I'm The Only One Who Can Do It

The premise for this week was supposed to be about how, even though I feel a fiduciary responsibility to my audience (hey guys! Yes, both of you) to endure shit like the president's nomination speech at the end of the Republican National Convention, the idea of actually watching that particular guy get up there and roll out the same tired bullshit, but in a much more controlled and programmatically Blut und Boden style dressed up in the trappings of a hundred thousand Hatch Act violations, was ultimately going to be less desirable than my original plan for the evening, the punchline of which would have been a detailed description of excruciating and physically improbably acts of self-harm.

But then I thought: what if I can do both at once?! My civic duty and an indescribable and unrecoverable spasm of masochism? My god, an hour-plus Trump speech accomplishes so much...

The fact that I survived it I guess isn't that much of a surprise considering a) what was going to be in this Trump speech that wasn't in literally every other one? and b) my kids, two of whom are in the house right now, are old enough and strong enough to tackle me if I'm suddenly moved to try to set the drapes on fire for no reason at all. Nothing that bad was going to happen. I was worried over the course of the day as I felt the bile rising in my throat and the white-hot rage just considering the idea he might even mention Kenosha in general or Jacob Blake at all. I'm not really prone to high blood pressure, but could it be induced by an onslaught of intolerable outside stimuli? Is it possible for a human head to just... burst? Good luck saving the drapes from that, kids.

I learned something about myself today though: sometimes it's better to pre-process the emotions. It turns out it's hard to sustain blind fury for like 12 hours, so by the time the speech itself started, I found myself unexpectedly in a space of... I don't know if "calm" is the right word.  But less frantic. Have you ever seen those videos where rescuers try to capture a feral stray, and it loses it's fucking shit the moment the leash or the snare first gets them, but after a while the adrenaline gives out and they're just left there, shaking and terrified but spent? It's like that! I'm certain my therapist would really appreciate the metaphor.

It also helped that today Trump was given his Presidential Dose and not his Wrestlemania Dose of the good medicine, whatever the fuck is in that cocktail his horse-trainer/presidential physician inserts for him. The result was a somnambulant affect, slouchy and slow, amplifying the normal struggles to do things like read. Was it mostly bullshit? Reader, it was mostly bullshit. But in the end, I couldn't help but feel a little bit sorry for a man still so clearly out of his depth in every respect.

Ha, just kidding, I'm still trying to think of ways I can bring about the kind of voter fraud that has never happened but Trump keeps saying already does happen all the time, like how Democrats somehow bus hundreds of thousands of people all over the country to vote in places where they are not on the voter rolls or get hold of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots to vote en masse because nobody would ever check a mail-in ballot against registration lists since voting for president works exactly the same as the Frito-Lay sweepstakes.* Because yes, voter fraud is a felony, but it would be a relief if he would lose, but hilarious if he lost by a shit-ton and sublime if all the dark fascist fantasies he peddles actually were his undoing in the end. Then maybe we could get some of his other doomsday scenarios to come true as well, like racial justice and healthcare.

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