Author Archive

It’s interesting isn’t it?

Two republicans have dropped out of the race because God told them to get in and then God told them to get out.

Right there on live television they lie.  And they are incredible, massively audacious, thundering lies. There has never been more effrontery.

These motherfuckers.

The entire GOP is completely bereft of anything at all.

Anything at all.

Then there’s us.

If you don’t support Hillary, you’re a he-man woman hater.  A chauvinist.  You  bristle at her pantsuits or criticize her for big bad Bill’s blow jobs.  She shamelessly milked that the other night. Waiting for the swinging dicks and the feminists to clash.  She’s a corporate trollop and a hawk.  She has mad skills.

It’s not untrue.

Or, because you dare to hope a consistent man of integrity like Bernie Sanders has a chance of finally breaking the forty year grip of neoconservative and neoliberal fuckery, well then you must just be looking to suck a fart out of a unicorns ass.  Because he’s a grumpy loser who’s never accomplished anything.  Because he’s a “socialist” and too radical.  He’s a populist.

It’s not untrue.

Like this is some sports rivalry.

The pregame for the democratic debate the other night might as well have been produced for the goddamn Superbowl. I was offended.  I was thoroughly nonplussed by Cheryl Crow singing the national anthem.   It’s what’s on TV so what the hell. It had tremendous production value.  I was expecting a prize fight and tons of blood.  I didn’t get that.

Social media is a petri dish for this nonsense.

There’s no way left to get the masses to understand that we’re all in the same boat.

Liberals are just as goddamn dumb as conservatives and the corollary is that democrats are no longer different in any meaningful way than republicans. Yes, the democratic debate was classier and far less callow.  But it’s over and not one thing has changed. There is no better evidence than assholes from both parties acting and responding in exactly the same way. Like it’s recess on the playground.  It not the democratic debate this that proves this, it’s the obsession with who won.

It occurs to me that the entire point of a political debate is not whether there is a winner or a loser, but rather how the game was played.  In other words, how good you looked.  The problem is with the immaturity of the electorate.

They can’t all be assholes.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

Let’s set an arbitrary figure.  Say $100 million. If you have 100 million dollars all to your lonesome and you are not a world class, king hell, reigning champion philanthropist, you suck. That’s more money than you can ever spend on yourself and like five generations to come.

Here’s what’s worse.  If you aren’t spectacularly generous,  you are saying that somehow you have been gifted with a provenance of wisdom and prudence so divine as to allow you to decide who eats and who starves. Who freezes and who gets a bed and a blanket.  Because you could make an actual difference and you don’t.  If all you bastards got together, you could literally save the world.

I’m talking about the 1% here.

The filthy.

Rich people can be disgusting. Most seem to hate the poor.  They actually believe poor people are somehow infected with failure.  Like it’s a disease.  They are are afraid of them.  Afraid of us.

I’ve always wondered, in terms of personal fortune, what really is the difference between $20 million and $200 million?  What the hell?  When do you stop caring how much you can accumulate?  How do the vulgar rich not understand there’s a finite amount of money and at a certain point  they are manufacturing poverty?

I’m paraphrasing a famous author when I say that socialism never caught on in America because most of the electorate view themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.  The pollution of ideology.  The absurdity of the carrot and the stick we’ve all been offered.

So we worship wealth.  And products that make us look wealthier than we are.  The rich do the very same thing only better.  We envy them.  We want to live in those cool living rooms we see in the movies. They do.  They live there.  Prosperity has become a euphemism for greed.

Cat puke would confuse them.  It would ruin their day.

I don’t get it.  But, I like money too.  Who doesn’t?  I was at the mall today and I shopped.  I didn’t buy much but I enjoyed my consumer experience.  I really love ostentatious indoor shopping malls.  I could spend hours in Williams Sonoma.  I could live there.  L’occitane is my favorite goddamn store.  I chose between Hot Dog On a Stick and a Mongolian barbecue.  I came home with a gorgeous cologne on my wrist.  I loves me some mall.  Retail therapy.  I love that shit.

I’d like to believe that if I won the lottery to the tune of say, five million, I’d buy an Audi R8, some new clothes, a nice watch and a modest house.  Then I’d enroll in some history and literature classes and find an animal shelter to volunteer at.  I’d get organized enough to eat mostly healthy food, exercise and spend way more time with friends and family.  I wouldn’t be available before noon no matter what.

I don’t understand why people who hoard houses full to bursting with useless possessions are regarded differently than people who hoard more money than they can ever possibly spend.  We are disgusted by the former but celebrate the latter.  Seems like the same disease to me.

Most filthy rich people in the world didn’t earn it.  They have no idea what it’s like to spend physical, intellectual or emotional capital day in and day out to barely get by.  Most of them inherited it from ancestors who made a career of screwing labor and they, the scions, make a career of the same.

Not a novel conclusion I know.

I’m not here to split the atom but i’d like to point out the obvious.

Understand.  The decisions we make every day are because of decisions they have already made.  They are running our shit.

It’s just weird how we revere these people.  With few exceptions, they contribute nothing to society.  Most of them are in fact, a cancer infecting the rest us one way or another.  They buy our representatives, they buy entire governments.  They pollute our air and water and food without fear of sanction or censure or punishment.  They invest in and make shit loads of money off of war.  Most of them don’t give a mad fuck about anyone but themselves.  They are sociopaths without the habit of serial murder.

Yet we have at least two presidential candidates running based solely on the credential that they are oily affluent.  One is leading in the polls and the other is gaining.

Their popularity is far more an indictment of us than it is of them.

Hang the rich.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

I don’t cry very often but when I do the tears start by coming out the sides of my eyes, run past my ears and my jaw, down my neck,  kinda like sweat.  It’s not until I’m really bawling that the front of my face gets soaked and my nose is running.

Once that happens, that’s when I know I’m fucked up.

My cat is dying.  She’s seventeen or eighteen years old.  Her kidneys are in an irreversible state of atrophy.

She’s old and all stove up.

Her coat is matted.  She doesn’t groom much these days.

I pet her and there are clumps.

I guess she can’t reach anymore.

Otherwise she’s still rabbit soft.

She’s a spectacularly patterned calico with huge eyes even for a cat.  Gold or green depending on kelvin temperature or her mood ring head.  Those big eyes sit a little deeper than they used too.  Despite very old bones, she walks the apartment with dignity.  Always regal but those eyes are a little confused of late.

She’s never been sweet or loving.

She’s always been cranky and particular.

I adore her.

Her name is Swirly and she’s gorgeous.

She weighs about nine pounds.

Down from twelve.

Like I said, she’s not sweet.

She can actually be a little cunty.

She happened upon me during my salad days so I’m not exactly sure how old she is.  I’ve been her dad forever. She came to the warehouse as a kitten and started visiting my office and sleeping in my chair when I was gone for the day so I became her dad.  I bought her food and scooped her box.  Took her to the vet.

When I got to work back in the day, I’d drop my Starbucks and backpack in my office and head out to the warehouse where she was always waiting to announce her self from various corners and elevations.

She would say my name.

I would go to her, say her name and rub her face and chin.

When I left that job I took her with me.

She’s lived with me in seven different places and in two states.  Over a thousand miles in my car.

Now I come home and she’s bathing in the sun coming through the sliding glass door.

I always stop to watch her breathe.

To make sure she’s breathing.

She doesn’t like the new low protein food for senior kitties in the beginning stages of renal failure.  She did at first. Now she won’t eat it.  She wants the fast food. Fancy Feast and Sheba.  She hoovers that shit and ignores the food that will prolong her life.  She doesn’t have many teeth left so I always get the kind with gravy. She’s not big on fish or seafood.

She gets dehydrated and bound up so she can’t poop.  We take her for an enema.  We have an aircraft carrier sized sectional that she owns about one quarter of.  A blue camping tarp half way between the east and west wings of it that we put the puppy pads on. She does her business there as exclusively as she can.  She lost interest in the litter box some time back.  We have a deal.  It helps me to monitor her progress.

She still likes to piss on whatever is on the bathroom floor.

The worst part is dosing her.  The irregularity regimen.  Holding her down, holding her head, prying her jaw open to squirt two different medicines down her throat from syringes.  She hates it and so do we.  It takes two of us.  I feel really bad when I miss or it spills out of her mouth because she can’t deal with it just then.

She gets a stay from the dosing for a day every time she bequeaths a turd with any heft.

Someday soon I’ll be holding her while she dies or after she’s dead.

One way or another it’s coming.

I’ve known her for a very long time and I’m watching the end of her life and she seems to know all about it.

Maybe the best and worst parts of people animal relationships is that we can’t actually explain things to each other.  We talk.  We communicate.  But we’re never sure how thorough we are being with each other.

Maybe that’s best.

Her end might be up to me.  It could be my decision.   I’m agnostic.  No “Rainbow Bridge” for me.  I hear they will come to your house now.  Home pet euthanasia. I’m pretty confused but I imagine that will be the most comfortable way for both of us.

She hangs a little closer these days.

These days she flops at my feet while I’m at the computer.  These days she doesn’t always look me straight in the eye and hiss when I pick her up to kiss her voluptuous head.  These days she seems to finally appreciate the comfort of love and affection while realizing it has nothing to do with her dignity.

We’re getting to know each other better.

She’s still beautiful and she talks more than she used to.

I’m her dad.

I’ll remember her sleeping.

Snoring.

This one is gonna hurt.

EPILOGUE:

She was just here, at my feet this very morning. The Swirl Swirl Girl Girl.  I followed her from water bowl to water bowl for an hour.  She would stand, dip her head to drink but never actually drink.  She asked for more food and she ate a little.  She smacked and licked at the gravy.  I couldn’t understand how she could manage that but not drink. She didn’t either.  She looked at me and asked for a solution.

I was pretty sure last night that today would be the day.  I got out of bed last night and came to the living room and out to the balcony, leaving the sliding door open in case she wanted one last time on my lap.  She did.  She purred her rare and subtle purr.

She peed at least twice through the night but she hadn’t pooped in almost four days.

