Grim, Grinning Ghosts

It's a long two months until Election Day. I can't remember the exact date, so I'm going to use my feelings to intuit what it is, which would make it November 254th of the year 4617. Donald Trump announced he was running for president in June of 2015. That seems like forever ago (because it totally is), sure, but Hillary's been running even longer. The official date of her campaign start was April of 2015 (that's 16 months ago, for fuck's sake) but more practically, she's been eyeing this election since the day she suspended her campaign against Barack Obama in June of 2008. She's been waiting out the Obama administration like Elon Musk was waiting out Amber Heard's marriage to Johnny Depp, except way less creepily and, oh yeah, in the middle she was secretary of state. So I guess not really like that at all.

I suppose I could distract myself in the meantime by focusing on the holidays, but the only problem I have with that is that holidays remind me of death. Not just Halloween, which is sort of about mortality and spirits but has really become more of a ritual of display and celebration for straight women and the gays. Even if I wanted to partake, it would be an anomaly and an intrusion. As a straight white dude in America, where literally all the other holidays are more or less designed to celebrate the civilizing wonder that is Me, I feel like I've been given enough as far as festivals go. And that's even if I wanted to throw myself headlong into All Hallows', which I don't. My birthday is in the first half of the year, during spring and right after ALL of my kids' birthdays in quick succession, so I'm usually too busy to notice. For whatever reason, it's the end of the year (you know, when all the holidays are happening) that reminds me of the unrecoverable slipping-away of time toward the screaming inevitability of my own cessation of existence. Yes, all the panic and moodiness most people allow to darken the day of their birthday I manage to spread out across four full months when everyone else gets all caught up in the spirit of fellowship and giving. I'm about as much fun as I'm making myself sound.

Here and there what I will do in the waning months is hole up in a cineplex for a major portions of whole days to ingest the annual slate of award-bait films as they are released, starting unofficially every year with the Toronto International Film Festival. The slate of titles available is long and daunting, and doesn't include the normal mass-culture fare of superheroes and sci-fi epics that I'll be taking in with my boy children through a steady progression of weekends through November and December. The scheduling can be a bit problematic, but worth it eventually, even if I watch something I eventually hate,* which still counts as a valid cultural experience. What solace I do get from films, and imbibing the sweet, sustaining nectar of hype they waft in on, I often take alone in the dark, like confession or prayer, except a confession or prayer often co-starring Mark Ruffalo.

I guess I've really got nothing to complain about, at least not anything original or even interesting. I think this is just me trying to avoid talking about the Commander-In-Chief Forum, the quasi-debate hosted by Matt Lauer last night, partly 1) because I forgot to watch it and 2) the waveform of the Trump-driven news cycle has become a numbing drone that my ears are starting to acclimate to, to the point of almost not hearing it at all. More outright lies, more exaggerations, more cobbled-together bebop-improv bullshit to cover the fact that he's not actually interested in the questions related to policy, let alone any possible answer. And then the media obsession with equivalency and the perception of fairness means we have to pretend they both fell down to exactly the same degree. Which is... I mean... Hillary failed because she was "too detailed" in her answers? I guess it would seem that way when your opponent's basic position on everything is "I can't really say, because my plan is TOO AWESOME." Meanwhile, the polls continue to narrow, which is probably a natural settling-out after the massive post-convention bump Hillary got as Trump did everything in the span of two weeks back then short of setting a veteran's baby on fire with natural gas fracked from a Native American burial ground. But any movement toward Trump feels like the entire political two-party equilibrium in this country disappearing up its own ass, leaving us all vulnerable to a wildly unpredictable outcome driven by a surfeit of rage and resentment, which is something I want to think about even less than I want to consider that it's only 107 days until fucking Christmas.

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*Yes, I mean you, The Hateful Eight. Sure, Pulp Fiction literally altered the way I understand the world, but the pointless savagery and playing misogyny for laughs was nihilistic, emotionally absent and ultimately depressing. I've rewatched Jackie Brown twice on cable in the last month or so. You should too, Quentin Tarantino. Restart from there and we'll pretend the last one never happened.