, as a white man, I’ll be afforded the opportunity to dispense judgement and justice like white men should be able to.  Again.  Like we’ve always been able to until now.

Great.

Again.

It’s gonna be so, so great.

We just need to hang on until the curiously orange dude with the impossible hair and no couth seals the deal by getting elected by an army of poisoned dipshits and manifests the fears of the rest of the world.

There has to be a reason we have become so fucking stupid.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

The notion of inevitability Hillary Clinton enjoyed has all but expired. The patina of feminism Clinton has assumed is deteriorating to the point of liability. Her broad but shallow support is crumbling. Her corporate ties and establishment history have become a point of contention with supporters and potential voters and she can’t seem to address any of it with anything other than tone deaf clumsiness.

She has become the parody of a democratic candidate for president.

Bernie Sanders has yet to attack her directly because he just doesn’t need to.  He has taken control of the debate.

With a discipline and consistency of message, he’s made the prevailing issue not about Clinton in particular,  but about the corrupt engines supplying horsepower to the political drive train and torque to the wheels of economic injustice system wide.

It’s a good thing that he’s not some iron jawed, graying at the temples, tailored suit.  It’s a good thing he’s a 74 year old son of Jewish immigrants with a thick as a brick Brooklyn accent that isn’t exactly the picture of sartorial splendor. We don’t need superheroes in capes and costumes.  We need ordinary men with the courage of conviction.

He is authentic.

His “artful smear” merely includes Hillary among the entire republican bench of goofecocks.  All he does is imply that despite being a democrat and a female, she is no different and he’s absolutely right.

He’s completely right when he says our biggest threat to national security is climate change and that North Korea makes ISIS look positively Fisher Price.

He’s absolutely right when he calls health care and education a right as opposed to a privilege and he’s blisteringly correct when he declares that as the richest first world country in the history of human kind, all it takes is the will of America to make it so.

He’s right about everything.

There hasn’t been a candidate like him in my lifetime.

Bernie Sanders is calling for a political revolution.  He’s talking about the opposite of what we do.  We elect and walk away.  Getting elected to any national level office in this country is analogous to getting a record deal in the 90’s.  Pun intended.  It was just the beginning.  97% of the artists lucky enough to get a recording contract were never heard from again.  I know, I made records back then and about five people have heard the best ones.

Once he’s elected, if we don’t engage, petition, write letters, march and generally make a shit load of noise, we will not just be disappointed, we will be embarrassed and demoralized.

Again.

We’ll end up with an elder statesman like Jimmy Carter who only served one term and subsequently shames us with his energy and morality by actually doing important and humane things at the age of 91. It will be way too late by then.  Jimmy put solar panels on the White House and that fucking idiot Reagan removed them.

Half of Reagan’s administration was indicted or convicted.

Somehow, Carter was a failure without a shot fired on his watch.

Fuck me.

And now Big Bad Bill is on the campaign trail, nose blind and spreading the same brand of shit sauce that lost Hillary the election the first time.  Newsflash Bill, the Sanders supporters that are vulgar and sexist are matched by Hillary supporters who are just as despicable and loathsome.  Trust me, your people are just as mean and just as ugly.  Old news Bill.  It’s been going on for months by both camps.  You’re killing me.  You Bill Clinton, are an official surrogate and a spouse.  Do you have an excuse other than naked desperation?

Is the plan for you and Chelsea to lie more so Hillary can lie less?

Hypocrite much?

The Clintons have lost me completely.

It’s starting to look like Hillary isn’t any threat at all.  And it’s starting to look like Donald Trump is.  The thing is this, there’s a corollary between Sanders and Trump supporters.  It makes sense.  The catalyst is shared.  The whole anti-establishment, anti-government thing.

The problem is Trump supporters are mean, selfish, bigoted and ignorant fuckheads.

He brags about a net worth of ten billion and he’s lying.

Sanders supporters are aware, engaged human beings who give a shit about other human beings that they will never even know.

His net worth is about three hundred thousand and he’s hiding nothing.

Authentic.

Vote bitches.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Too close to call as I contemplated bed with a smile on my face.

So I’ll just take this as a win because it wasn’t even supposed to be close mere months ago.

There’s that and his speech.

He followed Clinton on purpose.

He killed it.

He’s more toothsome these days.  And what beautiful horse teeth he has.

He was laughing.

I realize now I’m gonna have to join this team. I need to volunteer. Not just the eleven dollars I carry in my pocket on any given day, but my time.

California matters again.

He’s electable. I’m most afraid he’ll be a Carter in terms of perception. If that happens it will be because the people who elect him do only that.  Vote and then do the opposite of what he’s telling us.  Nothing at all.  Just sit back and expect miracles.  It’s not how revolutions work.

I read something the other day that posited Hillary was the legacy of Obama’s presidency and Bernie was the legacy of his candidacy.

I couldn’t agree more.

Health care and education as a right.  It’s our godamn money.  How do we expect to compete with all the countries who have been providing it for decades?  Seriously Hillary, how?  It’s not just about competing.  It’s about catching up.

So sometime in the last few days, she stuck her finger in the wind and is now stumping on universal health care. Just like the TPP, just like LGBT rights……..it goes on and on.  She’s an awfully transparent phony.  The more she talks, the less I like her.  Really, I’m starting to loath her.  I gave up feeling like she was trustworthy long ago.

She’s getting harder to watch.

Bernie though, he’s smiling now.  He’s laughing and even laughing at himself a little.  He seems to be having a good time more and more.  I worried that he was a little too, ‘get off my lawn!’.  His message is deadly serious and now that he’s being taken seriously, he’s losing a little of the cranky but wise uncle thing.