A little after 9 am, I made an appointment to euthanize her for 1 pm.  I spent the time between watching her and realizing how uncomfortable she was.  She was restless and confused and indecisive. Her face had become a mess in the last week.  Her sunken eyes had started to run relentlessly so the sides of her nose were now bald of fur and raw from her attempts to groom.

As an agnostic I’m often confused at the energy and angst we are compelled to devote to existence and consciousness that is obviously finite and always terminal.  Why do we have emotions and love that can be so painful if there never has been any hope of it lasting?  I wonder at the point of it. Days like today reveal the absurdity of it all.

There’s no tragedy here, just aching sadness from loss.  No real regret, just a profound sense of bittersweet.

A hole where there was a whole.

I stroked her back and kissed her head as she died.  Afterward, as she lay dead on the shirt I wore just yesterday, on the cold stainless steel examination table, I took the opportunity to fondle her beautiful white paws.  She never let me do that when she was alive, always snatching them away.

However benevolent, she was neither sweet, nor affectionate.  It didn’t stop her from being dignified and absolutely fabulous.  I imagine I will miss her in some amount, for as long as I live.  She was lovely.  Eighteen years is a really long time.

It’s impossible to kiss your cat’s head too many times.

Rest in peace Swirly Girl.

Goddammit.

I miss you.

 

Drinks for my friends. 

 

I’m so over all this government is evil crap.

So I’m all over it.

Government is evil because we are losers.

Passing the buck and blaming the government has become an American institution. Reagan started this bullshit in earnest..  We the people are the problem.  We get lulled into complacency by the next big and shiny anything. From Pong to the latest  iphone.  Ridiculous gun racks and ludicrous sub-woofers.  Or goddamn religion. Meantime, the middle class is getting really hammered while the poor are nothing but screwed.  We know this to be true because even republicans are beginning to acknowledge it.  The high fructose generation is just mad for the cult of political personality and identity politics. Substance is always boring unless it bites you on the ass.  So we keep walking, blind eye on all the racial injustice and economic inequity. We reelect these greasy pricks over and over despite the overwhelming disgust and shame we feel.

These days the morning after sucks for everyone regardless of political affiliation.

It’s national cop out.  We keep failing at responsibility and accountability for just how fucked we are.

We are a nation of self loathers.

We have exactly the government we deserve.

We know this to be true because if everyone voted, we’d be much better off.  The percentage of voters who actually vote in this country is embarrassing.

Whoever those bastards are on TV, they aren’t us.  So instead of doing something about it, we throw a tantrum.  We don’t vote.  We disengage or get all self righteous and wallow in indignation.  The smarter ones say fuck it  and rob banks or run for office and join a bank.  Most of us who bother are just punching ourselves in the face by voting for whatever carnival barker is most successful at convincing us this new shit sandwich is really gonna be mouthwatering.

Or, they run around beseeching that voting is futile.  Despite the corporate sponsored concert of effort to disenfranchise every voter who has a legitimate axe to grind.

We are loathsome.

If I didn’t know better, I’d get me a tin foil hat and obsess over chemtrails.

Tell me what’s wrong with NASA. Going to the moon and all the attendant technology.  All that climate science and understanding of our world.  The EPA, other than being rendered so anemic and addled it can barely cross the road to file the legal equivalent of a fuck you against the Koch brothers.  The EPA used to be a contender. There’s no good reason government isn’t building and repairing bridges and roads.  The postal service is fine and costs us nothing but postage.  Social security is awesome and whatever is wrong with it is an easy fix.  

Tell me, just how the ACA is failing.  

We need Medicare and Medicaid.  

The biggest lie America believes is that we can’t afford these things.

We are the richest goddamn country in written history.

It’s stupid.

How do we govern without government?

Tell me. 

Frankly, the truth is we could put any one of these goofecock deadbeats on the republican bench in office and make them do anything we want.  We the people ended a war.  We did.  We the people rose and demanded the vote for women and blacks and all kinds of other things like reversing an amendment so we could get drunk in public again of all things.  This all happened long before we lapsed into lazy and disaffected and gave up.

You can’t just vote for a president and complain once he is elected or pout and hold your breath when she isn’t.

The price of this democratic republic is our attention and participation.

Voting is a right but it doesn’t end there.  In all reality, it’s where individual responsibility begins.

Ever notice the people who blame the government for everything are the ones counting on God to fix it all?

Drinks for my friends.

 

So I watched as much of it as I could stomach.

Almost the whole thing.

Actually, my DVR cut off the end of it and I found myself all little grateful.

Relieved.

I’d had enough.

Here’s what I learned:

The most important issue America faces today is the funding of Planned Parenthood.  All them goddamn job stealing Mexican rapists is second.  Third,  America is being bullied by every country from Mexico to China so we need to spend even more money to  somehow rebuild what is already the most powerful and well funded military the human race has ever seen.  A globally celebrated deal with Iran to prevent them from enriching material to build a nuclear weapon is a deliberate betrayal of Israel that will inevitably lead to the apocalypse comes in at number four.  Last but not least and a solid number five, is Donald Trump’s acuity for substance free ad hominem improvisation.

Also:

Carly Fiorina has poise, charisma, specifics and is completely full of shit.  She won the debate for the biggest lie about a fully formed fetus, heart beating, legs kicking, being kept alive so it’s brain could be harvested.  Unfuckingbelievable.  Jeb Bush is a weak chinned wuss that thinks Margaret Thatcher should be pictured on American currency.  Huckabee is a shameless theocratic zealot.  Ted Cruz is becoming so transparent he’ll soon disappear.  Chris Christie is the last dipshit in America who thinks marijuana is a gateway drug.  Donald Trump will solve EVERYTHING by getting along with EVERYONE even though he’s a belligerent asshole. George W. Bush kept us safe because 911 never happened despite the aftermath, which was a bonus.  Ronald  Reagan, notwithstanding selling weapons to Iran for six years and flooding our inner cities with crack as well as presiding over the most indicted, arrested and convicted administration in American history,  is virtually indistinguishable from Jesus by anyone running for president as a republican.

Rand Paul, despite being a hypocritical, plagiarizing, racist, was sane, sensible and compassionate on the issues of national drug policy and American aggression.  It was the only fresh air all evening.

It was exactly the festival of outrageous mendacity and deliberate fomentation of fear appropriate for the level of emotional intelligence that has become the common denominator for the republican party as a whole.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m not going to comment on this.

I’m not going to.

Fuck me.

I’ll keep it short.

This woman, this sociopathic hypocrite, just sucks. From what I understand, the bible she’s so conveniently and contemporaneously enchanted with, would have had her stoned to to death for transgressions committed against it long ago.

One thing I know for sure, she’s a loser and does not have the courage of her convictions.

I’m absolutely sure of it.

This is why I loathe her.

She’s just another self righteous fraud.

And that is why I can’t stand this vulgar burlesque of moral pageantry, this shameless politicization, prostration, hucksterism, pandering and cheap fucking shilling by Mike Huckabee and every other loser republican polling under five percent,  it’s just embarrassing.

I’m ashamed that our politics and attention have become so goddamn cheap as to afford this bullshit any spectacle whatsoever.

That bigotry and ignorant hatred is celebrated or merely even allowed to be displayed for our indignant despise, coast to coast in the national media, virtually wall to wall, just fills me with disgust.

Goddamn this is stupid and I intend every iteration of whatever pun you perceive there.

Count me among the idiots for even acknowledging it.

I’m guilty.

Fuck me.

Somebody help me to look away.

Please.

Kim Kardashian’s ass is more worthy.

Drinks for my friends.

Immigration is not a problem in America.

It is not an issue.

It never has been.

Ever.

It’s not a deficit in any way.

It’s a goddamn net positive for all of us.

It always has been.

What it is now, is what it always has been.

A deliberately organized, thoroughly pernicious distraction.

No immigrant has ever stolen a job from an American.

Teabilly fucks should be grateful for the brown folks because without them their colons would  be bound up like mummified sausages.  Their rectums would be like packed with concrete for not being able to afford roughage in their diet.  Brown people are the only reason these miscreants can afford to supplement their ramen, spaghettio and pancake diets with fiber in the form of leafy greens, vegetables and grains so they can take a decent crap in whatever they recognize as a toilet.

Build a wall.

Fuck me that’s stupid.

When was the last time a goddamn wall worked?

Lord of The Rings?

You wanna end it?  Go after the fat white business owners who exploit the slave labor.  They capitalize the profits and socialize the losses and  never miss an opportunity to propagate the xenophobic hatred.  Demonizing the poor brown folks and their wives and children is the only way to insure they get to abuse the help at restaurants, hotels and on cruises and still turn a profit.

Assholes.

We don’t need a northern border because they understand we’re fucking nuts and want no part of this.  Pretty soon they will need a wall.

Nevermind that Mexican immigration is at damn near net zero and the only reason anyone from south of our border ever wanted to come here is to flee the horrific conditions that American greed and lust created in their countries in the first place.

We complain they breed irresponsibly but never acknowledge that it’s because we forced religion down their necks with muskets hundreds of years ago to “civilize” them.

The tacit agreement is they can avail themselves of emergency rooms and a limited amount of other social services and our hamburgers and salads don’t cost fifty bucks a pop.

We absolutely enjoy this transaction whether we’re aware of it or not.

It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever observed about American culture save for the open air practice of slavery.

And here’s what flat out amazes me.  It’s the number one republican campaign issue.  Number fucking one.  Of all the issues facing us, like our survival as a species, perpetual war and America’s own very real potential for becoming a third world country, this is what the mouth breathers are screeching about.  Something like half of us are self righteously indignant enough about brown people to somehow single them out for costing us a few dollars a month for the services they provide at an insane bargain rate.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

Like any of them would risk voting or reporting a crime or trying to get food stamps or welfare.

So once again half of us are so consumed with worry about this “problem” of our own device, it’s become a single issue litmus test for every single republican candidate.

Stupid.

There is one racist prick jackmammering the rest of us with this message and instead of calling him on it, the republican bench struggles to say the stupidest shit they can think of hoping for a spotlight in his venue.  It’s like they all fell off a truck he was driving and can’t think of anything but to chase it.

