Your Cousin, Marvin Berry

It's late August, which everyone knows is the absolute peak period of the year for the "Can you believe it's [name of unit of time measuring]?!" question we all ask ourselves. August sits right in the sweet spot where it's just far enough after the middle months of the year (June and July, I point out to you because apparently I assume you can't divide 12 by 2) but not deep enough into the latter parts of the year where talking about the passage of time is just a mad scramble to re-center your brain to the reality of yet another year of your life slipping away after you farted away the previous months lost in 1999, binge-watching Friends or listening to boy band music.

It's as good a time as any to realize: time only goes in one direction. Or as we also learned earlier this year, back when we couldn't believe it was already May, Back to the Future is a bunch of bullshit. I'm not sure all the rules of Einsteinian spacetime are entirely un-fungible, however. It used to be we measured the impending arrival of fall with "holy shit, is football really back already?" to the more modern measurement, the arrival of the pumpkin spice latte, which it is now clear Starbucks is pushing earlier and earlier every year. It seems crass and grasping, but somehow in 2019 if the basically inescapable and fixed boundaries within which the fourth dimension operates are going to be defiled and bent to anyone's will, to the detriment of all, it should as fucking well be at the hands of a faceless global corporate giant via the medium of product promotion. The only way it could be more Of The Moment is if every time you bought your PSL, an immigrant baby somewhere was denied a meal. And it was broadcast on YouTube. In a video sponsored by... well, not Loot Crate anymore I guess. Maybe Squarespace. Whatever makes you most want to stab yourself in the spleen with a crab fork.

What makes me think about this is not the clusterfuck of the current August, where the day-old mayonnaise sandwich president has a cockamamie plan to buy the world's most ecologically traumatized piece of land, which happens also not to be for sale, which then puts us into a global front-page pissing match with... [*checks notes*]... Denmark? Yep, all this seems regular.

No, what I'm thinking about is where we're going to be next August. That is August of 2020. Which is an election year. A presidential election year. Right now it's all a bit of a sideshow curiosity as a litany of completely interchangeable white men are falling out of the Democratic race, there's another debate coming up where people once again are gearing up to maybe skim a headline about the day after and hey, even a totally anonymous dipshit Republican is making noise about inventing new ways to get himself completely ignored by challenging Trump in the primaries. It's all a tedious distraction which has the singular benefit in the modern white-noise media landscape of being completely and totally ignorable.

By this time next year, we will have settled nominees, vice presidential picks, party conventions and upcoming one-on-one presidential debates. I'm trying and trying and trying and I simply lack the imagination to conjur an idea of how exactly I will feel. I'm imagining a whirring yin-yang at the center of my emotional being, powered by a perpetual-motion dialectic of complete hyperfocused panic and absolute attention-span obliteration. Just beginning the consider the capacity required to both pay a respectful amount of attention AND maintain some kind of mental health balance sounds so pre-emptively exhausting I feel like the only wise thing to do is to start sleeping now. And I mean straight through, no breaks.

All we can do is live in the moment, though. So I am going to bed, but not because of Trump stuff, just because it's after 11 pm and I have work tomorrow. The only prophylaxis is self-care and maybe a little bit of grace. But watch, next week he'll say something like mass shootings are caused by gay marriage* and I'll spin out again. Sometimes self-care looks a lot like cake.

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*Ha ha, sounds like I'm kidding with this line, but some asshole actually said this out loud. What kind of a future do we deserve really?