Meanwhile, Hillary gets more Stepford, stiffer, more desperate.  Shrill.  Cackling instead of laughing.  Nobody likes desperate.  Don’t be like Hillary. Nobody wants to be like Hillary.  She’s becoming the cunty, judgmental neighbor in the expensive but gaudy pantsuit.  She drives a late model yellow Cadillac.  Remember that cloying perfume from the eighties “Giorgio”?  I imagine she smells like that.

Okay, that last paragraph was sophomoric.  Mean spirited.  I’m guilty but earnest.

I’ve just engaged in the kind of immature crap that I go on and on about.  But really, Hillary Clinton has always been her own worst enemy.  She clearly wants to be president more than she wants to make a difference in the average American life.

I will tell you this, Hillary definitely did not win in Iowa last night and Bernie Sanders sure as fuck didn’t lose.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve just finished watching the latest republican presidential debate while participating on a liberal facebook thread where the back and forth was between Hillary and Bernie supporters.

I need a goddamn shower.

I am thoroughly disgusted by the hopeless stupidity of American voters.

I am more convinced than ever that we are never going to evolve as a society or as an electorate beyond this very minute.  It is hopeless.  The republican candidates are serial liars.  They are awful.  Just awful and shameless. Democratic voters are just as clueless as republican ones.  Republican candidates still court the pasty white evaporating evangelical vote.  Democratic voters still believe in hope as a euphemism for incremental change.

The republican candidates rarely debate actual issues.  Instead, they devote all their disingenuous bluster to fear. Fear of foreign terrorism when we are so successful at killing each other that a far more more legitimate concern is literally being shot by a fucking toddler.  Fear of an insurance law that is is protecting some 17 million Americans from death and bankruptcy.  Fear of a shrinking military when we outspend China by a ratio of ten to one.  When our military expenditure has in fact, not shrunk at all, but expanded under our fearless leader, Obama.  They have fomented fear of the poor and immigrants so successfully, that every knuckle dragging, mouth breathing teapublican is convinced they are one lottery ticket away from not having to pay taxes on their winnings.

If you want proof of republican insanity, look no further than the fact Sarah fucking Palin has been granted a third act by Donald fucking Trump.

Democratic voters are hardly any better.  They trade lies back and forth all day or resort to bickering over issues that just don’t matter.  Rarely is there a topic among them either salient or germane.  Most of them, despite which candidate they support,  are neither informed or attentive.  They actually debate pant suits versus hair, Bill’s philandering versus Bernie’s clumsy efforts at explaining human sexuality four decades ago.  When actual substantive issues emerge, potential democratic voters prove over and over without a doubt that they don’t know shit.

I’ve said it before, everyone seems to think this is one football or basketball team against another.  Some silly sports rivalry and that’s their intellectual investment in it.  It makes me want to puke.

I am despondent.

Awash in tsunami of dumb.

Assaulted, day in and day out by ignorance.

There is, as of now, only one man talking about the very real problems we face and his name is Bernie Sanders.  He will likely lose because we just don’t deserve him.  Because we just can’t be bothered to pay enough attention to realize that he is neither democrat or republican.  That he is genuinely, earnestly and sincerely for all of us.  No matter what color, no matter what political affiliation and no matter what socioeconomic class.

He is the only Don Quixote tipping at the windmills of capitalism.  The single most evil economic model humankind has ever suffered.  Unregulated capitalism will always implode.  History is relentless with this singular lesson. Capitalism is never as pure as conservatives dream.  Never. Unchecked, it erodes liberty, equality and opportunity. Institutions for public welfare atrophy and eventually fail.  At the very end, human dignity is beset by the virus of greed and hubris and there is no antibody available at such a late stage.

We are in the last throes of it as I write this.

Reality television, hate radio, cable news, social media all provide refuge for our individual insanity.

I can’t stand it.

The most important election of our lifetime and either no one is taking it seriously or there is a chronic lack of serious people.

I can’t decide if it would be better if if everyone voted or if no one does.

We may just be too goddamn dumb to save ourselves.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I am in awe.

We the people attack and bomb an launch against other people everyday and our excuse is as pathetic as it gets.

Because they are Muslims, they will kill us if we don’t kill them first.

That’s it.

That’s why.

We’ve been doing it for decades.

We make them fear our allmighty capability to rain death and destruction in their lands indiscriminately and then we impugn their culture and demonize their religion when they have the audacity to flee the mess we’ve made.  Our media works overtime to paint them as medieval savages when the volume of atrocity committed by our own Christianity against our own people makes all foreign terrorism look positively Fisher Price.

As of today, Americans have more to fear from a toddler with a gun than a foreign terrorist.

It’s insane.

Abortion clinics.

Movie theaters, malls, military bases and elementary schools.

Rampant, racially motivated violence by our own public servants against our own people.

Our protectors.

Dickheaded teabaggers burning down mosques and screeching that somehow, someway, Sharia law is some kind of existential threat.  They can’t be bothered to discern between Muslims and Sikhs for crying out loud.  Anyone in a turban must be plotting the the destruction of our once great country.

Oh my god ISIS.

It’s really starting to piss me the fuck off.

15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.  So we waged war in Iraq and screwed the whole thing up so clumsily and egregiously that that the entire region is exploding and a new world war is now somewhere between possible and likely.

I’m starting to think this can only end in fire.

Meanwhile, the most obtuse reaction possible is being championed by the republican front runner.  Millions of idiots are cheerleading bigotry.  The new normal is the excuse of nationalism for patriotism.

We just keep bombing the shit out of them but so far we haven’t committed cannon fodder to the sand again.  A minor but moral difference I guess.   The agenda of a military industrial complex in the throes of corrupting completely.

This is insane.

What makes us think that visiting death and destruction on these ordinary people between the rock and the hard place all day and all night is gonna keep them from blowing us up over here whenever they can?