Pathetic.

Drinks for my friends.

I want sauce with everything I eat.

From burritos to apples, all food is better with a sauce.

The sauce for cereal is whatever kind of milk and the sauce for salad is whatever kind of dressing.  The sauce for bagels is butter and or cream cheese etc.  The sauce for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is the jelly and so is the peanut butter.  It’s a sauce sandwich, stupid.

And how lovely is your very own formula of the wasabi and the soy when you’re dunking the albacore and the salmon?

Fuckin’ ponzu sauce rocks because scallions and sesame oil.

Sauce is one of life’s most obvious secrets.  The lubricant of existence.  Alchemy.  Sauce is proof of evolution and the superiority of our species. There are a plethora of synonyms for the concept of sauce, like condiment, side, gravy, baste, brine, juice, glaze, drippings, Miracle Whip……… realistically anything liquid that is orally consumable meant to accompany anything solid that is orally consumable is sauce and it’s an achievement right up there with our ability to split the atom and explore other planets.

Hardly as intrinsically rewarding though.

Here’s more proof.  Considerable science and technology has been brought to bear to preserve sauces and condiments indefinitely in little pillows or packets of foil and plastic.  I have a small drawer full just in case I need some kind of sauce in an emergency or as some kind of powerful afterthought.  I never worry about using them. Flavorful and safe until after the apocalypse.  An entire door of my refrigerator devoted to nothing but liquid flavor in various jars.

Cheese is an awesome food because of the relative ease in transforming it into a sauce.  Cheese sauce is among humankind’s highest achievements.  Proof of our right to dominion.  Animals have no concept of sauce.  Butter is awesome for the same reason. Combine butter and cheese and you have Alfredo or, a relatively cold fusion the way I see it.

I’ve lapsed to such profound and despicable indulgence that I have, on occasion, experienced the glee and shame of rubbing a deliciously tangy Hollandaise in my hair. I believed it had properties beyond my imagination based purely on the fact that it tasted divine. There’s nothing quite as simultaneously disturbing and invigorating as staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror, your own head festooned with the gore of a uniquely delicious sauce intended for a perfectly poached chicken egg.

I admit, booze is the sauce for joy and despair.

Okay so,  liquids, what about gases?

Wood smoke is a gas and it’s a goddamn bona fide sauce.

I’ll think of another example in a minute.

I argue that seasonings like salt and pepper for example, are sauce.  Oregano, dill, cayenne, coriander, lemon zest, cinnamon………see?

Solids.

So there we have it.

All three states of matter.

Just the other day I made a sauce that raised high the roof beams.  I started off with a deep sorta sauce pan with way too much really good olive oil on medium heat.  Half a garlic bulb, a whole large red onion and a whole shallot, all chopped coarse.  Added the onions first, the shallots second and the garlic last.  Cooked it until the onion is translucent  and before anything gets brown at all.  Add a couple generous glugs of a decent dry white and turn the burner way up so it can boil off for just a minute or so.

Then came the aggregate of my prep.  Eight medium vine ripened tomatoes, diced.  About a pint total of a couple varieties of chopped green, black and Kalamata olives along with big chunks of slippery roasted garlic.  Bold amounts of colorful ground peppercorns, lemon pepper and oregano in powder form.  The juice and zest of one whole lemon.

It was just like the Food Network I swear.

Then I exercised patience.

It needed to cook down for a spell.

An hour here and there with me tasting and doctoring.

A little smoked  sea salt once in a while as it reduced.

Got the farfalla boiling (24 oz.) and began grating and adding handfulls of parmesan, asiago and this hard, aged jack I found to the saucepan.  When executed correctly, the oily, chunky textured concoction behaves like a friendly emulsifier and it all evolves into a gooey, pizza flavored amalgam in no time.

Dumped the pasta in a mesh strainer and poured about half the sauce in the bottom of the giant pasta pot.  Poured the butterfly in and it clicked and smacked while it tumbled and then dumped the rest of the sauce on top and stirred it like a bastard with a giant black plastic spoon.

The sound was like a churning of wax teeth but the aroma was fabulous.

I left the three cheeses out with the grater.

Awesome sauce.

Drinks for my friends.

I’ve got a bit of a library. I read a lot of books. There’s always one in my briefcase. I try to put a book by the toilet I’ve already read and liked for any number of reasons so I can be reacquainted with whatever I thought was important about it.

A few days ago ago I put “Stupid White Men” by Michael Moore beside the throne and I’ve been struck by a few things.  He’s actually a good writer. He’s pretty funny and every thing he talks about from fifteen years ago is discouragingly worse today.  It’s spooky prescient.  No wonder he’s so disgusted these days.

Just today I read that Dick Cheney’s Haliburton is suing the very Iraq war veterans they poisoned. Somebody please explain to me how this real life Darth Vader fuck has not been carried from his lair and roasted on a spit jammed up his ass and out his mouth live on television.

I started this blog over seven years ago with one idea, most people aren’t stupid, they just don’t pay attention.  I’m not sure I own that anymore.

Here’s what happened.  Before Obama ever announced for ’08, he knew exactly what the transaction was.  In exchange for however much he could accomplish, he knew he’d be making a deal at the crossroads at some point. He’s done just that.  He hosts the evil while he does what he can. I believe that’s who he is now.  I’m pretty cynical so that’s how I see it.

Part of what happened to the inspired left is their naivete.  They never factored Satan into it.  I don’t actually believe in Satan but you know what I’m saying.  A lot of us on the left are kittens.  We find ourselves asking if drones and a bullshit trade deal are worth marriage equality and a far from perfect health care mandate.  If allowing big banks to consolidate even more power than before is a fair trade for for his populist rhetoric and a deficit cut in half. We wonder very hard.  And we weep.

The answer is maybe.

Two steps forward and one step back may be worth it merely because we’re  more fucked without it?

So we applaud and celebrate.

Therein lies our mistake.

We take what we are given and lament it all once the deal is done.

It really is our fault.

This is life in the fast lane.  This is America.  Everything is incremental except rage and lust for power and money.  Those things are exponential. Otherwise, it happens one step at a time.  Because most of us are fools we allow for it.  We are flawed.  We will not do the right thing this cycle.  We will not and we will sit around again and wonder what happened.

It will be obvious.

We will have elected a Clinton or a Bush.

We’ll take to the streets again in small numbers and demand change.

The world will marvel at our stupidity.

Again.

Any liberal who complains we didn’t have a choice this time or were faced again with the lesser of two evils is full of shit.

The entire republican bench is astoundingly hollow.

There really is no there, there.

There is nothing to lose.

They are all complete fuckups.

Donald Trump says what they all think and he’s scaring the shit out of them.  He’s leading the polls by double digits.  He’s not going to last but he’s swinging for the fences.  He is a singular and insular instrument of arrogance and stupidity laying bare the arrogance and stupidity of almost half of us.

As of today, Hillary Clinton refuses to stake a claim on the Keystone pipeline or the TPP.  These issues are settled among progressives.  She’s swinging the lumber of plutocrats and Wall Street.

I usually swing for the fences and I’ve enjoyed some pretty rewarding successes because of it.  I’ve also had my ass cheese grated in a painful and regrettable fashion for the same reason.  I always swing for the fences when there’s nothing to lose.  Always.  As of today there are seventeen republican contenders and three or four democratic ones.

We have nothing to lose by supporting the one democratic candidate that has never bullshitted us.

Not once.

Ever.

Bernie Sanders says what we all think and he’s scaring the shit out of them.  He has no problem speaking against the pipeline or the trade deal.  His whole platform is every single issue that was not discussed in the first republican debate.  He is now and always has talked about them.  He’s not lying about any of them and he’s not avoiding any them.

Bernie Sanders is swinging for the fences.

He has nothing to lose.

Drinks for my friends.

Well that was weird.

Surreal.

I cannot at this point give you any sort of detailed analysis.

But I guess I owe you something.

I’m still reeling.

Whatever, here we go.

What struck me first was the piety.  I’m an agnostic and view these assignations for Christ confusing and sort of pedantic.  Forgive me but I’ll never understand the American obsession with religion.  To me it’s an obvious Achilles Heel but we lap it up and we’re never better for it.  It just doesn’t matter.  Too many of us are under the the illusion that adherence to religious dogma is somehow a reliable indicator of moral or ethical resolve. Mike Huckabee for example, is an egregiously dirty prick.  His pronouncements about Obama leading Jews to ovens with the Iran negotiations and deploying our military to prevent gays from being married is unhinged and should disqualify him from ever being allowed in front of a television camera.

What a dick.

But they all did it.

It was fucking creepy.

I was looking for stupid and I found it.

So I can’t say I was disappointed.

I honestly think the moderators asked good hard questions.  I was impressed given how low I assumed the bar to be.  I was not surprised however by the outrageous mendacity that was then allowed to flood.  They all lied about “entitlements”, defense spending and the success of of the ACA.

Unchecked.

Unchallenged.

They were just allowed to piss all over everything.

Then they all sold us a fantasy about a shrinking military and some paranoid vulnerability.  This is where it gets magnificently bizarre. It’s a huge lie.  Our defense spending is WAY up under Obama. I don’t even know what to say about this biggest load of bullshit.  I hate this about the Obama presidency.  I hate it it and they just lie about it in the opposite direction consistently.  It’s just not true.

Obama blew the defense budget the fuck up.

They want more?

That’s some irony right there.

They all rather predictably merchandised fear.  They get this more than anything else.  They own that to be credible with the mouth breathing teabillies, they cannot skip striking fear in the hearts of their base.  Gotta check that box. Whenever offered the opportunity to seize the pornography of panic and danger, they grabbed that ring and acquitted themselves without shame or humility.

Carson was charming but innocuous.

I’d hire him to babysit puppies and proofread my children’s book.

Christie, Trump and Kasich had conviction but were shallow and callow.

These assholes did better than I expected.

Jeb was overcooked linguine.  No charisma, no footing and a quivering chin.  Weak sauce.  He can’t win shit. I absolutely loathed his answer to the question about the wars started by his dumbshit brother.  Cowardly and insulting.  He’s a twat and a loser.  Fuck you Jeb Bush you piece of shit. I sit here trying to think of more clever ways to say that.

