The Franchisees

None of my kids are voting this time around and I'm kind of glad about it for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, it means I'm not old enough to have voting-age children. Well, I guess technically from a mathematical perspective I am old enough, but the actual children I did have at the time I had them, no, they're still under 18.

I have a theory that we don't actually become mortals* until we procreate. It's a weird juxtaposition in that, once you have kids, whether you're 18 or 48, their timeline becomes your timeline. Your own sense of progress and momentum gets tangled up with their own, and rightfully so as the things they are doing (developing the ability to comprehend and express human language, becoming ambulatory, progressing from reflex grasping to full mastery of the opposable-thumb fine-motor skills, learning how to hide their porn on Snapchat or whatever, etc.) comparably are on a more (literally) fundamental and (literally) existential, and therefore more worth everyone's attention. Yes, even on your birthday.

But lingering there, in the back of your mind, even though it feels as though your life is in a state of suspended animation--spend one child's birthday party inside a Chuck E. Cheese and tell me if the earth doesn't stop fucking spinning altogether--is the absolute certainty is that one day, you're going to wake up from this, that child is going to be out of your house and you're going to be stuck reckoning with all the lapsed years in between, pretty much all at once. They say, in terms of emotional development, addicts remain arrested at the same point they were when they started using; someone who gets into crystal meth at 19 pretty much stays 19, until they get clean and start to develop again. This is a good place to make an easy Charlie Sheen joke, but I'm pretty sure the person I heard say this was actually Martin Sheen, so that makes it slightly less funny. What I'm arguing, to a lesser extent, is that the same thing happens to parents. Sure, there's less of a social stigma if you're a baby junkie as opposed to a committed lifelong IV drug user injecting heroin into the veins of your penis because all the rest of them have turned to mush, but the result is more or less the same. I guess the tradeoff for non-breeders then is that you don't get the blinding distraction (however futile, temporary and backloaded) from your own mortality, but you're also free to work on yourself, to focus on progressing as a human. Which sounds great and I'm not sickly jealous of at all. Hope it helps you out when you're old and you die alone and nobody comes to your stupid, tasteful funeral.

Also I'm glad my kids aren't voting this year (bet you thought I forgot this was the point, right? Well, OK, it's possible that I did. But all good writing is re-writing, am I right? I'm probably right) because I'm sure they'd be put off of it for the rest of their lives. I mean, look at this fucking shit-show. The front-runner on the GOP side is a billionaire populist(!) whose own voice is so braying and loud, I bet he doesn't even know all the dog whistles he's sounding. "Telling it like it is" has always been a euphemism for racism. It's a weirdly impressive balance to be both an oligarch and and ochlocrat at the same time and I'm willing to be real money that this is all because he needs a federal executive order to clear the zoning permits for some shitty building he wants to vomit into the unsuspecting landscape of some city in America. And meanwhile his last two main rivals are Latinos who have both managed to somehow come off as less authentically Hispanic than Jeb Bush.

And then on the Democratic side, there's Bernie, the openly socialist non-Democrat Democrat who speaks to our collectivist id, but whose all-or-nothing, stridently insistent supporters are ready to sit out and watch the general because Hillary is somehow unacceptable and gross. And yes, Hillary is the polar opposite of No Drama Obama. She comes with an automatic sideshow of lamentable calculations, avoidable complications borne out of a weird sense of personal exceptionalism and the constant, looming threat of a repeat touring show of Bill and Li'l Bubba, his wandering ventriloquist's dummy of a penis.

If any new voters are out there listening, please remember: this isn't normal. A presidential election cycle doesn't always look like a long-form outsider-art performance piece. Heck, this will be my seventh time voting and this has only happened... well, OK, it was like this in about half of them. But in the other ones we had Obama! There we go, there's a strategy to help you stave off the oncoming tidal wave of disillusionment, ennui and cynicism: just hold out for a once-in-a-generation leader with the political skill and temperament to steer you through troubling and impossible times, even knowing s/he would probably have to carry most of the blame in the short term and bear unrelenting and unprecedented levels of attack and obstruction along the way. Doesn't that make you feel better?

Hey, stop complaining. It could be worse. I just had my one and he's about to leave office. At least you have yours to look forward to. Theoretically.


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*in the sense of being aware of the grinding tick-tock of our own life force drip drip dripping away, not in the sense that before we have children, we cannot in any way be killed. Wait, that's not actually true, is it? It's possible I've made a horrible mistake. Three times.