Men Sixty Five and Up

The hardest thing to do this September is to not spend any time checking in on poll numbers at fivethirtyeight.com. It's not just that last time all the polls were famously incorrect. The problem I have is that last time, fivethirtyeight was the one that gave me my first indication that something was tragically, distressingly, apocalyptically wrong. After hovering, in an almost hypnotically gentle, consistent line around 90% likelihood of a Clinton victory for almost the entire run of the campaign, I remember all too vividly the last day before the election seeing that line drop, exactly in the same way you don't want to see an EKG printout line drop. Whatever organs and skin patches they were stuck to, translating impulses and twitches into the soothing ping of measurables, all seemed to seize or spasm at the same time in a storm of irregular dysfunction indicating the patient was, to use the medical phraseology, totally fuuuuucked.

I don't really need to recount anything about the course of this year in order to convince any of you that this election year is already unpredictable. All of us would like to go through one week where nobody in any news source has to use the swear word "unprecedented." Today in Southern California, the sky was fucking yellow. Not an amber glow of burnished autumnal gold, like yellow yellow. I'm not meteorologist, but that's probably a sign that things are not fine. At this point if I were a meteorologist, I'd be spending most of my time looking for an actual meteor. Partly for the what-the-fuck-why-not-this-also factor and partly just because it would seem preferable to all our current terrestrial options.

This cycle, poll tracking has its own pull as we lack entirely any kind of context to find any signal in all the noise. There are still marches and demonstrations as half of us scream for social justice while the other half are turning up dressed for the race war they've been promising since the last one. We've had political conventions with no audiences and campaigns without any of the recognizable hallmarks of campaigning. It would be great to have a lodestar to navigate by, a readout of indicators to let us know where we stand as an electorate ahead of one of the most consequential inflection points since 1860. In a less turbulent timeline, we could rally around the insignificant, mollifying palliative of college football or something, but this year even that is as fractured and fracturing as anything.

I know Biden is up in polls nationally at least, but really what can we trust? In the last three weeks, news about Trump has included item after item after item that would in any other year with any other candidate have been a sea mine launched in a torpedo inside an iceberg that wouldn't have just sunk the ship, but followed any survivors home and meticulously murdered their families one by one by one.

But we're past the point where someone like Howard Dean holds a microphone too close to his face when he does a weird yell once and he's automatically disqualified from being president. Where do you look when your entire reality seems to be made up exclusively of anomalies?

I'd like to end on a hopeful, or at least a sardonic note, but it's 2020 and no institutions are safe.

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I don't normally do commercials, but journalism died. Remember journalism? Haha, yeah, me neither. But in the atmosphere where news organizations are bought up by hedge fund dorks and stripped for parts, the current moment is also marked by the presence of a few efforts to wrest control of the wresting-control-of-the-narrative narrative from the liquidators and ungovernable capitalist pirates. Last year, the entire staff of Deadspin (no link to that zombie site, sorry) quit in protest of editorial interference by just that kind of soulless quiver of garter snakes. Many months later, those writers and editors have launched a new initiative, self-owned and run, as an experiment in editorial freedom. It's a subscription model that relies on the enthusiasm of the readership to support it, with minimal ads. It's called Defector. It's mostly sports oriented, but not entirely. If any of this is important to you, or if you just like writing and humor and democracy, please consider subscribing.