I hate that motherfucker.

Really.

Scott Walker’s eyes are too close together and he needs to just shave his fucking head and get it over with.  Trump at least pulls off the comb over with ostentatious arrogance. Notice how his ridiculous hair is no longer an issue.

Demonizing Planned Parenthood and immigration was another big fear factor.

Yeah well, fuck me.

Nobody in this country aspires to kill babies or has any desire to change the tacit contract in place between white folks and brown folks that allows for access to emergency rooms and schools for their children so they don’t grow up to be felons and our salads don’t cost fifty goddamn dollars.

I watched this spectacle and got drunk.  I cannot believe we are at a place where somewhere near half of of us are taking any of these assholes seriously.  It’s goddamn depressing.  They pander and cavort and exploit without vanity or shame.  They demonize and lie about everything.  They spin and obfuscate away from anything and everything that matters to us on the ground.

These bastards are unapologetic and proud of it all.

They will say anything.

Not one single breath devoted to anything that actually matters.

They are all cowards, every single one of them.

This is our contest in America and it’s unbelievably embarrassing.

America is stupid.

Drinks for my friends.

 

I’ve decided that I want to live on the highest southern corner of the tallest building in my hometown for the duration of my retirement.

The Ormsby House Hotel and Casino.

Ten stories closer to heaven.

When I was a kid, soon after construction was completed, I made a point of getting myself to the top of it to drop superballs and marbles and whatever else I could fit in my pockets.  It didn’t take long for me to be disappointed with the results but it was the furthest I’d ever been above the planet.  Breathtaking.  It was then that the idea of a permanent residence began to form in my head.  It wasn’t nearly as grandiose a notion as it is now.

It’s been closed for fifteen years for a remodel, but I’m confident it will reopen soon.  Walls will have to be razed and so, walls will have to be raised to make room for what I imagine to be suitable and private square footage.  It will cost a lot of money.  It goes without saying I don’t yet have the means but I remain undeterred.

There will be numerous venues for both fine and casual dining and at least a couple bars and cocktail lounges.  The windowless and clockless environs will quiet the preoccupations I have for time of day and the world outside.  After that, the most picturesque and historic walk in the great and storied metropolis of Carson City begins just outside the casino doors and extends forth for hundreds of feet to the north up highway 395 or Main Street, as we Carsonites know it.

I’m sure the neon signage on the roof will seep it’s subtle red glow into my windows at night.

The bedroom wing will face east.

I won’t mind taking the same elevator as the regular folks when I begin my day seeking the magical casino omelette and coffee or end it returning from a night on the town.

And then there will be room service twenty four seven.

I adore room service.

Grilled cheese sandwiches.  Chicken objects, breaded and deep fried with ranch dressing and ketchup served in those clever little stainless steel shot glasses.  Always a sprig of parsley for fresh breath and digestion enhancement.

A sterling silver tureen overflowing with bills of various denominations will mainstay the entrance to my apartments for the assortment of porters and waitstaff.

Robes and towels will be part of the deal and it goes without saying there won’t be any reason to take them off premise.  My drinking glasses will be enveloped in paper like new every morning and my mini soaps will all be replaced as though elves had visited.

I’ll open my widows at sunset to allow the inevitable Nevada wind to visit its indefatigable will on my papers, linens and drapery while I survey the fine city of my youth.

Opulence.

There will be periodic visits from local dignitaries and heads of the great state of Nevada given that Carson City is the state capitol.  I will dispense advice, provide counsel and offer wisdom.

Channel 8 KOLO will be allowed in my suites to film and interview.  A small parlor will be named after Tad Dunbar.  A monochromatic Barcalounger will be designated the honorary Jack Joseph  Memorial Throne.  The legs of various wooden tables will be known as O’Callaghans.

I actually stayed in the Ormsby House for the very first time on the very last night before it closed some fifteen years ago.  It was a very cold experience lacking any sort of romance or refinement but my vision for its potential was not compromised.

Finally there’s a pill on television that will melt my fat off without me having to do one other goddamn thing besides taking this pill.  I will live forever because of this pill at the very top of the Ormsby House.

No matter what consequences climate change visit upon us, I’ll be riding a mountain bike through the halls, around the gaming tables and through the kitchens until the end of time.

Drinks for my friends.

 

America has a withering obsession with torsos exploding at the end of a trigger.  Gun nuts.  Ammosexuals.  Racists,  anticipating a race war or dreaming of one.  Actual gun fetishists. I know a few.  Some covet paranoia so much they fantasize about a future war with a tyrannical government that they would lose in about two days.

Jade Helm anybody?

That there’s some derp of biblical proportions.

The malaise of shoot ’em up and Make My Day is uniquely American.

That shit runs deep in this country.

I understand that there are a lot of gun owners in America who are reasonable and responsible but fuck me if we don’t have a problem.

A few statistics for you:  A gun in the house means that you or a member of your family is twenty two times more likely to die at the end of a gun.  Among all instances when guns are fired during a break in or home invasion only two percent of the time does it result in the intruder being shot.

Guess who gets shot the other ninety eight percent of the time.

There are well over a quarter billion guns in America.  Each year over half a million are stolen, probably from white suburban homes.  The vast majority end up in inner cities.  They end up in the hands of desperate people living in poverty.  Guns in that environment are protein in the recipe for the carnage we’re always getting spewed with.

Hello Chicago.

The problem is one of overwhelming proliferation.

We’re all but inured to the never ending gun violence staining our screens with volume and velocity.

The NRA compels us to accept it as an inevitability.  Nothing can be done.  It’s futile.  The instant access afforded by modern media renders us powerless to escape.  We’ve been connived into it’s just too big of a problem.

Might as well entertain it.

Whatever system in place now is broken and failed with concerted promiscuity.

Guntards are really fucking loud and they are driving.

Maybe we are just plain weary. We were relieved enough by the distraction of the confederate flag imbroglio in South Carolina to resign to its near eclipse of the cold violence of equal gravity.  We can only pick one outrage most days.

For most of us, incentive has left the building.

Banning would be dumb.

We keep shoe bombers off every plane for fuck’s sake.  The incentive to take off our shoes before we board a flight is made of a collective will of people not wanting to die by sudden incineration at thirty thousand feet despite how silly the notion.

I have an idea.

The modern interpretation of the second amendment is flat wrong.  Gun ownership by individual citizens is not a right, it’s a privilege.  A “well regulated militia” in no way guarantees the right of individual ownership.  So, just like driving a car is a privilege as opposed to a right, every gun would be registered with a mandate to carry a license and liability insurance on each firearm owned. Licensing would include a thorough and comprehensive background check in symbiotic collusion with a national database.  Yes, a national data base, like we have for terrorists.  In addition, proof of license, registration and insurance must be available for every purchase of any ammunition.

It’s equitable, sane and rational.  A solution that only excludes whack jobs, the chronically irresponsible and the developmentally challenged.

There is the extra added benefit of leveraging the rampant avarice of the insurance companies against the vulgar greed of weapons manufacturers and lobbyists.

Fight fire with fire, or in this case money with money.

Put the insurance lobby and the gun lobby in a cage and guess who wins.

Ladies and Gentlemen we have incentive.

It wouldn’t solve the problem overnight and probably never by one hundred percent, but over time I predict it would be goddamn effective.

If guns don’t kill people they don’t save people.

We need to regulate people with guns.

Drinks for my friends.

If you have medical insurance and you make less than $50k a year and you still get a bill from the emergency room you should just toss it. I had to visit the emergency room about eight months ago. I was passing a kidney stone and was really only there for the morphine. I wanted to land on a cloud instead of the bathroom floor if I crashed again.

I knew there was nothing else they could do for me.

They did some scans of my torso and gave me an $800 saline drip ( $1.75 wholesale).

Long story short, I got the morphine.

Now I drink lots of cranberry juice and lemon in my water.

So far so good.

I don’t care about that bill. If I ever make any money again I will. If I can’t pay you and I’m not even sure why I owe you, I could not give less of a shit.  The hospital can sue me.  It will still be my go to emergency room if I ever have to go through that again.  It’s really close by.

I live in Los Angeles. If you make less than $50k a year here you should qualify for food stamps. I want a handicapped placard for my rear view on account of my ingrown toenails and sciatica.

I don’t qualify for shit.

It’s not like ever I tried.

I’m your typical liberal.

Lazy and shiftless and just looking for a free ride.

I don’t have a goddamn thing, not on paper at least.

I used to.

A good job, a house, cars.

I didn’t lose my job or my stuff because of the recession. But afterwards it took me a couple years to find something that paid at least a living wage. I had to sell a lot of my stuff.  I had to live with my parents. It’s been a struggle ever since. I’m not complaining. I’m a hell of a lot luckier than millions of other people. I’m a white male with a resume in the best country in the world.

I doubt I’ll ever be able to retire.

We live in amazing times.  We work harder, longer and more efficiently than any other country.  We are afforded less vacation time and sick leave than any other country.  Education and healthcare cost about a ten times more than they used to.  Seriously, a thousand percent more.  Way more than any other country.  I don’t make any more than back then and neither do you.  We can no longer afford either.

Something like half of us are living check to check.

That’s insane.

It’s not sustainable.

This is why we’re fucking nuts.

White people need to stop voting republican and scare this shit out of democrats by overwhelming them.  We simply don’t have time for a third party, it’s too late for that.  White people need to understand that we are no longer the shit in America or be complicit in becoming a third world country.

Acting like it matters in the scheme of things that an immigrant mother gets $12k a year in government subsidies for her seven children is moronic. Standing in front of all the modern horrors we can casually survey everyday and thinking this is worthy of anyone’s attention is moronic. We live in a country that blows people just like her to fucking bits all over the world every day.

Find something meaningful to give a self righteous shit about.

White people can still save us.  But only if we stop worrying about black men running amok and Mexicans raping our women.  Only if we actually realize this isn’t any longer about the color of our skin or the content of our character.

This is not about takers vs. makers.

