I’m walking my dogs on a morning that’s fresh from October’s PR department: bright and clear, cool and crisp. The green lawns are spangled with dew, the trees beginning to drop hints of autumn: fleshy ginkgo fruits, walnuts, hickory nuts, and ruby red hackberries scattered on the sidewalks and quiet side streets of Midtown. Watch your step. The leaves won’t be far behind.
Early celebrants have already set out their Halloween displays: Styrofoam headstones, plastic skeletons, pumpkins and gourds on the steps, cornstalks on the door, ghostly cobwebs on the shrubs. The annual happy dance of harvest and death, which has always seemed weird to me. But hey, I like the candy. In the spirit of the season, I bought a big bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at Walgreens a couple days ago, none of which will ever see the bottom of a trick-or-treat sack. Suck it, kids.
My dogs don’t care much about pumpkins and faux skeletal remains, but they are on the lookout for the occasional gray squirrel that dares skirt our passage. They like to act fierce, like the tipsy bar fighter saying, “Let me at ’em!” as his friends hold him back. I will never let my dogs at ’em and they know it. And they don’t even drink. Idiots.
A car pulls to a halt next to us on Linden and the driver lowers her window. “I really like your columns!” she says.
“Well, hey, thanks!” I say, feeling mildly celebrity-ish and wishing I’d brushed my hair.
As she pulls away, I regret that I’d not asked her name. It’s a small town, I think. I probably know her. Oh, well. The encounter reminds me that I haven’t come up with a column idea for the next issue of the Flyer.
We are less than 30 days away from a presidential election that seems weighted with more importance than any in my lifetime, but the thought of writing another column with the lying orange narcissist’s name in it repels me like picking up dog poop. It’s got to be done, I know, but I don’t have to like it. And there’s nothing worse than when one of my girls drops one at the beginning of our walk, so I have to carry a bag of warm doggy doo for 30 minutes. (Unless I go down that one alley behind the big houses, where all those trash bins are. Shhh.)
Come to think of it, carrying a bag of warm poop around is a pretty decent metaphor for what the former president has done to our heads. He’s gross and there’s no handy trash bin where we can put him. He’s everywhere, lying about hurricane rescue efforts and putting lives in danger, slandering immigrants and putting lives in danger, inflating the crime rate, trashing a healthy economy, disparaging the intelligence of his opponents, pimping for war, doubling down on his lies about the 2020 election. Argh.
And he’s been treated so unfairly, like no president in history, that he can tell you. Everything is rigged against him. Please. He is the most whiny-ass grown man I’ve ever had the misfortune to be exposed to. He has no conscience, no shame, no remorse. His lies are the most easily disprovable fabrications ever uttered by an American politician, but it doesn’t matter and he knows it. And that’s what I can’t get my head around.
If I work at it, I can understand the former guy as the latest in the historical parade of megalomaniacs and fanatics who finagled their way into power in one country or another. Now it’s the United States’ turn. It’s terrible and terrifying but here we are. What I cannot understand is how there are so many Americans who can listen to his never-ending torrent of hate-filled batshit, and say, “Yep, I’m down with that guy. He speaks for me.” It’s depressing.
After seeing clips of the fervid GOP rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, last weekend, I’m beginning to think we’re looking at a possible nightmare scenario either way this election goes. Obviously, I prefer one of those scenarios over the other, but there are literally millions of angry and easily manipulated people out there, people who can be convinced that Democrats control the weather, people who aren’t going away. Where’s that alley when you need it?