It guarantees it.  It’s what their leaders want.  It’s what our leaders lust for.  Everyone but the people who will suffer the consequences just loves this shit.

Why is this so hard?

There are four or five million troops in the region that are more than capable of handling whatever the new iteration of terror is.

The redneck mouth breathers are jerking off to the fear porn in public.  Self justified and emboldened by a reckless media.  Septic with addiction to rage while they adore their own ignorance.  Confident and justified in arming themselves further and sporting their new hardware and camouflage at the local grocery store.

Hey it’s fucking awesome now we’re hanging out with Trump.

It’s disgusting.

We have to stop looking at this as a war between Christianity and Islam.  It’s a bullshit script.  It’s the most destructive path there is.  I can’t stand it.  It might be proof that we are idiots.  It has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with money.

We support Saudi Arabia with weapons, money and trade while they are world champion decapitators, ISIS and Iran don’t have shit on the Saudis when it comes to human rights abuses and vulgar misogyny.  But we never say a word about it.  The same with Israel.  Don’t get me started on Israel when it comes to human rights.

We suck too.

At the very least we are a nation of hypocrites, at worst we’re so confused we have no idea who the enemy is or why.

It’s insane.

Religion is a futility that convinces me we have not even come close to evolving.  But is not the fault of religion. Culpability belongs to the oligarchs and plutocrats who are so deliberate with religion that when they assail us with a fusillade of propaganda insidious enough, we are beside ourselves.

But it will still be our fault.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

This Saturday I parked my car at a meter on Ventura Boulevard for my monthly haircut. I fed the meter enough quarters for an hour and fifteen minutes. The same woman, now semi retired, has been cutting my hair for nearly thirty years. Sometimes we get to talking and I’m usually her last customer of the day, so I always hedge with a few extra coins to insure against a parking ticket because I’ll probably forget about it or procrastinate over until it triples.

I emerged coiffed, shampooed and replete with pleasant smelling hair elixirs wafting, contemplating lunch, only to witness my car on a flatbed on its way to an impound.  My tags were expired.  Months earlier, when registering my car at Triple A, I learned that my insurance had yet to appear in the DMV data base so they issued me a sort of temporary certificate of registration.  Proof that I was paid up.  It goes without saying it wasn’t good enough for the department of transportation dickwad who’d initiated the whole miscarriage of justice.  After a brief and heated exchange where I made sure he understood that I was indeed not in arrears with documents in hand, after I precipitated a definitive end to the conversation by congratulating him on his career and remarking that his parents must be proud, he rolled up his window and sped off and my car did the same on the flatbed truck.

It was really nobody’s fault but mine, but still, because it was a Saturday and the bureaucracy with authority to release my car was closed for the weekend, it ended up being a nearly $500 mistake.  Three days of storage fees.

Over expired tags that I had actually paid for.

Fuck me.

I’m lucky.

I could take the hit.

I’ve been in a position where it would have sunk me.

But I’m confident that most people with expired tags simply can’t afford the fees yet need their vehicles to get back and forth from their shitty jobs, pick up their kids, go to the grocery store and the doctor.

People need their cars in Southern California.  They don’t neglect due diligence when it comes to livelihood.  In Los Angeles, you need a car.

I thought about how this morally absent kind of fuckery results in people becoming homeless.

There are European countries that base fines and penalties for minor infractions on income.  If you’re income is modest, it’s like ten bucks, if you’re flush, it’s like $500.

Makes sense.

I read somewhere recently that American banks collected about $300 million in overdraft fees last year.

That’s bullshit.  These huge, outrageously profitable financial institutions preyed on the people who can least afford it.

That’s America goddamnit.

Love it or leave it.

We just hate the poor.

You’re a loser in America if you’re poor, even if you went broke because you got sick.

You’re a loser in America if you can’t afford a college education in America despite the fact that housing and tuition have risen by something like 800% in the last couple decades.

You’re a loser in America if some greedy asshole CEO outsourced your job to another country, not to save the company, but merely to further line his and board member pockets and you need unemployment compensation and food stamps because they fucked you over amounts of money they’ll never even be able to spend.

This is why our middle class is evaporating.

This is why we have record rates of poverty, homelessness and child hunger.

This is how unchecked, unregulated capitalism is a slow motion catastrophe.

This is why America is well on its way to becoming a third world country.

Be sure to check under your bed for Muslims and root for your favorite team.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

You already know that there’s a far more efficient and an eco friendly way to power all transportation other than fossil fuels.

You already know there’s a way to manufacture every kind of textile, plastic and construction material with renewable, non petroleum sourced commodities.

You already know there is an easily available way to power our homes and businesses with energy from the natural cycles and rhythms of the earth.

You already understand that war is waged exclusively because of greed, lust for power and  control and that is why we are where we are.

You already know these problems are solvable.

Ninety nine percent of world scientists agree.

Exxon Mobile and Shell have publicly acquiesced to the reality of climate change.

What exactly is the deal with oligarchs vehemently campaigning against any notion of climate change or the cause thereof?  Why exactly are they so determined for us to believe such a blatant lie?  I’m not paranoid for wondering at the impetus here.  I’m saying it’s pretty obvious.  They want less of us and more for themselves.  They would rather most of us kill each other or die somehow.

So it makes sense that captains of industry, CEOs and modern day kings like the Koch brothers spend millions if not billions to persuade us otherwise.

They have a plan.

You already know that ridiculously rich people are sociopaths.  They are more than willing to risk the destruction of our ecosystems, mass extinction of species and humans.  They are betting on a planet that is only inhabitable by a select few and with so much goddamn money, they can literally construct their own bio-domes or underground castles or whatever it takes to ride it out .  And of course, just enough of the rest of us for manual labor and other necessities.