This is about a concentration of wealth.  Income redistribution but not like on the TV.  The wealthiest one percent have always gotten that way with a leg up and by shitting down the backs of thousands but now they are getting away with too goddamn much.  Power is their crack. They drool and careen behind closed doors, drunk with avaricious obliquity.  These fuckers are out of control.  They hate us.  They’re no longer bothered by what anyone else thinks.  It’s a harbinger.  An omen.

Us white folks used to be somewhat excluded from the military industrial complex, the financial industrial complex and the energy industrial complex leveraging the political industrial complex.  The beginning of the the end of that was Vietnam.  These days it’s rolling over all of us with impunity and without regard to complexion.  These days being fucked is an equal opportunity liability.  Rich people no longer despise the poor and minorities nearly as much as they see the middle class as an inconvenience.  An obstacle not to be gotten over or around, but eliminated.

They disenfranchise voters, craft and pay for the passage of profitable legislation, implement policy and ultimately buy our elected representatives and the very elections in which they run.

It’s a goddamn disaster and they don’t give a mad fuck what color we are.

The quicker we understand that we are no different than anyone else and never have been, the quicker we can get on with what needs to happen next.  We need to get over all this bullshit they would have us spend the rest of our lives in hand wringing self righteous despair of.  They have at least half of us pining and whining to take our country back from the other half by jerking at the strings of a sense of entitlement that is now archaic and obsolete.

Take our country back from what?

From who?

Nobody is coming for your guns, gay people don’t lust after your brats, black men just want a decent job and Latinos wouldn’t mind finally being recognized for how unbelievably fucking hard they work. We don’t all want man caves and nurseries and lawns and cement ponds and fancy eatin’ tables.

We aren’t all the same and we need to stop being distracted by that.

The big secret to equality and justice is one of economics. Racism is a symptom.  Greed is the disease. Class warfare has always been the hallmark of an aspiring plutocracy.

You gotta hand it to them, they swindle us with our own egos.   Rob us blind with fear and gyp us out of our dignity.  White people are kinda new to this.  We really need to catch up.  White people today are indisputable proof that the cancer of absolute power has metastasized absolutely.  We aren’t as bad off as other races yet but it won’t be long.

Yes, we need to take our country back.

From the people who actually took it.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

Every time, they say this election is the most important of our lifetime and I’m sure it’s been true of each one.

This one looms and it’s definitely true.

If democrats lose the presidency, we’ll all end up in FEMA camps.

A saw a list a few days ago of top donors for Bernie and Hillary.

Hillary is all banks and Wall Street law firms.

Bernie is all unions.

I’ve said it before, Bernie Sanders is the best presidential candidate of my lifetime.  He’s not perfect I know and I have real reservations.  I honestly don’t give a mad fuck about his foreign policy experience because I realize that the only existential threat to the American way is greed.  ISIS and Iran ain’t got shit on corporate American avarice.  My country tis of thee  isn’t broke at all.  I’m getting tired of pointing this out.  There is plenty of money.  We spend it on the wrong things and give it to the wrong people.

We the people are broke though.  This time it really is the economy stupid.  Inequality is always leveraged by the distribution of capital.  That’s why we have culture wars. There are actual social democracies where earnest students pay little to nothing to study and healthcare is a right.  And they aren’t out of their goddamn minds all the time.

What is working for Bernie now is what will work for him as president.  He stumps and big ass happy crowds show up.  President Sanders will have to continue all anachronistic like FDR and adopt the bully pulpit as policy.  As a tactic.  Without losing stride,  he keeps talking to the people in public all the time.  He has to make the people make him do things and he can only do that if he keeps doing exactly what he’s doing now.

I understand how archaic it is.

He’s a populist, that’s what they do.

Whatever the telegenic euphemism  is. Town Hall.  Webinar.  Cable news.  Keep stumping.  This is where accountability begins with the elected and ends with the electorate.  Bernie Sanders is doing this now.  It’s pretty goddamn cool.

Apoplexy if a republican wins.  Just look at them.  It may or may not get too much worse under plutocrat owned Hillary.  Or we can roll the bones for Bernie, who never squanders an opportunity in front of an audience to say say exactly what he’s saying.

Door number one is Donald Trump or Jeb Bush according to today’s forecast. Door number two is Hillary who gave a big 45 minute speech on the economy the other day that was 43 minutes of generic, pine scented air freshener.  Low calorie pablum almost indistinguishable from Scott Walker’s announcement that same day. Door number three is Bernie Sanders who hasn’t been fucking kidding for over half a century.

We are in a shit storm here and Bernie Sanders is the only one talking only about the biblical proportions of it.  He is the only one talking about what continues to cause it. He actually talks about what happens if we don’t do anything about it.  He is the only one talking about what absolutely must be done about it.

Whether or not Bernie Sanders is electable, whether or not he can prevail over whatever bozo the republicans foist is ultimately up to us.

The fulcrum of the sale rarely rests on reason but almost always reclines on romance.

Drinks for my friends.

I am watching the Donald Trump and I am in awe.  I have never heard a man say so much stupid with so much conviction.  So willing to suck his own dick in front of everyone.  He is as absurdly pompous as he presents.  Forcing every  interview into an agenda of toxic racism to riot the willing.

He pisses in the republican pool by  pissing on and pissing off brown people and he’s the most popular bigot at the club.

Awesome.

It’s an early grand finale.  He’s gonna walk away and it will be boring.  I’m sad about it already but I love that the only reason he got in was for the money and of course the auto erotic asphyxiation angle and now it’s actually costing him money and strangling him.

The great unwashed adore him for exactly the same reasons I do.

He’s amazing.

So this sucks.  There is no substitute for the Donald. Who among them can comfortably circus his volume of ego the way he does?  There is no other capable of this noxious dumbfuckery.  It’s a shallow bench without him. No candle power or charisma.

I don’t believe he ever had any intention of becoming president.  He’s probably as amazed as the rest of us that he’s polling in first place in the first place.  All this means is he’s looking to bail even quicker than originally intended.  It’s costing him actual money, his brand is genuinely soiled and he’s getting over on the mouth breathers far better than he anticipated.  There’s a lot more of them than he thought.  He’s understandably afraid of them.  Scary shit for someone so full of himself.

It’s all a crying shame because as the absolute worst person to ever run for president, Donald Trump  is the best environmental disaster to ever contaminate the teabilly ecosystem.  He really is Fukishima for the conservative base.   His public masturbation has a political half life of well over fifty years.  Every month he stays is another reactor melting down and killing potential voters for at least a half century.

Bullies are cowards and he’s going to pull a fade.

The last interesting thing about him will be how much pride he leaves on the floor.

Dammit.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

It’s rich.

I’ll grant you that.

The holy indignation.

It is intrinsically rewarding.

They say the supreme court made a law.  Nope.  They say removing the confederate flag from government houses is a violation of the first amendment.  Nope. They say it’s injection of racism into a historical context of proud heritage.  Complete crap.

The irony, it burns.

I’m a little disappointed though.

The sound of their heads exploding is not quite what I imagined.

I figured it would be louder.

But it’s like grapes imploding.

Sort of gassy.

I was hoping for some fire and brimstone moral turpitude kinda shit.  Maybe some kind of widespread stigmata outbreak or a gang of vampire exorcists descending on unsuspecting heathens with fire hoses gushing holy water.  The crackle of burning flesh and it’s lingering perfume.

But no.

More of the same narcissistic intellectually lazy binary crap about the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the ridiculous pride of an entire region of this country that lost a war a hundred and fifty years ago for the best reason I can possibly imagine.  That stupid goddamn flag represents nothing more than the enslavement, subjugation, oppression, rape and murder of an entire people.

If you’re troubled by conundrums like how is preventing the confederate flag over state houses any different than forcing bakeries to make and sell cakes to gay and lesbian couples for their weddings,  stop reading my shit now and stab yourself in the eye with a fork.  If you’re a redneck teabilly male experiencing any pleasure at all listening to Fuckface von Clownstick rhapsodize bigoted about Mexicans, stop reading my shit now and vigorously scrub your taint with a brick of pumice until you weep out loud.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The whole republican field is pathetic.

Mittens is back in I hear.

An equal and opposite reaction.

What we are seeing is act three of our first black presidency.

Act one was denial.

Act two was a more vociferous denial.

They have lost their shame and are feeling fresh.  They shrugged off that brief period when it wasn’t cool to be racist.  None of the republican contenders are even trying.  Not one of them can get out front and call Donald Trump a prick bastard for his racist rants.  There is no decency in Smallville.  They just can’t risk calling Trump a racist ass clown.

Act three.

It’s not worth it.

There are no heroes on this republican bench.

None.

Every single one is the worst possible example of what they say they stand for.

Work with me here because this makes it easy.  You’ve got this woman who has been around forever and has serious gravity and experience.  Sure, she’s compromised but she is regal and serene.  So adept she probably meets with Satan once or twice a week.  And then we have Bernie Sanders.  Bernie knows the devil but so far has not danced with him.  He has not danced with him.  He is not perfect but we can see him.  There is no mystery.  He is consistent.

On the other hand, you have a barn door wide open.  Zealots crashing out with the worst of intentions. All of them phony salesmen of halcyon days that never actually happened. They sell Norman Rockwell but you’ll end up with Ralph Steadman or even worse, Nagel.  They just want you to believe them.  Everyone of them will guarantee you an afterlife whether they believe in it or not.  Before  that, they swear you will prosper financially.  They’re not kidding about that. Just vote for them one more time.

Just one more time.

They all believe in you.

Just one more chance.

It is the fourth of July.  I live in the San Fernando Valley.  I cleaned the shit out of my kitchen.  I stood on my balcony last night and listened to the fireworks exploding all over and tried to imagine it as the same sound all the other people hear in all the other countries where we wage war everyday.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

Then there was Joyce.

I never knew her last name or even the spelling of her first.

I don’t think she actually had an official title.

We called her Joycee.

She could neither read nor write.

As a runner, she could make or break you.

If she wasn’t on your side, you were fucked.

She actually carried things on her head all the time in a bright dress.

