I Was Given This Information

For the last six or seven years, this has been the point in the calendar when I've been away. I've been on a mission, much to the chagrin of Future Me who would prefer a retirement devoid of cat food dinners or really a retirement of any kind at all, to educate my children with exposure to other places and cultures, most of them of the subcultural type right here in the U.S. of A., but at least in that one case, to wade into the strange waters tainted by dirty, dirty foreigners.

That's not exactly fair as we live in a cosmopolitan exurb of Los Angeles, where the dreaded, threatened White People Minority Moment is going to hit a bit ahead of schedule versus the country as a whole, probably sometime next Tuesday, around lunch. Hell, even the high school I went to, waaaaay back at the dawn of the 1990s* was already between 40 and 50% white kids at best. The concept of "dirty, dirty foreigners" is something my kids are already readily familiar with, except depending on which social cluster they happened to walk through at lunch time at school, sometimes applies to them.

This year, though, I've foregone the educational trip to places where I give myself license to eat deep-fried things in the name of cultural exchange and have elected instead to stay home. My kids, however, find themselves in Hawaii with their mom, so I've given myself license to be on my couch eating deep-fried things in the name of staving off the gnawing, stalking loneliness of an empty nest, no matter how temporary. I'm not sure exactly where comfort lives, but who's to say it isn't in the center of a donut or five?

Coincidentally my vaunted and majestic lady-friend is also away this week, handling things in her native Midwest. I could have gone with her, I suppose, but I remembered: I've been to the Midwest. It would be just as depressing as I'd remembered, except now they're all Trump states too. There's nothing harder to watch than someone kicking themselves while they're down.

The problem with Me Time is that there's less distraction. I'm like an exposed nerve out here running around** without conversations about colleges or homework or music lessons or whatever to insulate me from the stinging, cold wind of 2017. And this is not the time to be vulnerable in any way. I came into this week already run down by the incessant, relentless pressure to follow a political news cycle that refuses to recede into the boring getting-on-with-it business of government.

Today was no help with the bonkers hour-plus press conference kabuki show involving the blunt and unrepentant denial of several clearly presented facets of objective reality by the person accidentally elected to lead the most powerful nation in the history of the world. I'm not really sure what else to say about it except if you're Donald Trump and you're losing Fox News, there should be enough red flags waving to signal to you that something is amiss.

But then again, it was only Shep Smith, a known gay, so therefore dismissible as a tool (heh) of the Godless Left. I mean, he openly defended a journalist. And worse, a CNN one.

Under the weight of all the evidence before us, though, with these long 437 years since Donald Trump was inaugurated, this won't make a difference. The "fake news" people (the ones reporting the information on the leaks, which are real, but turning them into fake news somehow) will remain in the fake news pile. Steve Bannon will just reach out with his martinet's riding crop, the one probably with a silver skull's head on the end, and slide the Shepard Smith chip into the fake news pile with the radicals and anarchists at the Wall Street Journal.

Trump is just going to keep on keepin' on, trading in conspiracy theories with his bros like Bobby Kennedy Jr. and whipping around classified info with his totally discreet capitalist fat-cat pals when North Korea launches ICBMs while he happens to be at his golf retreat.

I'm sure the panic will go away. But this situation, man, I feel like I've got tightness in my chest and a slight pain in one arm and the only resource I have available is WebMD. Sure, I'd prefer NOT to panic, but it's not immediately clear to me that there are other options.

All things being equal, I'd take the dirty foreigners at this point.

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*the decade that made science fiction writers of several previous generations scramble to massage their surviving work into retroactive continuity as the former FAR DISTANT FUTURE became a reality of non-flying cars and the only thing really dystopian going on was what we were doing to our poor, poor jeans.

**This is strictly a euphemism. I haven't done anything than could be even accidentally construed as running since probably October of 2016.