It's a wonderful life.....and then it isn't...and then maybe it is again
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At this time of the year you're getting the tree up. Outside lights are tackled. Everything is Christmas-ed up, and for a little while at least your house feels less like a tomb and more like a cocoon.....a warm, festive place with comfy couches and chairs, maybe a fire going, next to some goofy-sized TV you're still paying on hanging on the wall....awaiting the commands from a multitude of streaming services that you signed up for during the year and never meant to keep. The other night I planned to go out but found "It's a Wonderful Life" playing on NBC and felt seasonally obligated to watch Jimmy Stewart refuse to give naked Mary her robe back, scream at his kids, get drunk as a monkey, drive into a tree, punch a cop, and then flee down the street as the cop tries to shoot him in the back, firing wildly into a crowd of people, surely a scene that hasn't aged well but whatever. The point is that I was, for an evening at least, content to sit in the dark illuminated only by the lights of the newly festooned tree and pretend that we're not doomed. With my dog. It was nice.
We are doomed of course, destined to implode from a terminal case of the stupids, but as long as it's still possible to block a few hours off and watch politically incorrect Xmas movies with the ones you love, sipping on a cold beer and eating cheeseballs, it's a good reminder that the holidays can act like a perfectly timed benzodiazepine, as long as you're smart enough to not actually leave your residence or scroll through your phone.
Tonight I get my Covid booster shot, for which I am both grateful and dreading......since the last one knocked me on my ass, and also gave me this weird ear infection that nobody could really explain and that took two rounds of antibiotics to knock out. But ear infections, while unpleasant, are infinitely preferable to a ventilator, which I've never been on but I still know this to be true because I'm not a fucking moron. I'm also glad that for this shot my drive is 2 miles to my local pharmacy, and not 60 miles to the New York border. We've gotten a bit better at the logistics of this vaccine thing, thankfully. My plan is to take tomorrow off and lay around popping pills and whining about how crappy I feel, which beats working. I have sleep to catch up on and vacation days to use and books to read and shows to binge and existential dread to deal with, so it's not like I'm gonna be bored. This whole Covid thing blows, but I'm ever so thankful for the work that thousands upon thousands have put into this historically effective vaccine in a historically fast amount of time, which has saved more lives than our nation would have been able to cope with losing. This thing remains a civil war, as everybody who dies is draped with the same flag. It's already killed more than 1861-1865. You can choose to fight, flee, or fortify. Hearts and minds are already hardened at this point. When intubation is the only thing that trumps (sorry) your own research, you've come around just a tad too late.
(and I’m back after getting my booster. I mentioned my nasty ear infection to the pharmacist, and she looked at me like I was just some exaggerating man-baby, which I’m not, honest…well……sometimes I am but not this time. It really was nasty and forced me to wear a skull cap everywhere like The Edge from U2. Whatever. I just rolled up my sleeve and took my medicine like a good boy. I have my skull cap on stand-by.)
And so it goes.
Now, if I may pivot a bit…
Above is the family Christmas card of Republican congressman Thomas Massie, from Kentucky. It's captioned "Merry Christmas. ps Santa, please bring ammo". They look like a family of Kid Rock roadies.
It pretty much speaks for itself. As if the state doesn’t already have to answer for terminal assholes Mitch McConnell and the perennially punched-out Rand Paul. And now this guy? One gets the feeling that this crew never had to deal with vaccine side effects, eh?
This was posted before the bodies of the Oxford High School four are even buried. This is what we're up against folks. These people are why we can't sit in the house and watch Jimmy Stewart movies indefinitely. These people are legitimately evil. Massie is just another connect-the-dot Trump loving shithead.....a white privileged attention whore with the moral compass of starving hyena. A true sociopath willing to troll dead kids and their families in order to "own the libs". In years past something like this would have the offender politically exiled to fucking Elba, but nowadays it just gets you more Twitter followers. It's hard to believe that recently departed Bob Dole and this guy belonged to the same species, let alone the same political party. Yet here we are. Massie's fellow Republicans have largely remained silent on this and other equal outrages, both for fear of upsetting the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals in their base who are pissed they didn’t pose their own families like this first, and because many of them are fucking sociopaths too. Sometimes it's no simpler put than that. These people are fucking nuts.
Sometimes this stuff descends like sudden fog, and you wonder if this nation is worth saving at all.
But then the town comes together and in an old fashioned GoFundMe thingie they pay off your $8k debt and stick it to The Man, in this case Mr. Potter, the miserable old fascist in Bedford Falls who refuses to take down his Trump 2020 flag.
And suddenly there’s hope again.
In a bit..
—tf