Joycee was a Jamaican woman of almost indeterminate age and an accent with the viscosity of syrup.   It took me a long week to even begin to understand her.  Medium height with a pronounced pot belly and a deep chuckle.

Despite her latent power she was almost entirely benevolent yet still a powerful ally.

My first day in the magic castle I misunderstood her so completely that I walked straight into the only public women’s bathroom and there stood Sheri Lazerus.  She was adjusting her stretch pants, approaching the mirror and looked at me like I was a serial rapist on fire.

“Wrong door honey”.

My face was hot.  Fuck me I was embarrassed.

I would clean that bathroom for years.

I was off to a brilliant start.

What I understand now is Joycee was directing me to the runners closet next door.

What Joycee did, if she had your back, is cover your ass and keep you from looking stupid.  She could do everything three times as fast and way better.  If you didn’t cross her, if you respected her, she was capable of delivering you into good favor.  She worked hard.  A sweet and kind woman.  We became friends once she decided I wasn’t a fool.  It took some time because I was a fool.  I loaned her a few bucks here and there and never asked for it back.  When her sentence started with “Grant me a favor” in that humid dialect, I knew she was about to hit me up for something.  She sold me shitty Mexican pot now and then.  Occasionally she sent me home with food.  Good food.  I sometimes drove her home in my shitbox VW Bug to an awful and dangerous neighborhood instead of her taking the bus.

She was always happy.  She was almost always smiling.  It was a sad day if she wasn’t.

She ran the grill out behind the studios on Friday afternoons.

She cooked like a mom.

Just about everyone respected, trusted and appreciated her.

We were rarely at odds.  She hated it when I brushed my teeth in the runner’s closet sink.  The same place we washed the dishes for all five studios every night and the fruit for every control room each morning.  She reserved her most furious anger for when the night shift runners would get drunk and high and throw all the dishes away instead of washing them but that’s a story for another chapter.

My favorite memory of Joycee is from one early morning when I was still on the day shift.  It had been one of those nights where all the rooms went down late and the entire complex was in chaos.  I walked in and just about nothing had been done.  The night runners cheesed it.  It was ugly.  The second studio on the right after the lethal door is Stuidio A.  I was late and and probably hungover and  Joycee is already there.  We start picking up trash and collecting dishes.  I go for a cart and come back.  We were loading it up,  filling trash bags back and forth when she makes a happy noise.  I look at her and she is beaming.  In one hand is an ashtray and in the other a big fat Jeff Porcaro kind of roach.

I put on a Toni Childs CD and we fire it up.   All of the sudden it’s an easy Sunday morning on the bridge of a starship.  Beyond the console and a wall of angled glass, is the basketball gymnasium live room lit by a sun that began by banging through the only window in the entire place and down a dark hallway to just then, politely invade the east loading bay doors of Studio A. Everything is fresh and glowing.  Time passes.  We are sharing the record, laughing, singing and dancing a little as we lounge.

I love that record to this day.

Time passes and we’re back on our feet and getting it done because urgency has replaced joy.

The rest of the morning she is beside me and apart from me but we are of the same mind.  Toni Childs in our heads, doing whatever we have to do to make it all acceptable before everyone else sees it.

Saving ourselves.

One day years later, Joycee retired.  We had a big party with presents and food and it was the first and only time I ever saw her cry.  As far as I know she went back to Jamaica to open a restaurant.

It’s the last anyone ever heard of her that I know.

I can still see her and hear her in my head.

I miss her a lot.

Drinks for my friends.

There is still plenty of injustice in the world, but today was a happy day.

I am pleased.

There exists a lingering conservative legacy on the highest court in our land.  Like many, I considered the supreme court deigning to hear the issue of gay marriage to be ominous.

Turns out I was wrong.

I am a rare kind of satisfied.

I am excited.

This is big.

The whiplash paced acknowledgement of LGBT dignity and the eschewing of the confederate flag as a symbol of anything but hate and oppression is soul caressing.  It fortifies my sensibilities. The religious right in this country has been bitch slapped hard and the message is unambiguous.  You people can longer enjoy being unapologetic dicks with impunity. The rest of us are on to you.  You’re on notice.  Your bullshit has an expiration date now.  The provenance of passing judgement and bullying from an altar of righteous indignation has been revoked.

Just like that, you are on your way to the margins.

My pleasure is guilty.  For hundreds of years you have been insulated from the verdict of equitable objectivity.  I can’t help but rejoice in your confusion and new found sting of shame.  The Lucifer of your peculiar fantasy is you.

It’s about goddamned time.

Today we were visited by justice and its always attendant compassion.

We deserve to celebrate that and to revel in it.

Take the weekend.  Get drunk and make toasts.

The union is indeed a little more perfect.

Careful not be lulled, however.

Beware the sentimental euphoria of complacency.

It is far from over.

Gird your sensitivity and generosity and brace yourself for what Monday will surely bring.

Until then, own that love and kindness prevailed in a big way today.  Keep it close to your heart.  Remember it when the shit storm once again darkens your day. Reach for it the next time some asshole opens fire on the TV.  Be ready to beat it back all over again.

Drinks for my friends.

I had to step back and think about it for a minute.

Because this time it was perfect.

A hate crime.

Terrorism.

Some product of deplorable southern genetic fuckery succumbs to calculated indoctrination, walks into an iconic black church and sits through a service for like an hour with the unsuspecting he intends to murder.  He quietly allows his rage to detonate and blows holes in people he doesn’t know at all but hates with the incandescence of racial animus.  He believes the full throttle afterburner of lies forced down his neck at the optimum time for his aptitude to gulp them.

He was about fourteen years old when Barack Obama was first elected president of the United States of America.  Since then he’s been given specific purpose to fear and hate black people and allowed to blame all his own failures and shortcomings on people whose only difference is the color of their skin.

Not just one shit stain lost his mind,  half the goddamn country has.

The second it begins, the right wing religious assholes don’t even break stride in their relentless campaign of obfuscation to render culpable the first black president.  It’s all his fault.  How dare he get elected twice. They stop at nothing.  Shame and hypocrisy are mere divots in a smooth green field to them.  Such routine violence is ascribed to trends of acceptance and equality for everyone from gay and transgendered to immigrants and black Americans.

It’s an attack on Christians and of course it is racism to point out the impetus was exclusively racist.

It’s everyone’s fault but theirs.

They relentlessly spin it away from anything to do with bigotry and the sick fetish for guns in our culture.  They just can’t abide a lingering look at this latest horror.  Any prolonged bearing of witness to the very worst of our kind slithering from under rocks and out of caves to visit misery. Any scrutiny of the those among us emboldened by the craven fantasy of a  president on the verge of sending troops to confiscate anything resembling a firearm from every American household.

It’s all about that fetish.  They don’t give a mad fuck about protecting their families.  They aren’t actually worried about the grid failing and battling their neighbors for sustenance.  That’s all bullshit.  The second amendment is nothing but a goddamn slogan to them.  They only fear the potential emasculation writ large for them by the NRA of losing their guns to the nigger in chief.

I loath the NRA. Because without it we would have at least some amount less of these tragedies. Because Wayne LaPierre could not give less of a shit that without him there would be less of them.  Because the NRA is organized crime.  Because they masquerade as a group of innocuous defenders of the second amendment when they are actually a cabal of greasy lobbyists who agitate the hardest case dumbasses in this country into thinking they need some sort of arsenal to prepare for the coming race war.  Because they paint it as holy and even some kind of civic duty.

I really hate them.  Because they have somehow managed to be on the lips of every callow redneck confederate flag waving asshole from Florida to Arizona. Because they are able to get otherwise reasonably sane people to buy into this crap.  They have so successfully plumbed the paranoia of the contemporary American male, they are able to exploit millions of them with hubris but without reservation.

Because they effortlessly paint every new atrocity as one side or another didn’t have enough fucking firepower.  If there were just more guns, everything would be just fine.  What we need is more guns.  Every injustice can be resolved with some obtuse Dirty Harry doctrine.  If only everyone had a goddamn gun, the good guys would win every time.

Because the more they foment fear and prejudice, the NRA and every other pig at the trough rakes in a shitload more money.

I hate the NRA because they will not allow us to even try things.  We need to try things for fuck’s sake.  We need actual universal, comprehensive background checks and a data base for people who would purchase a gun, a dozen guns or more than a thousand rounds.  Whatever.  People who have felonies, mental disorders, or even a propensity for railing against other “groups”.  A list of people with a history of violence or meaningful conversations with the disembodied.

We have such a list for anyone who aspires to ride on a commercial airplane. No one in this country has ever been killed by a shoe bomb but we all have take our shoes off before we can get on one.

What about liability insurance?  Maybe everyone who buys a lethal weapon should have an insurance policy that will pay out the nose if the bastard accidentally or intentionally ends a life with it for any reason other than self preservation.  The notorious avarice of insurance companies could be the antidote for the infamous greed of gun merchants.

But we can’t even have that conversation.

The president is an asshole for confronting the ubiquity of guns in our country instead of just letting folks grieve.  Somehow, he is the one politicizing it because he points out an ostentatiously aberrant problem with no equal anywhere else in the civilized world.  He is chastised and pilloried by the media, our elected representatives and half the electorate for daring to point out the obvious carcinogen.

Somehow, by being nothing but forthright and germane, he’s too soon and too much for pointing out this crazy fucker would have only been marginallysuccessful at the sporadic hematoma if he was limited to plastic spoons.

I am done with you idiots that would suggest we talk about anything other than how we can realistically mitigate this problem.  Regulation.  Common sense.  There is no substitute.  There is no longer any excuse for eschewing responsibility.  Fuck you if you want to whine about the looming potential of a home invasion because violent crime is at a historic low.  Yeah yeah, criminals will always have guns.  If you don’t live among criminals then piss up a rope.  If you’re that worried about it, lock your doors and windows, get a home security system and keep a Louisville slugger by your bed.  If you’re not crazy you can even have a gun.  Seriously, despite the odds that you’ll die by it or kill your spouse being exponentially higher.

No shit, if any of this happens to you it’s unlikely you’ll be wearing your holster.