The rest of the world’s population will starve or burn or drown or suffocate outside their fortresses.

Nothing else makes sense. They have run our shit for centuries, now this small but outrageously wealthy and powerful cabal is denying hard science.  Obvious truth.  There is only one reason for all this mendacity.

There’s too fucking many humans and they know it and perpetual war, famine, disease  etc. aren’t quite doing the trick.

Not quick enough.

They are terraforming the earth into a more manageable population for themselves by polluting the shit out of it and sucking it dry.  They are deliberately destroying the planet in order to exert complete dominance over what will be left for only them.

Whatever it takes.  Fear of the the innocent.  Religious zealotry.  Racial animus. Xenophobia.  Nationalism.  Media manipulation. Blind hatred and an addiction to self righteous rage.  Whatever it takes to distract us from exactly what they are up to.

Let them eat cake indeed.

When the fuck are we going to get this?

An asteroid or a comet may end life on earth as we know it someday but the 1% could do it long before that.

Drinks for my friends.

I don’t care what anyone says. The music of the seventies was easily as rich and inventive and innovative as the music of the sixties.  The eighties didn’t suck by any means.

I don’t practice much in the way of brand loyalty but there is no substitute for Best Foods/Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese Dressing or Jif Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter.

The problem with children is they eat a lot, they can’t drive, they have no money and they are always around.

It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. What matters is how good you looked.

The two most attractive things about a woman are confidence and intelligence. A foreign accent doesn’t hurt.

If there is such a thing as a soul, animals have them too.  Having said that, there isn’t much that puts me in the red faster than animal abuse.

If only people would take their politics as seriously as their sports, America would be a much better place.

A vacation is a drink in your hand,a nice view and the means to afford a really good meal.

If I could choose a superpower, it would probably be invisibility. I could get away with all kinds of shit.

I like living in Los Angeles but it doesn’t have shit on New York or even San Francisco.  It’s too bad that there isn’t a Waffle House in any of them.

Wearing sunglasses indoors or at night is an egregious character flaw. I won’t even fucking talk to you.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is taking yourself too seriously. I’m still trying to learn that.

If “to go” cups were bottom heavy instead of top heavy, cars wouldn’t need cup holders.

When I was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, in Carson City Nevada, there were three or four brothels just over the county line at the end of a cul-de -sac.  Me and my buddies would visit them on a Friday or Saturday night.  We didn’t have any money but they didn’t know that.  They would buzz us in, we’d sit on couches and the hookers would do a lineup and introduce themselves with ridiculous names.  We’d politely decline to make a decision and the madame would offer us a cocktail.  The implication was that we wanted to see what other women were available who were busy at the time of our arrival.  After a time, a few free drinks and some light conversation and flirtation with the working girls, the madame would figure out we didn’t have any money and ask us to leave.  It was all very amicable.  We would thank her and depart politely.  She would buzz us out. Then we would walk to the next one to ring the buzzer.

A booze mop should always consist of eggs, some iteration of greasy fried potatoes and sauce ranging from ketchup to Tobasco or Siracha.

The phrase “Happy Holidays” is just fine.  Get over yourself if you think otherwise asshole.

I like big boobs and can’t fathom why I should be impugned for it.

Never had a Bigwheel. That’s my problem. The television commercials were amazing. They kept coming out with new models.  There ended up being a super cool green one. You could go pretty fast on one of those machines and slide across some serious amount of driveway with the genius braking mechanisms. I was at least twelve and riding bicycles by then.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.

Also, tomatoes don’t taste like they used to.  They are fire engine red but over the last decade or two, supermarket tomatoes have become flavorless and have a texture like sand in a flavorless pudding.  I remember when my mother would slice one in the kitchen and I could smell it in the living room.  That only happens these days if I buy heirlooms from a farmer’s market in the fall.

I think I want to live in the forties.  No smart phones, no internet and flavorful produce.  Really great radio programs. And I could wear a fedora without looking like a hipster or a lesbian.

The internet is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.

Green Day was playing in the supermarket tonight.  I’m bothered by this because Green Day is apparently innocuous enough to enhance my grocery shopping experience.  I can’t stand the idea of it.  As I write this, seniors in senior living facilities are enjoying the music of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.

What if I end up with with varicose veins?

What then?

Drinks for my friends.

It’s not really baffling that the only republican candidates calling Trump out on his lowest common denominator obsequiousness to the knuckle dragging mouth breathers are the ones at the back of the pack looking for anything to gain traction.

What’s disturbing is that the media keeps serving at the pleasure of this malignant narcissist scion. They just broadcast his vicious brand of fear porn without reservation.

Nevermind the worthless American citizens who lap his shit up. Where the fuck is the responsibility or accountability of our journalists?  They sit with composure and deference while this anti-articulate dickhead vomits hate and vitriol all over our airwaves.

So far the the only “journalist” to even approach a come to Jesus moment with Trump is Bill O’Reilly.

Fuck me.

It’s malpractice.  They should all be sued.  I am disgusted. Bigoted liars like Trump used to fear or at least respect the media, now somehow the media fears Trump. Because they are cowards and he is a bully.  Chuck Todd actually said he was afraid to call Trump on his shit because  he wouldn’t come on his show anymore.  So fucking what?  Skewer him for being afraid.  That  puts asses in the seats at least as much as allowing the blowhard to pollute your bandwidth.  Zero integrity.  Zero respect for what used to be an esteemed institution.  What if Trump was actually afraid to show up because he knew he was going to be held to one goddamn standard or another?  Isn’t that the way it used to be?

Remember David Duke?

He flamed out because he was a piece of shit and the media weren’t such pussies.

