.

I moved down here to Terre Haute, Indiana (a city which yes, has correctly predicted the presidential election winner every election since World War II) three months ago, from my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, and in this entire three months, I have yet to have a day whereupon I had nothing to do. Every single ascension of the sun has begat at least ONE obligation for me, whether it be work, school, my other thing I’m doing, LOOKING for a job, finishing up moving, cooking for my mom and her boyfriend… it’s been all obligations all the time.
This, of course, has spawned a lot of drinking. Ironically, on election night, I just FELT like an alcoholic: it was like there was a beer-bottle-shaped-hole swimming around in my blood. I’d spent the obligatory eight or so hours doing school related things, soon to do the same thing the next night, and I just had to duck out to the bar two blocks away from me for a beer, which turned into three, sitting there.
But hey, it was election night. There’s this vaudeville clown on the TV, Donald Trump, whom, I’ll admit, I’ve never actually heard talk in my entire life, and I still don’t plan on it.
But one day I SAW him talk. I saw the crow’s look in his eye, like an animal in furious defense, I saw the jaundiced expression, everything all mummified over from years and years of desensitization to the needy, to minorities, to America.
Well, as many of us know, or anyone who reads The New Yorker, Trumpie hadn’t been doing so great in recent years, starting, at the latest, in 2014. He’d lost almost all of his casinos in Atlantic City, maybe from people actually waking up and prioritizing what they do with their money, who knows. Or maybe they just got sick of the SOUND of casinos — all that clanging, all those inane, robotic exclamations from machines, the veritable noise machine right before you, the crowds of pickpocketers, the whole thing one big luck of the draw. It’s dark in casinos, so people can go there and hide their embarrassment from the rest of the world.
Well here it is. At 11:30 pm, 11/08/2016, Trump still to me is just a joke, and this election is just a comedy act, which is why I’ve spent the previous year reading things like Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl and Rob Sheffield’s On Bowie… I’ve pretty much abandoned looking at my New Yorker subscription, which seems to depict this money hoarding oaf on every cover. How many times can we beat a dead horse?
I get done with the one bar and decide to walk over to wear I work, which is just two more blocks down. I’m gonna bit** to my co-workers that the Carolina Panthers aren’t even in the top 20 in the NFL power rankings. This is what I’m pi**ed off about, at the moment.
I get in there, and boom, there’s Fox News on every single TV. We’re talking 12 or so TV’s. I ask for them to put sports on one of them, they can’t.
I see strange people everywhere. I see this dude who doesn’t look like an everyday working dude… he looks like somebody who should be on The Big Bang Theory. Everybody seems baby-faced, and dismissive of me when they see me.
I end up making friends with a couple dudes from town, taking a shot of Fireball and doing a weird “Fireball” chant I just made up… but slowly the whole thing’s sinking in. The results keep trickling, Donald Trump might actually win this thing.
Something inside me dies. I feel one day closer to my funeral, when they will bury my body underground, my heart no longer beating. I feel that this thing in my hand, this burning drink that makes me forget, that gives me an escape from reality, is my greatest asset.
The people are assembled there as if they are watching sports. It’s really no different. I do not hear anybody going on diatribes about how great the candidates are going to be. It seems mainly a matter of bracing oneself against the inevitable conflict of life, and piling up hidden facts by way of subterfuge, to unleash in a monotone upon whatever sucker is dumb enough to actually talk to you. The guys I was drinking with were bit**ing about the school board… why the fu** not? Maybe they made it so you can’t skateboard down the school entrance, I dunno. I dunno why anybody would care about the school board, when we’re about to have a failing casino tycoon with no political experience as our president.
Walking home later, I’m a little less pi**ed off about the Panthers not being in the Top 20. I stop to pi** behind a building, trying to stay free of all the night perverts, etc. I get home and get a craving for Casey’s, a place I used to make fun of for being like “country pizza,” but which actually bangs out some dope late-night drunk munchies to rival all. I get there and it hits me — this really is a uniformed existence. These people working in here, they’ve got uniforms on, and this Casey’s is exactly like all the other ones… at least, its GOAL is to be exactly like all the other ones. And now me, walking out, I’m just a man. I’m just like the dude on American Psycho, or Saw. If I smoked weed, I’m even crazier. I’m just not like everybody else, and that’s all that matters. The climb to the top, something we all might have thought about a time or two, is so long and convoluted that many, many times, you just come to pity people — the workers, the killers, the misfits that grace our streets in this fine nation, in the heartland — people who would gouge out your eyes given the legality of that act, the stomped-on, and the stompers. Get ready to know that with more pristine certainty than you ever have before, America.

