I feel like a dart board in a dive bar...

Election day used to bring a promise of a fresh start. America could hit the re-set button. We could come together and rationally discuss what was working vs what wasn't working, and change things accordingly. We voted as early as possible, because the bars could not re-open until all the polling places had officially closed. Nobody wanted to be that guy holding up the taps from flowing. Before we went to bed we knew who was in and who was out and everybody just kinda shrugged and that was that. Some slept better than others, but there was never a sense that what had just happened was about to strangle American democracy in the bathtub and then hang its dead carcass from a front porch flag pole.

We were ADORABLE back then, weren't we?

Election day now is a dystopian Stephen King novel, filled with monsters and lizard people and clowns hiding in the sewers and crazy ladies strapping you to a bed and crushing your legs with an ax. Every year the sheer volume of astoundingly dense dingbats on our ballots increases, and the rest of the world, which used to look on in a sort of worried fascination, now just laugh their collective asses off at our intellectual decline, which will surely be written into future histories in the same way that we currently study the city of Pompeii after it was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius. Future geologists will discover a piles of fossilized white dudes sitting around dead cases of Miller Lite and Confederate flags, surrounded by piles of charred books, AK-47s, and "Let's Go Brandon" bumper stickers. They will chip away at the mummified remains that were instantly hardened by some savage global warming event that was never supposed to happen because global warming was thought to be a hoax. Mummies can’t own any libs. SAD.

I take no pleasure in informing you all of this. I live here too you know.

I combat this by rarely leaving the house. I write on these pages and I work my 9-5 job from my basement office and I make music and I watch football and the World Series and read countless books and sit on my porch and drink a beer and watch the stars at night and try to be a good husband and good father and play a few gigs on the weekends that I don't get paid enough for but I do it anyway because music is good for the soul even in a barroom filled with people who would much rather watch football on TV than hear me sing Who songs on a guitar that has a “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker on it. I'm old and I finally feel old, which is kinda scary but inevitable I guess. I used to equate age with wisdom but now some of the dumbest people on the planet are my age and older. If I was a kid and knew that most adults I was forced to listen to and take direction from were not as intelligent as I, I'm not sure I'd bother to vote either.

Do you see how this all fits together?

I feel like a dart board in a dive bar. I feel like a man sentenced to drive on nothing but roundabouts for the rest of my days. It makes me unbearably sad. Even last night, my joy over my Astros climbing to within a game of winning the World Series without wearing buzzers was pissed on by the camera cutting to Samuel Alito at Citizen's Bank Park, looking like he'd just gotten in on the 8pm bus from Gilead and was about to order the arrest of the ballgirls. My happiness must always be fucked with. It’s depressing.

Maybe this election won't be as dire as the predictors are predicting. Recall these are the same people who laughed Donald Trump right into the White House. A gaggle of staggeringly wrong prognosticators who lifted Hillary Clinton up as high as she could go, and then dropped her on her head at the last moment, suggesting that perhaps, like Michael Bolton in the movie "Office Space" (the guy who beat the shit out of the photocopy machine) they may have forgotten a decimal place in their calculations. Or maybe they just didn't ask the right people.

Maybe they're not asking the same people again.

But then again, maybe a Ron DeSantis administration is what we dumbasses deserve.

Hope only springs eternal for those in the DOJ with the power to bring indictments. Maybe whatever it is that we call democracy around here will live to see another day, and being racist and fascist and ignorant et al will once again be something that disqualifies you from appearing on the ballot…..as opposed to a requirement.

Otherwise, we’re doomed.

In a bit…

—tf