Step-Ball-Change

I find the act of watching live events where people speak about things a bit too emotionally taxing to tolerate almost. I can't watch awards shows because I know there's going to be some interstitial attempts at painfully scripted banter or wantonly earnest, elegiac prose setting up the clips for Best Foreign Film Sound Editing-Short Subject or whatever, usually read out by Sigourney Weaver. I'm not sure what the personality trait* is that makes me suffer so acutely from Potential Second-Hand Embarrassment, but it's always been there. I remember (and this is true) episodes of Happy Days, human history's baseline level for anodyne, pre-chewed entertainment pap, where I had to leave the room because I couldn't bear the tension caused by the inevitable resolution of a cringingly comic misunderstanding. That poor Potsie. How many times I wished him dead, not out of malice, but out of pity.

I've gotten better over the years, as with most everything, as the great balm of lived experience crusts and hardens into the callouses of cynicism and detachment that characterize the authentic transition to curmudgeonhood. It's not that I don't feel the same things, it's just that often I can no longer muster the attention or interest to give a shit. I mean, I still won't watch Happy Days, but that's for totally different reasons now. Less the embarrassment thing and slightly more the way it reminds me too acutely of the unrecoverable passage of years dragging me unwillingly behind the singular fourth-dimensional gravitational impulse of time's one-way arrow toward the unpierceable darkness of veiled death.

Also, fuck Scott Baio.

I'm still an open wound, however, when it comes to political debates. I know I shouldn't be. My earned cynicism as I enter my eighth presidential cycle as a voter should be enough to reassure me of the empty spectacle of it all, the superficial showiness, the canned lines, the fawning (and sometimes more insidiously subtle) sops to moneyed interests, the thick pandering to constituencies lining up to be ignored the second the last vote is dropped...

But no, when I can stand to watch them, I do it pacing, muttering, frowning, terrified both that someone is going to say something to immolate themselves and fretting about the possibility that nobody will. The point is to build to some kind of clarity, but I don't really want to see someone stage-fright themselves to political death in front of me. The stakes are too high. The second-hand cringe would crush my diaphragm and send me scrambling for the soothing comfort of facebook videos about homeless dog rescue.

It's slightly easier when I've made up my mind. It's still incredibly tense for me to watch, say, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debate, even though I know the odds of him convincing me of anything, up to and including the idea that he's not some kind of shaved sewer yeti, are functionally zero. But I'd still be so invested in My Person doing well (or more specifically, not completely fucking it up) that the tension is largely the same: pacing, muttering, sweating, sitting in weird places I'd never otherwise sit to watch TV like the floor or the stairs or under the table in the dining room with my hands over my ears.

Over the last two nights we've had (and I'm not sure of the official number. MSNBC says the count of appearing candidates is still being tallied) approximately 1,336 Democratic candidates debating on live TV. This is something I should be paying close attention to, being a committed voter, highly motivated to correct the national course in 2020, but I'll admit that over the two nights, of the four total hours of debate coverage, I think I watched a grand total of about 20 minutes.

I just couldn't do it. All that gross alpha energy spilling and splashing all over the stage, the audience, the other candidates... the desperation and flailing of the lesser candidates as they try to shove their nameless faces forward... the sometimes crippling facility or incompetence of the moderators... the bad jokes, the fake inspirational anecdotes, the shitty Spanish... It's enough to make the committed introvert swallow his own tongue.

On another level though, I know: these debates don't matter at all. What are the odds I'm going to vote for someone OTHER than the Democratic nominee? It's not purely a case of reflex lever-pulling, if indeed I lived in an area or old-timey era that included lever-pulling in the voting process. Yes, I'm a D and sometimes the D gets an automatic pull. But as much as the value and shape of a thing is determined by what it is, just as much it is determined by what it is not. And none of these motherfuckers are the ones talking about invading Iran or drowning the foreign babies they aren't locking up. Shit, I'd even vote for Bernie Sanders and he's not even a goddamned Democrat.

Either way, there's relief in knowing I don't have to watch. It's more comfortable for everyone. I'm glad Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren seemed to do well. And it was a good opportunity to get to know all the anonymous white guys who are apparently also running like... uh... James Inskeith? ... or... Barry... Merit, I wanna say? I don't know. Welcome to the struggle anyway to all, even the gray-haired lady who sounded like she wandered in trying to find her junior college book club the professor was going to be dropping in on. I'd vote for her too! Or... does Jared Swanberg sound right? Something like that. Anyway, the one who's not a pornstar-fucking rapist. That's the one I'll be voting for. In 16 months.

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*failing? Nah, trait. I'm 45 now. I can give myself a break here and there.