It is the final surrender of government to money.
This ultimate control comedy show has given birth to a perfect epitome of America —
A sneering “cool kid” with no compassion,
A biting incisor to exact on the world,
In the minds of millions of helpless, cloistered,
Overworked voters,
Every bit the anger they feel about their predicament —
He hates the world as they do.

Ears to pleas have fallen deaf,
Hearts to humanity have crusted,
Developed spores,
Developed teeth and ganglia
With which to face
The next tedious day.
In the sky today, I saw a dark cloud.
I’m not sure if it was trying to tell me something,
But I batted it down with my hand and started kicking it down the sidewalk.
I just had to make something hurt,
Hurt like that handicapped reporter the butt of mockery,
Hurt like that Hispanic anchorman the victim of cold, unfeeling dismissal,
Hurt like people’s consciousnesses,
People’s pride,
People’s manhood and womanhood
Before the constant drudgery,
The repetition,
The lies that said they would get an “American dream,”
That they’d become the star of their own movie,
Movies that never got written
Because wielding that wine and knife isn’t for everyone.
It’s for our leaders.

I want to grab this mouse that’s running around in my apartment and throw it out the back door into the yard, like I did with one a month or so ago, but it looks so cute. The particular moments at which it looks so cute are when it’s scared witless of me catching it, and throwing it out into the back yard, like I did with one a month or so ago.

Just once I’d like to see you,
Instead of going into that computer lab and checking that e-mail,
Go out into the parking lot
And do that dance where you’re climbing up the tree
In your sports jersey
Like one of the antiquated rustic men
We see in our dreams
.
But I know,
This is your squall,
This is your death —
Beaming out onto the sun
With everybody knowing you and throwing eyes
Into the side of your skull,
Vengeance, sweet vengeance.

Eventually you just get used to it. The life becoming a nonstop reality of checking e-mails and waiting, the passing endless empty, nondescript and ominous buildings, the girls walking around in the tight pants and acting as if they are wearing actual clothes — it all gets tucked away, and like a squirrel, you get your little acorn of truth, your mission of the day. And you missed things — you missed opportunities, you missed achievements and you missed groups of people getting high, expressionless faces like the one you always wanted to have. But this is just part of life. And maybe the “missing” is the true essence of the situation anyway, like how if you pick up a petal and it’s too heartbreakingly beautiful, it crumbles in your hands.

* Happy Halloween, everyone!

