The Cuyahoga Is Burning

If you ever wondered if it's possible to be a responsible citizen AND recklessly spend away the precious grains of sand in the mortal hourglass that is your life, I'm here to tell you: yes it is! I watched (almost) the whole Donald Trump RNC nomination acceptance speech and I still found time to work in multiple viewings of the Netflix/Marvel Luke Cage series trailer that just dropped during San Diego Comicon. I'm not going to say which one I immediately liked better, but one just promised a lot of violence in a static one-shot over the course of an hour-plus while the other had one dude wrap some other dude up in a tore-off car door using his bare hands, plus a bunch of other cool shit in like 90 seconds. If somewhere in the middle Donald Trump smashed through a layer of drywall with his fist, reached into the hole, ripped out a length of plumbing piping and then clocked a miscreant with said piping somewhere around, say, Minute 45, maybe I'd have felt the certainty of my voting conscience wobble just the tiniest of bits.

I said tiniest. And not for very long. If he wanted to make some headway, he would have had to tone down just a smidge the part of the speech where I was afraid to look outside my front door for fear that the America he was describing had been spoken into life, like some kind of Voldemortian incantation that saps all hope and the human instinct for community. Imagine my relief and surprise when I finally did peek around a window blind to see all my neighbors' houses hadn't all been set on fire by Mexican arson-rapists.

It was a little dark is what I'm saying. Like half-way-through-it-I-considered-buying-a-shotgun-level dark. Not to protect myself from the Muslim immigrants who were going to get me* but just to cradle and stare at for hours on end as a reminder of the thin line between life and death as I decide whether or not to give in to the relentless levels of despair being peddled by a major-party candidate for president.

I didn't really watch much of the rest of the Republican convention. This election has held very little drama for me really, especially when the last two candidates standing in the Republican primary competition were a self-sticking vinyl Halloween door decal and a space alien in a man costume. I'd never been a huge, huge Hillary guy just because she comes off as a bit technocrat-y in the Al Gore mold more than the grinning, naughty, sneaking-a-flask-into-the-Knights-of-Columbus-pancake-breakfast charisma fountain of her husband; plus I knew of her (fair or otherwise... mostly otherwise) persistent levels of unpopularity over a significant percentage of the electorate, which was going to make any election she participated in a logistical challenge, just as a known quantity.

But you know, the only other choice was Bernie Sanders. I thought about him for a minute until I realized if you're over 26, you spend all your time driving other Bernie supporters around because none of them are old enough to rent a car. I got other shit to do, man. Oh, plus? The only other person with more backstory to unfuck than Hillary among the national voting public would be the only guy in elective office in this country to describe himself openly and proudly as a socialist. Not that I have anything against socialists,** but again, logistically, that's a steep uphill grade to start out with.

So Hillary more or less by default. Not that I didn't or couldn't care, it was just that it was, like, February when I figured all this out. I guessed (correctly, it turns out!) that it would all shake itself out without the direct emotional or intellectual intervention by me on any level.

And well, now I guess it's time time pull this stuff off the back burner, mentally speaking, and gin up the give-a-shit. I will say this about the Trump speech: he has my full attention now. Maybe not in the way he'd like. But then I'm a college-educated unmarried irreligious white dude with two (2) college degrees and full health insurance. He was never talking to me anyway.

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*Aided and abetted by the corrupt FBI and the incompetent TSA. Although I guess with the TSA, fair enough...

**I drove a Prius for 9 years, you guys. Come at me.