Open carry is absurd.  I don’t automatically assume you’re hung like a gnat if you own a gun but I’m confident you resemble a Ken Doll sans underwear if you think it’s normal to strap your AR15 on before you go grocery shopping or out for ice cream.   If you find yourself in the middle of some stick up, run or get on the floor like the bastard says because if you’re packing you’ll probably be the first to taste your own blood.  Stop fantasizing about being a hero.  Life isn’t a comic book and you’re not in an action movie.

So relax, and shut the fuck up, you can have your goddamn guns as long as you’re not a goofecock nutter planning to shoot up the local Starbuck’s and willing to prove it by submitting to an objective process.  Nobody wants to take your precious guns away as long as you are sane and willing to prove it.

There’s no way that’s too much to ask.

And South Carolina, take down that stupid fucking flag.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

There should be some sort of meter.

A scientific instrument.

To measure it.

As soon as they say anything like “Obama’s Kenyan socialist/communist policies are sinking this once proud Christian nation”, I just have to walk away.

Because, well.

I used to argue.

I used to get angry.

I’m not necessarily some huge fan of our president but I don’t hate him and my problems with him are really only because I’m paying attention.

I’ve finally figured out that no matter how much I humiliate them in my eyes they are never humiliated in theirs.  This gives me pause because what if I’m that stupid and don’t know it too?  There’s a conundrum I’ve grappled with.  I’m grateful to have worked it out and you’ll be pleased to know that I’m not that stupid.

I’m pretty sure.

Because if I look hard enough I can find the asshole in any libertarian.  It’s pretty easy to find the asshole in most republicans and it’s a regular walk in the park with just about every Christian I’ve met lately.  I know how tired it sounds but I’m completely serious when I say it really is the old fashioned magnifying glass of logic and truth.  I swear it works.  Christians will say the exact same thing and then challenge you to disprove the existence of their adult version of Santa out of a thousand other versions for the exact same reason the other religions do.  Most republicans are arrogant and hypocritical so there’s your Christianity connection right there.  And most libertarians, although there are quite a few atheists, are really just particularly narcissistic, selfish republicans.

One thing is for sure.   Sooner or later, any one of the above will utter some version of “Obama’s Kenyan socialist/communist policies are sinking this once proud Christian nation”.

So you see what I mean now.

It’s just so cheap and intellectually lazy.  Fifty year old cliches that still pack a punch for the elderly, fanatical and racists old and new.

That racist thing, with all the other brackish deception, just gets to be too much for me.  It’s too too toxic.  Too wrong.  Too bullshit.  No reason on top of no reason with all that conviction and absolute certainty.  Before I know it, I’m actually arguing about dinosaurs cavorting with children and Obama’s fucking birth certificate.

A couple of these people have fooled me lately while on my way to believing they were good people.  This is where I need an instrument.  A device.  A tricorder or some damn thing.  They actually fooled me with the Christian shit. They get all pious on you and assure you they don’t judge.  Before I knew it I was having conversations with them about music and food and sometimes even politics.

Next they say some thing or another and my neck hair starts looking for a breakfast broadcast.  As soon as they can’t defend the socialist/communism thing, they move to insisting the unbelievable amount of racist vitriol howitzered at Obama never happened.

They’re not convinced he’s a citizen.

Then they tell me all those young black men were thugs.

That’s the dirty bomb.

It’s true I’ve got a stake in it but that shouldn’t matter.  I tilt on my axis and my parasites are spilled into the ether because of the gravitational disruption around my equator.  All my markets crash.   Somewhere in there I want get drunk and beat somebody up and puke in the sink.

It’s like they’re terrorists.  If you go on the offensive at all they get ever more self righteous and obstreperous.  They actually tell you about what the look on your face will be when God comes.  They share made up anecdotes about stereotypical minorities.   They bond among themselves. They WILL lie to you.  They flaunt it with all the pompous audacity of a child convinced that the cookie is bigger by breaking it in to pieces.

I just can’t do that any more.

So I’ve decided that if I am that stupid, I don’t want to know.  I want to be like them and have the courage of my convictions no matter what.  If I am that tragically vain, I won’t be able to bear it.  If I have anything in common with them, there it is.

I’ve decided that I have a finite amount of time and I need to allot that time more wisely.

I need to be among my people.

Drinks for my friends.

 

So word on the street is the Donald isn’t kidding this time.

He’s about to throw his hat and maybe his ridiculous hair into the ring.

I can’t wait.

Donald Trump will perform the equivalent of racking a 12 gauge at thirty thousand feet and blowing a hole in the fuselage of the commercial airliner the rest of the GOP bench is flying on and so vacuum all the integrity and credibility out of the pressurized cabin.

They will all panic and clamor for oxygen masks but half of them will perish by asphyxiation anyway.

It gonna be awesome.

He won’t be the stupidest and probably not the most radical to ever run for president but he will be intrinsically the douchiest.

The deal with the Donald is that he is utterly contemptible.  He may not be the stupidest but he is an idiot.  I say this for many reasons but chief among them is the fact that he’s a wealthy white racist.  His whole barely concealed dog whistle birther campaign waged from the sidelines for the last six years obviates any seriousness he would assume as his what?  Birth right?

I actually watched a season of his television show about a decade ago.  I’d just bought a new house and didn’t have internet access.  It occurred to me to be the most insipid, self aggrandizing spectacle I’d ever witnessed.  It was the first and last time I ever devoted any of my attention to “reality television”.

It completely sucked because he was an asshole blowhard.

My father is very funny and a consummate judge of character.  When he sees the Donald on television he calls him “suckerface”.

Despite the fact that I don’t think a single candidate from the GOP bench is worth a shit, Donald Trump is going to drag it through a sewer.  It’s sad.  Maybe the comedy looms way larger than any potential tragedy here.

Not really.

Trump just may be the harbinger of a final nadir in American politics.  Polls show he lands solidly in the middle of the field and that is troubling enough.  Donald trump is a uniquely American cartoon.  A real live face on the side of a bus. What the rest of the world pictures when they imagine the ringleader of the ugliest American carnival.

No experience.  No bona fides.

An uninterrupted history of pious avarice and narcissism.

So the most obvious move for him is to finally run for president of America.

If you’re anywhere north of thirty five years old, the idea of a clown like Donald Trump running for president should give you pause.  Some of you might panic and indeed you should.  It’s a neon billboard announcing our total abandon of vanity and self respect as a nation.  It indicates to the rest of the world that we have resigned ourselves to the idea that this campaign will be the punchline for the end of our dignity as a country.

Donald Trump entering the race for the GOP nomination is the last straw.  I hope he actually follows through.  I think we need to own how spectacularly ridiculous we have become.

It will be cathartic.

It will be a relief.

Goddamn we suck.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

She lived just a few blocks east. Just down the road. She had questionable teeth but she was always in a good mood.  She was attractive. Fun.  I wasn’t used to my affections being paid any attention.  The first independent woman I ever met.

I was twelve.

I ended up at her place one day. There was a boarded up window at the front of the trailer and some huge vented machine on the roof sounding like it was drilling everything apart. It was quiet inside though, and dark.  Red sheets instead of curtains. The school bus driver’s son was there on the couch with a buxom red freckled girl named Belinda.  Turquoise eye shadow.  His name was actually Johnny. Skinny and hollow eyed. He was greasy and stank like a man in his tank top and bell bottoms.  Trying to get Belinda to make out with him.

The dead of summer.

The rare humid day in the high desert with a dark sky and the smell of rain whenever the breeze stirred. I remember a mere dozen days like it because of their peculiar jaundice and because they barely ever happened.

Her name was Donna Stevens. She seemed okay with me being there. It was morning because children were eating toast and cereal. There was chaos and confusion. Just a few streets down from where I lived the world was entirely different. They didn’t have a yard at all. It was all dirt and the discarded.  Cardboard and crates and mechanical parts. Identical plastic step stools to the front and back doors. Little kids running around yelling at pretending. People having nothing to do with anything walking through to the next street.

Donna’s older brother was Daryl Stevens. Friendly enough. I’d met him before on the bus. They were from Detroit. He wore a tight thermal shirt and a silver chain with tooth swinging from it. On his left fist he wore a giant steel ring that made me think of a piston. Muscular and quiet. He brooded and smiled. He rubbed his hands together a lot like it was cold. Like it was Detroit. I had no reason to be afraid of him but I was. He was coiled and you could see the mean in the way his jaw rippled.

We decided on the high school that day. A picnic. We had a bag of chips and a big bottle of soda. I’d never been there before but I watched it go by everyday from the bus. I don’t remember getting there that day. Three or four miles on the way into town on our bikes.

We broke into the cafeteria first. They had piled gym mats between the lunch tables for the off season. We fell on the mats from atop everything available. Inside a huge modern structure. There were murals and bridges. We broke into the auto shop next. It smelled familiar. We had contempt for the people who would be there during any other season somehow.

We vandalized.

We celebrated with barbecue chips and orange soda.

Outside it was darker, hotter and heavier.

There was a huge field in front with a track around it.

There was this guy named Shawn Hudson. A pole vaulter. He and his dad were working out that day. We were bouncing around on his landing mat in the middle of the field. They showed up fast from wherever they’d been. I don’t remember if this guy was olympic material at the time but if you lived in Carson City you knew his name. All sinew and formidable.  An angry nervous horse.

We were punks and they were up to serious business. I figured they were pretty much right about that after what we’d been up to. They got mean pretty fast though. His dad threatened us and taunted his son to fight, to kick our asses. He was hysterical. Adamant. Indignant. Resolute. Justified.  We started to panic but Daryl Stevens watched it come. Like he’d been waiting all day for this exact thing and was now able to relax because the time for it had finally arrived.

He was still. Waiting for it to start. Nothing about his outside changed at all.

It was the first time I ever witnessed two males not afraid of each other.

It scared the fuck out of me.

Because I understood that the pole vaulter was afraid. He didn’t want this but it was impossible for him. His dad. Right there. Punks on his equipment. His father beside himself.

I was afraid for him.

Once it started it kept speeding up.