I couldn’t help it: Virginia Tech was playing Virginia again in football. I HAD to leave the house for another chunk of five hours, in the middle of the day.
Of course, when I came home at eight, I really should have noticed that my fly was open. Also, the carton of milk was left out, which Eric shot a hole in with his bee-bee gun, leaving it to drip out empty.
Felicia, of course, was over in the corner applying more black eyeshadow. Just as yesterday, my two children had been subsisting entirely on Ritz crackers and Tang. The thought of buying them food for sustenance hung over me like an irksome black shroud, but unfortunately I had sprung for like four rounds of Grey Goose and vodka for the guys down at the bar. Hey, they were real cool dudes. I had to do it.
Walking into the bathroom, I went to brush my teeth, mostly out of vanity, and noticed that my fly was down. I decided to leave it down… it might be covered with germs. Glancing, then, into the mirror, wondering whether or not Virginia Tech even won the game I’d spent the last five hours watching, right through its entirety, I let the salve of toothpaste permeate my mouth, and ruminated over the deep, meaningful look I always had in my eyes. It’s just like that time I took Felicia to soccer practice last year. Always being there for them. There’s no doubt, I was quite the Dad.
I came out of the bathroom and remembered, gosh da**it, I have twizted kidz. It was Eric who came at me first, and with my ex-wife’s butcher knife of all things. She’d died five years earlier ‘cause I’d left the car running in the garage while she was sleeping in it. God da**it if this little squirt didn’t dig this knife right into my throat, at which time I immediately lunged for my car keys to drive myself to the hospital, wondering how much this da** wound would cost to fix. Then came the bite from Felicia: right in the thigh. She really sunk those incisors in. “That’ll teach you to make me quit soccer!” she yelled. “Christ!” I thought. Soccer, who needs it. I lunged for the front door and the car outside like a sleek nighttime bat, with the fire in my eyes all over again, ready to do battle with this world and make my stamp loud and clear. But then I saw the worst part, on the TV in the garage: Virginia 33, Virgnia Tech 28. Da**it, I thought to myself, maybe I should’ve bought another round after that THIRD score.

The objects we see around us —
The streetsigns, the buildings and the lightposts —
They SUGGEST events, they suggest feelings,
Destinations, purposes like rivers for the gratifying fording,
.
And so with the envisioning of this transformation
Comes an anxiety unbearable and bequeathing of self-concept,
To the point where you’ll do ANYTHING just to know who you are:
Insanity.

You entered life
And all you ever found was
A bunch of people wondering
At what life is,
.
Between taking orders
Under two timing moons
.
And at the mad charade’s end
You realized
That it all took place in under one second,
In the springing jolt of a man’s hand
To his face.

One time out in Colorado we saw a house burning. It was the end of a long day (aren’t they all) canvassing in an environmental campaign in suburban Denver, and we were headed back into the city, a group of four of us, by car. Someone remarked, “Whoa, look at that,” and a couple of us others went “Holy sh**,” or, “I wonder if they called it in yet!” I’m pretty sure one of the people just sat there, not saying anything.
We continued to drive on, most of us, if not all of us, thinking about the fire. Thinking about what we had just seen. The backs of houses, along I-170, emerged, depicted themselves, and then obscured, again. We were mostly silent — thinking about how the day had gone. There was no need for anything else, at this time. Much of what we had, much of what we were, much of what we were doing, was working just fine. The rest, we figured we’d just drive right by, for now.

I see it every time I walk up to those glass doors — I look in your office, hoping for just one more clue on how to live, how to wrest my life out of the biting grasp of candy bar dietetics, of turning down the thermostat in winter, of living a second class existence. Sometimes I see your cat rolling around on the rug in there. Then I’ll see you, emerging out of your corner cubicle. Your skin will look just like mine. I’ll swear I’ll see a mirror there. I see in you nervousness, almost like you’re coated in some lizard sweat, all the obligatory things you’ve been doing, “fun” things, with a false enthusiasm, always that nervous smile. Sometimes I wonder if you’d rather change places with me, and have your life be composed of endless shouting matches, of nobody saying hi to you, of your every moment being consumed with the thought of how you’re going to make your next rent payment. It’s something in your eyes. You’re happy, but you’re never TRULY happy, happiness is part of your job. You thumb your nose at the unmitigated bile — unthinkable forms of our species crouched in dusty corners for what seems like eternity, wanting only the demise of everyone who passes, wanting only annihilation of this entire form — the houses, the computers, the passing of time, everything that has placed them in this miserable condition of “honest worker.” And time passes upon your vacation in Cancun — upon the last one, and the next one. Time works on those like sands from a star, masking their autonomy, crashing into them like a tidal wave from California. Movies work on time, you watch, from the Hollywood machine, how you took that gun out, didn’t you, how you finally got your way, didn’t you.