The Soft Gelatin of These Dull Cow Eyes

Help me with this:

"We’re building a beautiful wall. A big one that really works, that you can’t get over, that you can’t get under..."
I could spend time and effort to let you know who said it, but seeing as it contains the adjectives "big" and "beautiful" and the noun "wall," there's really no need. You know. And I know you know.

I don't really want to get into the politics of the whole wall idea here. For the regular reader(s?) here, it's probably clear by now that I've been skirting politics directly as a topic for the last several weeks, if not months. Sure, I've said the word "Trump" every now and again, but usually it's in the service of a quick-hitter punchline to color a piece written about something otherwise unrelated. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's more self-care, psychic prophylaxis as I brace myself (again!) for whatever kind of actual insanity is about to be unleashed the next day. It's a cliche now to mutter to oneself "I can't believe this actually managed to get worse" every time you wake up and the president has abandoned longstanding allies to torture and death, proclaimed parts of the Constitution he's sworn to uphold as illegitimate or (interestingly!) illegal or publicly contemplated selling the military draft rights of American teenagers to a foreign government. I'm working my ass off to try to find a satirical point to make here, but it's hard to do when only one of those three things didn't actually happen.

It's safer to stay away, so I do. But sometimes all the typewriter monkeys in his head come up with something that I just can't even... I mean, the part of the quote at the top that's getting all the press, the thing about the wall in Colorado to keep the Mexicans out, I left out entirely because a) it's already been covered by every hi-larious twitterer who ever twittered and b) I have enough trouble maintaining my physical vigor and emotional wellbeing dealing with the things he says that are actually barely-crypto fascist, I simply don't have the reserve to reckon with the things that he says that are just objectively stupid. Hell, in this context, it's almost a relief. Until he decides to double down on the mistake and turn his uninformed mouth diarrhea into a federally funded program with a thousand unintended consequences like biome destruction or New Polio. I don't know that the second one is his fault directly, but honestly how long do you think we'll have to wait to find out it is?

What I'm focusing on now is the idea of a wall you CAN'T GET OVER and you also CAN'T GET UNDER. It stopped me in my tracks because, conceptually, it's a lot. Is it because it's so high? Or because it's buried so deep? How far down is the earth's core anyway? Are there magma chambers? Or maybe it's a design feature that makes it so you can't get over, like some kind of trapezoid so complicated and sublime it actually makes gravity heavier in the area around it? Is the top guarded by racist owls triggered at the sound of spoken Spanish?

It's an embarrassing failure of my own imagination that I can't conceive of an unbreachable wall, especially one that's supposed to be 2,000-ish miles long. It probably also doesn't help that the only versions that have been presented so far can be climbed by an 8-year-old girl who doesn't particularly care to climb.

I don't know. His most ardent supporters and most virulent enemies sometimes overly generously credit/accuse him of playing four-dimensional chess, being ten steps ahead of friends and enemies alike. But I mean: Mexico wall in Colorado. That can't actually be the case. I don't know. I'm not sure I have the mental or emotional capacity to sort it, even in optimal conditions, unlike the intellectual siege of the last almost three years. Maybe it's unanswerable. Maybe we just need to have a little faith. Not that anything is going to happen to save us from this bullshit, ha, no. But maybe we're at least developing the technology to answer the questions that have been heretofore eluded elucidation. When it's all over we can huddle together to receive the answer from the holy machine, in our city at the base of the wall, down by the core, where it's still warm.