You’ve heard the phrase: scary – (serious) as a heart attack. Let me tell you, scary? No. Fuckin’ painful? Hell yes. (And yeah, serious.)

I must have pissed off the gods somehow as that’s exactly what happened this morning.

First the job then this. Bad things come in threes, or so has been my experience. What’s to come next? And please don’t say the reelection of Dimwit Donald.

Yes. Heart attack. STEMI with four stents. Shee-it, I thought I was healthy. Not over weight, mild exercise, generally healthy diet.

Hope the company healthcare plan doesn’t crap out before I have to pay for all this. Gonna be like $50 grand.

I will have you know I made my stoic peace before the catheter plunged into my forearm. The Great Void, here I come.

Mole’s passionate excoriation of our retard-in-chief should need no further explanation or context, but when one breaks out the Hitler comparisons, there are still many Americans who would cry “foul!” And no, he wasn’t trying to compare our current situation in the U.S. with the full-fledged Third Reich and its sprawling international complex of death camps. He was trying to warn you about how it all starts.

To that end, here are the facts:

• Prior to usurping the presidency, Donald Trump was a slumlord, a proudly public racist and a fraud. Remember when the current king of crying “harassment!” spent an entire year harassing President Obama with that racist birth certificate bullshit? Of course, you do. Those of you who do not hail from the East Coast: Google Trump’s public statements (and full-page newspaper ad buy) regarding the Central Park Five after they were exonerated by DNA evidence. Better yet, read the recent book published by his niece, Mary, then get back to me and try to defend his status as a human being, let alone a president.
• 175,000 Covid-19 fatalities and counting – it’ll all go away like a miracle!
• On John McCain: “I like people who weren’t captured.” On the late John Lewis: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. Nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have. He should have come.” On Q-Anon: “I’ve heard these are people that love our country.”
• Russia’s dictator elevated Trump to the presidency, not the American voters. Period. Still unsure what to think about this because Mueller was a little too “polite” in the wording of his findings? Then take a look at the 1,000 page report issued this week from a Republican-led Senate committee.
• Trump threw our entire intelligence community under the bus on an international stage and sided instead with…you guessed it, PUTIN.
• Babies in cages.
• All of our former alliances across the globe have been squandered in favor of courting dictators. And, ahem – here’s a direct quote from Orangina: “Kim Jong-Un is the head of the country – and he’s the strong head, don’t let anyone think any different. He speaks and his people sit up in attention. I want my people to do the same.”
• A bald-faced attempt to rig the upcoming election by rigging it himself, screaming that it’s rigged before it even happens, knee-capping the postal service to suppress the vote and threatening to send armed goons to polling places to intimidate brown people. This is happening RIGHT NOW. Oh, and nobody’s done a goddamn thing about Russia yet. Not a thing.
• Speaking of Russia, they put bounties on our troops to encourage Taliban members to kill them. Our “law and order” (translation: FASCIST) president refuses to address this with his puppet master because he would rather our soldiers DIE than offend his man crush in the Kremlin.
• William Barr publicly and deliberately mischaracterized the findings of the Mueller report, then proceeded to fire (or attempt to fire) every U.S. attorney working on cases involving Trump or his criminal associates. Trump’s big fat lap dog also choreographed the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors using the military to facilitate a bullshit photo op.
• “There were very fine people on both sides.” Charlottesville, 2017.
• When directly questioned about Putin’s brutality to his own people (most recently on the poisoning of Russia’s most prominent dissident), Trump’s go-to answer is “we’re not very innocent, either”. Very true, Asshole – and you’ve done more than anyone to ensure that’s a fitting motto for the United States.
• None of the above matters one iota to approximately 40% of the American citizenry. That means that 4 out of 10 people I encounter on a daily basis are cowardly, racist authoritarian sycophants. I, for one, would rather die than live in such a selfish, fucked up society. If that sounds like an overreaction, then I demand that you stop quoting Patrick Henry immediately.

Throughout my life, I’ve often pondered the mass insanity of the German populace in the early 1930’s. The most common excuse heard from “decent” Germans after the war was that they “didn’t know it would be so bad” or that “it was just the way things were”. Sorry, Assholes, but that doesn’t cut the mustard for me. I currently view Trumpists in the exact same way, even those who share my last name. I will not accept “we didn’t know” because the facts are screaming in their faces. They just REFUSE to see it. For that, I detest each and every one of them. Not a very enlightened view, I know, but it’s how I feel. I cannot take “the high road” since anything short of pure venom falls on willfully deaf ears in 21st Century America. This is my home and they have destroyed it and I will never forgive anyone who had a part in this.

God bless America.

When we see a dog engaged in the obviously futile effort of chasing down its own coccyx or treating the toilet bowl like a desert oasis, our most common reaction is to shrug this behavior off as just “a dog being a dog”.

Right?

So when will we, the blabbing hairless apes of the Animal Kingdom, make peace with the fact that every single frightening and atrocious thing we view on the nightly news is just another example of “a human being a human”?

I can’t really claim that this pandemic hasn’t affected me, though I undoubtedly have made such a public claim more than once. I don’t talk about this very often because many people would find it cold and callous, but I honestly think that the effect this whole situation is having on those who aren’t tangibly fighting for their lives is downright hysterical. The fact that most people are absolutely terrified of themselves and the workings of their undistracted minds has never been brought into starker focus. There was a touch of Buddhist influence in that statement, of course, but far from causing me to meditate on “the suffering of all beings” and pray for the alleviation of their collective ignorance, all I can feel in the presence of people struggling to retain some small grip on their “sanity” in the face of such an “unfair” turn of events is smug amusement. That’s right, Morons – the problem all along has been Y-O-U!

There were an awful lot of personal questions in your latest letter, most of which I’m going to ignore. Not because the answers would be uncomfortably private or confidential, but because even I don’t care about the answers to the things you asked, even though they were the types of questions most people would love to publicly field. So I’ll answer all of ‘em in one big catch-all reply: Don’t know. Don’t care.

Right now, I am telling myself and anyone within earshot that I am in a holding pattern until Election Day. It seems to make sense to those who hear me explain it and it serves to kick the can of figuring out what to do with myself down the road for at least a few more months. But what if November 3 does mark the beginning of the end of this retarded chapter in American history, as the pundits predict?

Don’t know. Don’t care.

You see, the current state of the world has nothing to do with my lack of passion for…well, for pretty much everything, really. My lack of passion is caused, quite simply, by a lack of passion. A realization of the intrinsic banality behind the illusory excitement of the news cycle and the social media trends. Nothing’s shocking. Very little is even worthy of analysis. But I still enjoy ice cream and bong hits and bad TV and playing with Jesse – and that’s a lot of priceless stuff in one deceptively short sentence. Those things, along with a detached curiosity about my species and its self-defeating tendencies, are what keep me motoring along, such as I do.

But I try not to think about the “I” or the motoring. And that, right there, is the only spiritual advice I have left to dispense. The blandest subject matter upon which one can ruminate is “me”, however each of us may define that. Though I doubt any significant lessons will be learned by humanity at large when we finally come out the other end of this pandemic, it would still be a very pleasant surprise to see people come to the collective realization — however slowly — that in order to be happy, all they need to do is get the fuck out of their own way.

The dumbest thing anyone can do, of course, is sit around waiting to be pleasantly surprised.

Sitting Around Waiting To Be Pleasantly Surprised,

‘Mudge