Bury It and Rise Above

It would be a lie to say every time I sit* here and start to write, it's entirely spontaneous. Sure, it feels that way because of my lack of professionalism and active, debilitating allergy to proof-reading, but like any good writer, even in a low-stakes endeavor like this, I do feel the looming pressure of crankin' out pages as I contemplate the doing of the thing. I've been at this long enough that I know when I sit down, even when I have nothing in particular percolating, I'll likely be fine. It's the double-barreled beauty of a) the confidence borne out of decades of experience and b) literally zero feedback. People would only take the trouble to stop you if it was something that needed fixing, that's my philosophy. You only get those grim-faced sit-down one-on-one meetings with your boss at work after you've missed enough achievement milestones to draw their attention. Nobody stops work to have a "you're doing great" meeting, am I right? I'm pretty sure I'm right. I thank you, imagined audience, for your tacit and resounding silent support.

So I do spend random parts of the week between posts with the antennae extended, looking for topics I either find interesting or lend themselves particularly well to dick jokes. I realize those two propositions are fairly redundant, but not all interesting things are dick jokes, even if all dick jokes are interesting.

These past few weeks? Hoo-ee, the content is out there in the air, thick and sticky, like clouds of tree pollen, or a fine mist sprayed from a skunk's stank gland. I'm sure it has a more scientific name, but you have to imagine the skunk is the size of South America and the spray covers just about the entire globe, so we're outside the realm of biology here. Stay with me.

Like everyone else, I've been watching (and living, allegedly) all this Bannon-esque flooding of the zone that has predictably overwhelmed an already culled and cowed media, leaving it slack-jawed and swooning like Glass Joe, which is of course the point. Pondering it all, it's been difficult to draw single conclusions, or even see strategy in the chaos of random tacticality in volume. Just when you think Trump might have a plan, he breaks out a "let's turn Gaza into Saint-Tropez" idea that literally everyone hates and you're back to square one from an understanding point of view.

Instead of comprehending the incomprehensible in terms of its own presenting--a dubious proposition bordering on impossible, just definitionally--maybe the clearest path is to take a step back and notice what's missing. So earlier this week, I concluded: nobody better ever say the words "Deep State" to me ever a-fucking-gain.

All this talk for all these years about a cabal of self-interested actors embedded in the machinery of government, designed and self-empowered to protect their own power base at the expense of any of the "mavericks" and "reformers" who might dare try to challenge it... like, wouldn't right now, in the face of the comprehensively intrusive and by-all-rights-most-likely illegal unspooling of whole organizations at the agency or even departmental level be the exact time to activate something like that? Shouldn't the secret, disparate pieces be emerging from their buried places, like cicadas, to shake off the dust and swarm and devour the interlopers who dared to rouse them? These bitches are either the second-worst run conspiracy ever (after the one between Democrats and the media to prevent Republicans from winning elections, please see Exhibit: Every-fucking-thing) or they never existed at all. And I need just one Republican to say that on the record. The evidence is here and it's overwhelming. You want the Department of Labor? OK, but you have to trade us a public statement of "Yeah, fine, we obviously made all that up."

Also to be clear: it's definitely not actually OK for you to have the Department of Labor.

However... however... however....

Maybe the Deep State just took a second to get rolling? I mean, it's got "deep" right there in the title, maybe I'm not giving it enough time to surface.

I dunno. It's hard to judge history when you're in the middle of it. Like that first Tom Brady Super Bowl way back in 2002. We all thought it was a freak thing involving Drew Bledsoe's backup. There was no way to know it was going to result in a 20 year reign of pure evil and darkness.

Same exact thing here. We have a lame duck near-octogenarian doofus president with severe attention deficit issues. Not a lot of visible or credible opposition at the moment, so are we on the brink of an era of greyscale doldrums where the country is stripped for parts by the billionaire oligarchs who came into this with enough money to buy their own fucking parts already, if not their own country? Or is this another instance of Karl Rove's famous "permanent Republican majority" that lasted about 18 months?

Again, history stubbornly refuses to divulge spoilers. It also makes us do all the work by living in it, which seems impertinent and rude. All I can think to do in the meantime: keep writing it down. It feels like activism, but I can do it at home, and seated.

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*I guess it's presumptuous to presume I knew how your imagined me positioned as I worked on this. I suppose a standing desk is as common as anything now as well, but no, you were right to think of what I'm doing as "sitting" even if it's in this ceiling-mounted sex swing modified for productivity. I thought the wiring for the reading lamp was going to be tricky, but sex swing technology has come a long way. This one has a USB-C port built right in!