Before I knew it they were swinging on each other.

The pole vaulter from Carson City had run into a saw he couldn’t have imagined when he woke up that day. Daryl hit him maybe three times before anything else was possible. The sound of those blows caused me a languid trauma that I just can’t describe any better. I could have pissed myself but I didn’t. My brain temporarily suspended sensation. My mouth tasted like a nine volt battery.

I heard the pole vaulter bounce off the mat and saw blood where his right eye should have been. It gushed down his face and he screamed he would kill us all. He was half blind and in shock. Stumbling and tilting.  His cheek caved in. The worst thing I’d ever seen. Before anything else, the father understood his son needed to be in a hospital.

The rain was hot and plump but only sparse enough to stir the desert dust like talc on the way home.

I could smell the brush and the animals.

It finally rained hard that night.

It flooded the next day.

I don’t remember what happened to any them.

Drinks for my friends.

Really?

You people floor me.

There is no way all of you can be this goddamn dumb.

How do you deserve the benefit of my doubt?

Rick Perry.

Could not remember one of three government agencies he would absolutely abolish if he were elected during a live televised presidential debate.  Despite that, he’s running again.  This time he’s wearing glasses.  Under federal indictment.

Unfuckingbelievable.

George W. Bush.

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

Same deal.  You know the rest.

What happened?

I mean, how is it that you can possibly even entertain the notion that the US military under executive order will be invading you anytime soon?

What exactly the hell is wrong with you people?

You publish textbooks for the rest of the country that actually endorse completely ridiculous shit like Moses is the father of our democracy and our founding fathers gave more than a passing fuck about Christianity.  You actually fight to include creationism in your science.  You would have modern homo sapiens cavorting with goddamn dinosaurs.

You’re just as crazy for the death penalty as you are for saving fetuses.  You lead the nation in executions. It doesn’t matter whether those pregnancies are the result of violent rape by a jaundiced and crusty alcoholic uncle.  You actually lead the nation in laws that defy and ignore women’s rights over their own bodies.  While you’re simultaneously adamant those fetuses never benefit from a single social program or basic infrastructure.

That’s the kind of stupid that just can’t be fixed.

The only people, the only place Ted Cruz is taken seriously is your state.  He said proposed federal relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy was a pork project that would serve only to further expand our national debt.  As opposed to helping people that just got their asses handed to them by God I guess.  Then he completely lacks shame in begging for federal funds for the climate disaster visiting his state now.  A disaster that just about every scientific mind agrees is the result of the human impact on climate change that Ted Cruz vehemently denies.

Every thing is is bigger in Texas, even the mendacious hypocrisy of your elected representatives.

Ted Cruz is a lying, hypocritical prick, he’s your junior senator and he is absent self awareness so profoundly that he is running for president too.

Your senior Senator is John Cornyn.  Oh boy.  Apparently you people hate the poor bastard.  Because he endeavored to end the economic maelstrom his party created by holding his nose and voting for the bailout.  He said it was a “necessity” and he was right.  Because he voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25, which still wouldn’t allow for a homeless man to support himself even with all the dumpster diving a man, woman or child could avail themselves of.  And he voted to raise the debt ceiling, to pay the bills he and his colleagues had already written checks for.  Gosh, no wonder you hate him.

You gave us Louie Gohmert and Pete Sessions, thank you very much.

Your entire state seems to revere stupidity and celebrate ignorance.

Highest percentage of minimum wage jobs in the country.

Lowest rate of high school graduates.

Top three in teenage pregnancy.

Dead last in voter turnout.

Greater reliance on federal aid than any other state.

You want to secede but don’t understand you’d never make it on your own without the filthy federal government lucre you so despise.

I have a number of friends from Texas and they all say you are the stupidest motherfuckers they have ever met and that is why they left.

The dirty South indeed.

The epicenter of American stupidity and the cartoon that inspires the loathing of America by every other civilized country.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what you are all so proud of.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

I see everything.

I am omnipotent and omnipresent.

I am the arbiter.

I decide.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

Trust me.

Believe me or burn in hell.

I am a republican candidate for president of the United States of America.

A Christian nation.

Women are not the the equal of any man.  They do not deserve the same pay.  Their role is one of subservience.  Colored people are not the equal of white people. They can be shot with impunity.  Their role is one of subservience.  Poor people are poor for a reason.  Their role is one of subservience.  All of them are lazy, less intelligent and lack ambition.  All of them.  Women, colored and poor.

I hold these truths to be self evident.

The constitution is explicit.

It matters not whether their station in life is ordained by God or by circumstance.  Inferiority is not my cause or my problem. I am only here to lead the righteous to prosperity and the undeserving to prison or poverty.

All you need to know is that if you are poor but worthy, I promise you will get yours and you won’t have to pay taxes on it.  If you already have it, I will make sure you keep it and it will grow.  Good Christians should never have to pay taxes, everyone else should.  In the meantime, understand you are deserving of all that God grants you.  Feel free to practice judgement and dominion over all who are not righteous in the eyes of God.  You are just and divine in your endeavor to exercise your will and the rule of law over every godless liberal, socialist, feminist, homosexual, environmentalist, addicted, disadvantaged, minority, atheist, agnostic heathen that threatens your privilege and right as the chosen.

I am the agent of God.  My name is Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum, Ben Carson or Ted Cruz.

I could be Scott Walker or Jeb Bush because whatever it takes.

I come in many forms and faces but my purpose never falters.

Do not allow yourself to be distracted by so called contemporary issues like perpetual war and egregious wealth.  Concern yourselves only with the most vital and timeless of matters.  There is a sustained attack on our way of life and our values.  Our culture and morality is under siege.  Our entitlement as white Christian males is being challenged.  This once great country has excreted an entire class of godless people who believe they deserve endless convenience store burritos, menthol cigarettes, Mountain Dew and free rent.  All prizes to be sure, but hordes of them want free education and health care too.

Imagine if these things were available to everybody.

They would eat unborn fetuses and receive two checks a month for it.

We are outnumbered.  Soon they will demand these things because they are the majority.  We alone deserve to enjoy all the spoils and deviance from the affairs of men. The time to enforce our message of divine superiority is at hand.

The hour is short.

The democrat liberal heathens want everything for nothing and a vote for me is a vote against feeding, clothing and educating them and most importantly, their children, who will only grow up to champion Satan.

Trust me.

Beware false prophets.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

Don’t be stupid.

Vote for me and buy my free book.

Drinks for my friends.

 

What I hate about Americans is our notion of what is presidential.

Tall, calm and graying at the temples.

Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan etc, all very presidential.

The cult of political celebrity.

Whatever.

Bernie Sanders is not presidential but I’d like to have a drink with him.

Bernie shows up on TV looking like he combed his hair with a sharp rock.  His suit is wrinkled and his tie is cheesy.  He sounds like a cab driver from Brooklyn and he has the on air presence of an assistant district attorney from south Boston.  His Achilles heel is AIPAC and all matters Israel and he’s got gun issues.

These things give me pause.

He’s not ideal.

But he is smart and completely unafraid.

No candidate is perfect.  None will ever be as far as I’m concerned.  None will ever be as far as you are either.  Look in the mirror.  That’s as close as you are ever going to get and you will never run for president.

He’s not a choice because of what we’ve learned to picture on our screens.  It’s the only test he doesn’t pass.  Otherwise, he’s been consistent from the day he walked on.  He’s a socialist.  Our republic is a failing model because of unchecked capitalism.  It survives only because of some modicum of socialism.

It’s why we don’t don’t actually enslave the migrant workers that clean our hotel rooms or why our salads aren’t $50 a pop.  Instead, the bigots bitch about them taking jobs none of us would ever consider and they get to go to the emergency room when it’s a matter of life and death.  It’s a better deal than most of them will ever admit.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist.  That very word is so polarizing it will probably prevent him from ever being elected.  Nevermind the socialist constructs in this country that we all take for granted everyday. Fire departments and libraries, medicare and social security.  For whatever reason Americans have been taught to fear that word so profoundly that we imagine it threatens our existence.

It’s sucks because it is why we aren’t a third world country.

Or a theocracy or plutocracy.

All of the above

Can Bernie beat Hillary?

It’s unlikely.

Hillary’s support is broad but shallow.  She’s hawkish and corporate cozy.  Her path is trickier than most estimate.  She’s got baggage and skeletons and a lot of Americans think she’s a bitch.

She is vulnerable.

She has the amps but maybe not the volts.

Bernie has voltage.  A long history of consistent values, beliefs and actions that amount to a rare integrity.  It’s formidable.  His support is deep.  But he needs amperage.  Broader support.  Crucial and hard to come by.  Wattage.

He is not presidential and that might just be the best reason to vote for him.

He is the best person to run for president in my lifetime.

Thom Hartmann says Bernie is not kidding.  He’s not here to pull Clinton to the left.  He’s in it to win it.  I hope he’s right.  He probably won’t get the nomination and what pisses me me off is he won’t get taken seriously by the media.  We deserve him.  This man says every single thing I crave to hear on every issue that every other politician has avoided for the entire time I’ve been paying attention.

He goes right at it.

Fuck big banks, fuck big pharma, fuck big energy, fuck the military industrial complex.  Fuck everything that fucks with most of us every fucking day.  Goddamn I love that.  He is a no bullshit, unapologetic liberal.  He is a socialist.  We need socialism because capitalism is running amok.  Capitalism is why an education costs as much as a house.  Capitalism is why a $1 bag of saline costs $700 in a hospital.  Capitalism is why I pay $1.30 more a gallon for gas in California than the rest of the country despite oil being less than $50 a barrel.  The minimum wage used to be a living wage and capitalism is why it is now not enough sustain an individual.  Capitalism is why, despite all of this, corporations are far richer than they have ever been while worker productivity is at an all time high and wages are stagnant.

Capitalism is why they are no longer embarrassed to buy and sell our elected representatives on television.

Bernie Sanders has been talking about this shit his entire life.

What more do you want?

He has my vote.

Then I’ll vote for Hillary in the general because the GOP offers nothing but filthy idiots.

Drinks for my friends.