A Tan Suit

I know what the calendar says (D-minus 15 days and counting), it feels like the height of hubristic self-sabotage to assume the year is going to magically tick over and move on to 2021 just because that's what happened after all of the previous December Thirty-Firsts at least since we all agreed on the spurious novelty that is the Gregorian calendar. It sort of feels like assuming the stalking mountain lion has given up just because we lost it in the undergrowth.

It's time for reflection and yearly best-of lists and all the other things journalists do because 'tis the season for phoning it in, I guess. I'm not really up for it though. If I think back to life in December '19 and where we are now, there's a very real possibility the attempt to contextualize the zombie-movie horror of the last year all at once will result in one long, endless, primal howl of despair. "Better out than in," I acknowledge and agree, but I'm kind of on thin ice with the neighbors since the incident with my real-life Halloween front-yard diorama. I should have considered there was a reason live bats were so cheap at the time.

It's safer, I think, to look forward. But you're right to protest. It doesn't seem all that safe given that every time we think events have settled into a pattern,* a state catches on fire or a comprehensive Russian cyberwarfare assault happens. Speculating on what's next seems a lot like pissing in the wind, except instead of urine, it's Novichok nerve agent and instead of wind, it's like a shitload of thrown knives.

But I'm not talking about blind speculation or anything as recklessly stupid as hope. I have been paying attention, thank you very much. My masochism absolutely knows limits. No, what I'm talking about is an accidental glimmer of optimism birthed out of actual events, unseen and unlooked-for.

And I don't even exactly mean the arrival of a COVID vaccine at an absolutely obscene speed, an indicator in the middle of the worst medical disaster in the history of my own life that we may actually be living in the Star Trek future where medicine and magic are almost entirely indistinguishable.

What I mean is, in this period of transition where the status quo of the political now, characterized by personality cult, hostility to norms, callous venality, capricious vanity and plenty of actual assaults on the constitutional order in some cases bordering on treason, there are the first inklings that we have the capacity, as a people, to snap back to a state of affairs where "political scandals" are trivial bullshit only interesting to a closed chamber of punditocracy and not a source of existential peril on legal, political and societal levels.

We've got our first Biden Administration scandals, you guys! Wanna guess what they are? Jill Biden sometimes gets called "doctor" when she has an Ed.D. degree! And one of Biden's incoming staffers said the word "fuck" to someone else!

Oh man. I've never been more excited. These are topics that have actually been discussed as though they are serious on cable news and in the halls of power. Think about it: there was a time in a previous administration where a "scandal" was the outrageous, effete, indefensible request for dijon mustard. Close your eyes and remember what the level of annoyance bullshit like that engendered. Imagine the strain of your extraocular muscles as you rolled your eyes to high heaven. Search if you can, if your imagination hasn't atrophied to into a wiggly, limp little appendix in this atmosphere of waking nightmares... Dare yourself to project living in a world where that level of background irritation was all you had to worry about from the executive branch of government and the economy of professional commentary paid to overreact to the people in it.

I'm not making any promises, but if this is the new level we're setting, can we live with that? Jesus Christ, I think we literally, literally could.

---

*A horrible, debilitating, life-sucking pattern. Like the kind of commitment and tunnel-vision focus on a routine you only see in heroin addicts.