The same actually goes for the rest of the champion liars posing as candidates.  Like Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz.    These two are vaudeville mendacious and debate moderators aren’t just complicit, they are participants for not shaming them on live television.  It was embarrassing to watch.  They got away with a metric ton of crap.

The same spineless talking heads that call every right wing, evangelical gun nut a radical or misunderstood or simply, the shooter.  Instead of what they are.  Terrorists.  Because they are always white.

So much for the “liberal media”.

And here’s the thing about Trump in particular, he’s barely spent a dime.  Our media is his Super PAC.  He is playing us like we’ve never been played before.  It’s not just FOX aiding and abetting here boys and girls.  It’s all of us.

Me too.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves……..”

Cowardice.

All the way around.

Drinks for my friends.

I can’t help it. I’ve done it before and I’m sure I’ll do it again. Like millions before and millions hence. So forgive me. Donald Trump is the biggest asshole to ever run for president of this country by a fucking mile. He is a stain on American dignity. An indictment of our ignorance and cruel stupidity.  This one piece of lamentable shit has managed to expose our most profound moral and ethical shortcomings so completely that I have never been more embarrassed to be an American.

If this man gets elected, we deserve it.  Because it will be our own consequence of laziness and apathy and complacency.  A low brow campaign of distraction and obfuscation.  Because we are rubes.  Suckers.  And it will mean that our only hope for salvation by wisdom is even more abject suffering.  It will be a sign that we require further self abuse to learn our lesson.

It will mean we asked for it.

And this is exactly why Brainspank officially endorses Bernard Sanders for president of the United States of America.  Because he is our last chance at embarrassing these idiots.  Our last chance at shutting them the fuck up.  I believe he is our last hope at extinguishing the rampant and chronic fuckery that has infected us as a country and a people.

Yup, alert the media.

This is big.

Because Hillary Clinton is basically an opportunist.

She is full of shit.

She is on record speaking glowingly of the TPP and Keystone XL before she stuck her finger in the wind.  Among the most disingenuous things she’s opined is that somehow as secretary of state, she had no knowledge of either one in any way so only now has she made up her mind.  She is lying.

She won’t commit to expanding medicare, medicaid and Social Security.  She won’t in fact commit to not weakening them.  She won’t commit to a $15 an hour minimum wage.  She has earned millions of dollars in speaking fees and collected millions more from the very institutions that flirted with the financial demise of the millions of people in this country who actually work for a living.  She is committed to allowing them another chance at the table.  I don’t care who you are or what you think you know, she absolutely has their backs.  And just recently, the last straw for me, she criticized Sanders for his support of the notion that we deserve single payer health coverage as a right, not a privilege.  It’s our money, it’s not goddamn  free and we deserve to have our money spent on our well being as opposed to our money spent on multiple ridiculous wars that enrich the rich even further.

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that even talks about this.  Our money.

I will admit this, I will vote for her if she gets the nomination, because she is as Sanders said, better on her worst day than any of these goofecock republicans.  Because it will then be about nominations to the supreme court.  Corporate democrats will punch you in the back of the head just as hard as republicans over sparing the filthy rich but they have a soft spot when it comes to social imperatives.

I won’t be capitulating.

If this woman gets elected, we deserve it.  Because it will be our own consequence of laziness and apathy and complacency. A low brow campaign of distraction and obfuscation.  Because we are rubes.  Suckers.  And it will mean that our only hope for salvation by wisdom is even more abject suffering.  It will be a sign that we require further self abuse to learn our lesson.

It will mean we asked for it.

We have one shot at this.

Go Bernie go.

Drinks for my friends.

I could not be more thoroughly disgusted that we live in a world where things like this occur.

I am all but hollowed out by the empty headed reactions to it.

France begins by stepping up their bombing in Syria with fierce and ignorant determination.  The Russian bear is doing the same. Here in the homeland, we’re all fired up jingoistic. Our rednecks are beside themselves with xenophobic lust even though the only word they recognize that starts with “x” is “xmas”.  Our neocons are masturbating in public. Some asshole on cable news just now said Saudi Arabia is cool because they have never attacked us.

Instead of admitting we made this mess, we insist on pursuing the same obtuse path, the same binary policies that led directly and predictably to this minor horror.

Yup,  A minor horror.

Spare the sentimentalism, it really is awful.

I get that.

We’re doing big picture here.

A minor horror in the scheme of things.  Merely awful compared to the horrific shit we pull over there. We kill these fuckers wholesale.  Everyday.  All the time. All day long. We don’t care. We see them as cockroaches. And they are sick and fucking tired of us wading in with overwhelming military force, obscene wealth and ginormous resources, only to make things exponentially worse.  We are the architects of their hell.

They have every reason to fucking hate us and we show no sign of giving up stepping on our dicks anytime soon.

I am loath to be the bearer of the obvious, but all these tragedies are of our own device.  Well, to be fair, it’s us and all the oligarchies, plutocracies and theocracies we call allies.  Our coalition.

Understand that our lethally modern military is about as useful as a machine gun against a nest of hornets.  We didn’t defeat The Soviet Union, they did.  We have way more money by virtue of raping our middle class, but the more we turn our machines of modern warfare on them, the more they will visit destruction on innocents.

They don’t have a goddamn army and it’s their biggest advantage.

They don’t hate us for our goddamn freedoms. They hate us because we refuse to stay the fuck out of their lives. They cheer us on as it blows up in our faces. We create the petri dish for recruitment and chaos.  Clumsy giants. Clueless oafs with aircraft carriers in a theater where it just doesn’t matter. At all. We are being lured into boots on the ground. We can make blast craters every hundred yards in the entire Middle East and they will laugh at us.  It’s not like that’s never happened  before.

