Burnt Hombre

I acknowledge being president is not easy. Sure, you get a helicopter and a house and a great big plane, fine, but it's got its pitfalls too. For example, you no longer also get a boat.

But the lack of a yacht isn't the only part of presidenting that is bullshit. In fact, I'd venture as far as to say that most of it is fucking bullshit. There you are, just a regular guy,* minding your own business, ripping off contractors and leaving your wife/wives for other professionally attractive people, when out of nowhere you're elevated to the highest office in the land by practically unanimous acclamation with a margin of minus-3.1-million, give or take. You'd rather stay home in New York in your apartment made of mostly gold, the standard of obvious good taste, drowning in Diet Coke and KFC, paying porn stars and nude models to pretend they want to fuck you. Who wouldn't want a life of that kind of profound intellectual and spiritual fulfillment?

Instead they make you go to Washington, probably by throwing a day-old cheeseburger into the plane ahead of you. And Washington is the worst, where everyone is looking at you all the time, so having sex with porn stars and nude models becomes virtually impossible. You can't go anywhere without like eight dudes following you around, not only to act as professional cockblockers but all of whom are also strapping and fit and capable and armed, so they automatically make you feel a little bad about yourself, mostly because you look like a mashed potato sculpture of an alopecia walrus.

The worst part of presidenting though--god, the worst part--is that now people have stopped thinking of you as a pathetic, slimy, amoral public joke, a parody of a certain type of 1980s New York callous masculine narcissism that died with Bonfire of the Vanities and now start actually listening to what you say. And commenting on it? Like you mean it? Sure, some of them are OK, but mostly they're calling you a liar all the time just because you're wise enough to know that consistency of a position is a loser's bet. That's how your enemies--like for example the electrical contractors who completed work for you but you don't feel like paying for--can find you, pin you down, try to get you to do things you don't wanna do. Did you really get the city with the latest mass shooting wrong or are you just making sure the evil press stays on their toes?

Worse though, suddenly people start not only listening but taking the things you say seriously, which, I mean, come on, what kind of square does shit like that? Pipe bombs? Mass shootings? Assaulting children for not taking of their hats during the national anthem? Where's it going to end? Uh... I was going to end with a rhetorical flourish and pick some horrible extreme where this could never end up, but I already said "mass shootings," so I'm pretty much stuck short of "actual invasion by Mexico."

Sometimes it gets so bad, the people you want to help by reminding them how none of this is your fault while on television are refusing to even speak to you. That's right, they don't want to see you. The audacity. The chutzpah,** as Roy Cohn definitely wouldn't say.

And what nobody understands is all you want--all you really want--is for everyone to go back to the way it used to be, when you could say whatever you wanted to, like, Howard Stern or whatever, just about benign stuff. Like how much money your casinos haven't lost or the dimensions and contours of your daughter's developing body. Regular people stuff. Sometimes you just miss the good old days where you had the freedom to be a creep and a loudmouth and a liar instead of a vocal catalyst for domestic terrorism directly against the country you've sworn to protect.

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*Nobody more than me would love to have to qualify the use of the gendered "guy" here. Alas...

**In this usage, pronounced "chanukkah."