We have but three choices if we genuinely want to prevail.  Stop utilizing fossile fuels tomorrow, turn all the sand into glass or leave.  I’m not kidding.  We’re not going to abandon the absurdly archaic and obsolete monopoly of petroleum anytime soon.  So yes,  kill every single last one of them with our aging nuclear arsenal or move the fuck on.

Again, don’t get all sentimental on me here, we’re doing big picture.

I’m in favor of the latter.

Here’s the rub, and this is my point, there is no surplus in either one of the only two viable solutions.  No need for exorbitant defense contractors, no nutrition for the military industrial complex, no reason to perpetuate the insanity and therefore no reason not to pursue the not so new normal of endless war.  Neither solution supplies reason to continue a closed loop enterprise that generates enormous revenue for the sick bastards who collect the filthy lucre and worship at the altar of death and violence.

So I’m in favor of walking away.

It is the most sensible, compassionate and courageous thing we could possibly do.  Help in whatever way we can.  Welcome as many refugees fleeing this nightmare we created as we have capacity for and otherwise abdicate the blackening of sand with blood to the five million troops that are already there.

Drinks for my friends.

All you jackasses understand is a goddamn brand. You don’t give a mad fuck what the brand stands for. You don’t care what the brand does. You’ll never take it upon yourself to seriously question the brand. Your brand cannot do any wrong no matter what. No matter what anyone who opposes your brand says or does, you reject it without ever considering it.

You are useless.

We have abandoned the civic responsibility of being informed.  Too much information is the new normal.  Clearly, people are stupefied.

Everybody needs a brand.

I understand now why we are where we are.

We have always been willing to work hard but are otherwise intellectually lazy.  It is more confusing than ever but we are so convinced that nose to the grindstone is paramount, we have forgotten to think  for ourselves.  Hard work is the key to the universe and failure to be rich means you’re a lazy bastard.  We actually believe all that.

Right and left.

Every single one of the republicans is an asshole with really shitty branding.

But they sell the shit out of anything.

They do it with fear.

It works.

Democrats are just as stupid as republicans.  Liberals are just as stupid as conservatives.  Progressives are just as stupid as the freedom caucus. Real issues are tertiary at best. It’s all about the cult of personality.  We really are all the same.  Hillary supporters don’t know shit about Bernie but think he’s a lazy commie ammosexual and Bernie supporters think Hillary is a corporate whore who abdicated her responsibility for blowjobs to an intern.  Reminds me of the other party in black hats.

It’s goddamn depressing.  I watch these assholes online, on social media, posting memes and links to polls and vines that are completely absent any effort whatsoever.  No adult discussion of issues, policy or legislation.  And these are liberals, progressives and democrats.  Madness.  It really is like they are rooting for their favorite wrestler.

See, democrats do it with hope.

Republicans have completely lost the will to do legitimate, germane topics.  They no longer even bother.  They surrendered to the culture wars and other idiocy. Democrats are close behind.  They screech, whine and explode over their candidate.  Hillary supporters get ugly and Bernie supporters get mean at the drop of a hat. Neither side offers anything salient, both sides just start shooting.

It has burst my bubble for sure.

I understand now why we are where we are.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I’m sitting here watching yet another clusterfuck republican debate.

They talk about taxes like that’s the problem. We are paying less in taxes, particularly corporations and the wealthy, than we have in five decades.  They ignore what we spend that tax revenue on.

They talk about government being too big but never mention that government spending, with the exception of the ridiculously bloated defense budget, has been going down for years.

They talk about immigration like it is is some sort of cancer on the economy and that deporting all the dirty wetbacks is the path to remission when our economy would collapse in a goddamn month if they could somehow manifest this fantasy.

They talk about too much regulation when the lack thereof is what’s literally killing us.

They talk about the need to spend even more on “defense”.  A trillion dollars more.  I shit you not.  When was the last time American soil actually needed defending? We don’t defend shit.  We start wars and we already spend a trillion dollars a year to do it.  Ten times more, a thousand percent more, than any other country.  It is insane.

They talk about terrorism being our most compelling threat.  The last time we were attacked was by Saudis but they’re one of our most important allies so we attacked a country that didn’t have shit to do with it and destabilized the whole region so thoroughly that a third world war is now a realistic possibility.

They talk about concentration of wealth and income inequality but only to blame it on Obama as opposed to republican obstructionism while they all pissed on a $15 minimum wage by lying about it’s effects.  They actually argued that wages were too high.  Seriously.  Fuck me.

The very things that are strangling us are the same things that earn the most enthusiastic and boisterous applause.  They all talk about cutting taxes, eliminating regulation and making more war when those three things exclusively are the reason for the the shit storm we are in.

They don’t talk about climate change, despite our very own pentagon identifying it as our most existential threat.

They don’t talk about homeless veterans, homeless in general, poverty etc.  No solutions, no substance, nothing salient or germane.

They don’t talk about how we can possibly hope to compete with countries that pay to educate their populace and provide access to health care with tax revenue instead of starving their middle class with absurd “defense” budgets.

They don’t talk about gun violence and racial inequality.

It’s fucking brain damage on parade.

Then, right in the goddamn middle of the whole masturbatory circus, there’s a fucking commercial for some bullshit, nationalistic propaganda movie about Benghazi. I swear I imagined millions of FOX viewers simultaneously commencing to diddle themselves with this guarantee of actualization for their addiction to rage.  Fear porn just like they crave it. I feel sorry for the mouth breathing viewers who mistook it for the actual money shot and spent the second half of the debate flagellating themselves back to inspiration.

Drinks for my friends.

The whole notion that Americans are somehow morally superior or righteous in some God given way is one of the fattest loads of crap ever served up.

We are not.

We do adore these handiest and laziest of myths.

We are not possibly any better than the millions our government has murdered in pursuit of imperialistic adventure.  How can we stomach ourselves after sending our youngest adults with the common denominator of least potential to commit these atrocities and then ignore them once they return from being murderous pawns in a rigged game of geopolitical brinkmanship?  We sloganeer relentlessly about supporting our troops.  It’s disgusting.  We say it with bumper stickers and memes and yellow ribbons but we never discuss the mental anguish our greed has visited upon these completely clueless innocent soldiers.  They come back missing arms and legs.  They come back missing scoops of their brains.  They come back missing a reason to live because they were ordered to participate in the absolute worst humans are capable of and we can’t wait to lionize them right before we completely blow them off.

We never have to look at them.

We never actually see them.

We cheer lead and wax all jingoistic with the requisite poison dose of nationalism that justifies might being right.

We’re so badass.

We rewrite history books and even textbooks to hide the blood on our hands.  Holocaust is a word that Americans know because of WWII, not because of our own systematic genocide of native Americans.  We ascribe our very worst behaviors to God’s will and then we pray.  That fucks with me.  Really hard.

Just last week our hope and change democratic president committed to putting boots on the ground in Syria.  A small number.  Sure.  But after he basically swore he wouldn’t. Five million goddamn soldiers in that region with fat fucking defense budgets and we somehow have to put our kids in another hopeless goddamn mess.

For what?

For profit.

For advantage.

For the bullshit that no one but the 1% cares about.

Again.

And half of us take these assholes seriously.  These candidates that preach about our moral and ethical responsibility in a world gone mad that they either made or hope to make or keep making.  How can we be so goddamn dumb?  It’s completely useless unless you’re stinking rich.  America makes war for profit.  Exclusively. How many did we kill in Vietnam,  Korea,  Libya, or  Iraq?  What’s it gonna take for us to learn this lesson?  Shit gets exponentially worse when profits soar.

These wars, this massive amount of death and destruction cannot possibly make the world anything other than worse.  It makes the filthy rich even richer and exposes the rest of us as rubes. We haven’t actually won a war since WWII.  We haven’t actually declared a war since then.  We haven’t actually fought a war since then that didn’t make everything ten times worse.

Seriously.

We have the most devastating military in the history of humankind and that’s our biggest goddamn problem.

We really have to stop being such patsies.

We need to get over ourselves.

ISIS and Al Qaeda are not a threat to you.  Not even close to the threat domestic right wing evangelical nut job gun nuts are.  America’s most compelling problems are all domestic. All of our worries and troubles are homegrown.

The very best evidence of this is the concerted effort to convince us otherwise.

If we could just shave twenty five percent from our national aspiration to visit misery and death on whomever stands in our way, we could spend it on taking care of most of our problems and people.  We would still be, by far, the most powerful military in the history of our species.  There would then be the extra added benefit of us being roughly one quarter less giant dickheads on the world stage.

Drinks for my friends.

We no longer give a shit about anybody we don’t actually know.  It’s how assholes are allowed to become even bigger assholes and believe all Mexicans and Blacks are lazy and nobody deserves food stamps.  It’s why rednecks think people even less fortunate than them are stealing from them instead of corporations, the military industrial complex and Wall Street. It’s how Ben Carson and Donald Trump are dominating the truncated attention span of the roughly one quarter of of our electorate that just can’t vote responsibly.

Think about it.  I’ve always called it the The One Quarter Paradigm.  When Nixon fled office ahead of impeachment, his approval rating was roughly 25%.  When Cheney and Bush escaped, somewhere around one quarter of our national pie was still rooting for the bastards.  The two most gigantic goofecocks of the century so far and brother Jeb is actually running on the keeping us safe thing.

One fourth of us are just enough of idiot to still get all wistful about them.

I don’t care who you are, that’s disgusting.

We must automatically saw 25% of all American voters off the top.

Too goddamn stupid to reach, much less help.

Relax.

Trump and Carson are less than the paradigm already.  They will fade.  Their replacements will perform the same.  The entire bench cannot be more than half of the paradigm.  Do the math. Republicans are going to lose big unless democrats learn lickety split to eat there own the way the GOP has been for a decade.  Margins could be pregnant enough to make all patrician efforts by the paradigm no different than pissing in the wind. Gerrymandering and disenfranchisement won’t matter.  The GOP is not a threat in the context of national elections. They have nobody with legs or lungs.  They will cheat like bastards and it won’t matter.

Me, I like Kasich. I bet he’s a lush.

So let’s stop wringing our hands and sweating through our frilly liberal blouses over them.

Two candidates.

Sanders and Clinton.

Unless we screw the pooch.

I believe one is far better than the other but that’s not important right now.  Bernie supporters that intend to write him in for the general election if they don’t get their way are idiots.  This isn’t a campaign for student body president.  Clinton supporters who screech about Bernie not being a democrat or claim that he’s never accomplished anything are just assholes.

If anyone tries to tell me there’s a sexist element here I’ll swing hard for the center of the face.

The Supreme Court above all else.

The republicans are doing an excellent job of making Americans look like dickheads around the world.  If liberals keep it up the world will finally figure out what dickheads all of us really are. They will turn against us and the weird places around the world who still covet our culture will just dry up.

Canada just showed us.

Again.

Grow the fuck up.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I’ve been pretty skeptical about the substantive differences between our two political parties for awhile.

Having said that, I still believe the democratic party is the lesser of two evils. So it it makes complete angry sense to me to avail myself of every opportunity to to mock, impugn, malign, insult and deride the spectacularly ridiculous and transparent antics of republicans. If for no other reason than to put democrats on notice that we smell bullshit and if we ever manage to wade our way through all of the republican fuckery foisted on us by the hour, democrats need to get that they are next.

It only makes sense to staunch blood from the most prolific wound first.

I fully expected Hillary to maintain calm and control during the Benghazi burlesque.  She did not disappoint.  She has balls.  There’s no other way to say it.  She was playing chess while the republicans on the committee dabbled at checkers.  She is whip smart and solid. She played them and I don’t doubt she actually set them up. With grace and aplomb.  She flat out outlasted them.  It was an awesome display of composure and command of facts, specifics and patience.

She crushed it.

I am enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders for reasons I think are pretty obvious.  But Hillary Clinton doesn’t suck.  I will vote for her in the general if that’s the lay of the land come next summer.  I’ll feel better about it because of her performance today.

If we’re ever actually able to make the entire republican bench cry in front of their mouth breathing, knuckle dragging base, it will be Hillary under the next microscope, not Bernie Sanders.

So here’s my point, Bernie Sanders’ influence on this election has been nothing but a net positive.  He absolutely has moved the entire conversation further left.  He alone is responsible for Hillary’s “coming out” on Keystone and more importantly, the TPP.  I do not trust her newfound positions on these things but it is measurable progress nonetheless.  She is too cozy with the puppet masters and that is a fact.

What it amounts to is whether we we move forward or keep from sliding back.  It’s either a political and social revolution or not losing too much more ground for at least four more years.  Maybe we’ll be more sick of this crap after that long but I doubt it.  The time is now.  It’s pretty plain that none of these jackasses on the republican bench stands a chance against pinball wizards like Hillary or Bernie.

Imagine Trump or Carson trying to pile on against either of them.

Light sabers versus cap pistols.

It makes me wish I was a comedian.

I can’t wait.

It’s ours to lose.

Drinks for my friends.

Once upon a time there was a band named Dumpster.

A Brian Huttenhower project. Famous A&R guy who signed Soundgarden and then succumbed to crack.

The lead singer was a dude named Robert English. He simmered. Brilliant blues eyes, big front teeth, one chipped in half and a bald head. Burly and coiled like he’d just been released from prison.  My sense was he would combust with violence like taking a breath.

I was afraid of him.

His girlfriend was all tall amber pale and vampy. She was a B level porn star and he was a heroin junkie. I feared him when he needed his demon but I liked him. Very smart and very funny. Tons of dark charisma. Nosferatu and Anton LeVey.

An anarchist.

A nihilist.

He showed up one morning to the recording session with an eyebrow missing. When I asked about it, he smirked, looked away and said he’d woken up with it  resting perfectly on his pillow. He said he decided to leave it there, just as he found it.  He described it with his hands.

He was lying.

There was maybe a radiation leak.

Dumpster was an angry band. Furious punk rock with excellent pop. Kelly, the drummer told me that Robert’s girlfriend had the ugliest pussy he’d ever seen. I didn’t understand until he popped in a VHS one day. It was an incredibly ugly pussy. The color was wrong. Like those badly lit menus overhead in cheap ethnic restaurants. Garish and glistening color with fucked up contrast.

We took a break everyday around six when she showed up with Robert’s rig in a small tin.  He didn’t want it around otherwise because he was serious about what we were doing.  He was limiting himself.  She nurtured with slender hands and a soft voice until he was high and then patronized with long fingers and dirty nails once he was.  She was was afraid of him but in love with what she wanted him to be.

She smelled of dryer sheets and feminine deodorant.

He told me a story about getting hit in the face with a full can of beer while walking along side a highway in South Carolina on a hot summer day. He said he figured he deserved it because he was just some fucking punk and that was how his front tooth was chipped.

He said it didn’t hurt much. He was lying to me about all of it.

I hated that.

He was a lion, just sitting and staring at me, tail flicking, sizing me up.

Until we did smack together, and he became a very dangerous cartoon.

We began to talk about it. I did my best.  It took a few days. He ended up being a pretty forthright guy. Heroin was pretty much the only drug I’d never experimented with. I was more than curious.  I’d seen people die from it. I was an idiot.

He was not about to be responsible . No way would would we be shooting it.

So we waited until we were finished recording one night and smoked it off aluminium foil, inhaling it with a glass tube.  Chasing the dragon. Bubbling brown sugar streaming down burning chrome as we followed it with a Bic flame from underneath.

He coached me the entire time.

Making sure I got a good hit and wasn’t wasting his dope.

It was pungent but sweet.

Curry and honey.

The high was ridiculous and overwhelming. Almost hot. Molasses in my head. I could not believe how comfortable I was.  An earthquake would have been a curiosity. We had beers and talked about what we were working on. We had another hit. He walked me through it again. We talked about his life. I didn’t understand how such an angry man could succumb to such flowery observations in such a syrupy calm and swampy Carolina drawl.

I wondered if he would be homicidal without it.

Some people need to be medicated.

The next night we finished and waited for the band to leave. We took a plate from the kitchen and I snorted grainy beige sugar into each nostril. His lines were longer and fatter than mine. I was glad of that. We took  a walk. I told the guard we’d be back on the way out the front gates.

Up La Brea and onto Sunset. We walked a while without saying much. The lights and neon were gorgeous and the exhaust and fast food fumes coated me so spectacularly pleasant. Enveloped in the city and it’s most lethal drug.

Glazed and nestled in the soft wholesome fibers of Hollywood autumn twilight. I asked about his anger and whether heroin might be what balanced him. He took his time and finally said he imagined there were better things out there but he didn’t know what they were.

He was telling me the truth as best he could.

He asked me if I was having fun and I told him I was floating in bliss. I said to him I can never do this again and he smiled for the first and last time I ever saw and said under his breath he hoped not.

I never did.

It still haunts me.

Don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in someway synchronized with all the things that we don’t understand about the universe. It’s what we do know that confounds us. All the while, what we don’t know blows us along.

Drinks for my friends.