Category Archives: “funny”

Have no negative feelings about anything

If you pack up several of your best recent drawings, address the envelope to a loved one, weigh it, put proper postage on it and walk two blocks,  haltingly with a cane, to mail it to the very house you walked from, have no feeling if it does not arrive twelve days later, or even if it never arrives.   You must not expect things like a government agency holding up its end of the contract it makes when it sells you postage stamps.  It is best always to have no expectation of anything so as not to be disappointed when the world appears to be an unredeemed series of utter shit shows.

Whatever you do, do not try to see your petty problem in any larger context.  There is only doom down the road that starts “I’ve mailed literally hundreds of letters in recent years, including to myself, and none ever took more than three or four days to arrive, what is different now?”  Where does this thought lead you?  To wonder why Biden has not yet removed the Trump megadonor UPS stock owning Postmaster who was appointed by Trump to destroy mail service in order to slow down receipt of mail-in ballots is a thought experiment you should not start.  It is a complicated issue, of course, since any one Nazi senator can block virtually any presidential appointment and Biden needs to appoint two members to the Postal board of governors before the manifestly corrupt Looey DeJoy can be removed from office and sent on his smirking, self-satisfied way.

Have no feelings about the idiotic sham of a solemn, long delayed Supreme Court proceeding to hear arguments establishing whether it is legally permissible for a sitting president, after losing an election, to lie to, whip up and unleash a violent armed mob to storm the Capitol and stop the certification of his electoral defeat. 

We hear a hypothetical about whether the sitting president may legally, and unaccountably, order the murder of the duly elected man who is about to replace him as president, and his running mate, and anyone next in line for the presidency, in order to stay in power after his legal term ends.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution.   Lets say, for example, that the president truly and honestly believes these people are evil vampires who drink the blood of innocent white Christian children.   After all, the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

If you can’t walk more than a block without pain, a year after your knee replacement surgery, and the surgeon has no idea how to fix it, that doesn’t give you the right to feel sorry for yourself. Self-pity never helped anyone.

If your primary Care doctor is hard to reach, unresponsive, inconsistent, arbitrary, find a new doctor.  If the new doctor immediately proves hard to reach, unresponsive, etc., do not jump to any conclusions you might come to regret.

And so on, down the fucking endless list of reasons to ever feel sadness, anger, disgust, anything negative.  Be happy all the time, no matter what.  Isn’t that the best fucking advice you ever heard?  Rejoice, there is never a good reason for negativity!  

Our first tabloid ex-president

In a real sense, Trump is the first tabloid president, the first National Enquirer president — as well as the first “reality TV” game show host president. His pronouncements are as credible as any National Enquirer headline, they always are and always have been, and as full of truth.  He is bigger than life and more full of shit than any supermarket tabloid, more real than any reality TV set.

Now he is on criminal trial in an anarchist jurisdiction, where his vicious enemies will unfairly prosecute him in an attempt to prove that he is a liar, which he has never been because they are the liars, he has never lied. They lie, they always lie, because they’re evil. And wiseass Rosie O’Donnell will be smiling out of the other side of her ass when she ends up in one of his righteous outdoor detention camps.

Those are not the kind of camps rich kids go to, let’s just put it that way. If things go badly, I’ll probably see you there, if you’re not careful. 

What, me worry?

How do people stay ahead of their demons?

Many people, to avoid thinking about painful or threatening things, keep themselves heroically, productively busy all day and go to bed exhausted.  They wake up early the next morning to work hard all day, every moment programmed down to the minute.  My father used to call this lifestyle “running a full flight pattern” and you can picture a harried, over-caffeinated air traffic controller doing the job of four, eyes darting constantly from the sky, to a computer screen, to the blinking dots on a wall map, to the sky, to the runways below, to his watch, to an open game of solitaire on another computer, to the coffee maker and so on.

Other people try to live in a more contemplative way, allowing time to think, feel, seek a little clarity in a world of chaos and senseless cruelty.  The usual example of a contemplative life is a monk in a monastery, though life in a monastery is highly programmed too.   I have always, from as far back as I can recall, preferred living an unharried life in this mercilessly harried world.  

I have to admit, I feel smugly superior to those running a full flight pattern, the coffee and cocaine achievers I’ve known, the exercise addicts, self-righteous compulsive workaholics of every stripe.  I am also compelled, of course, in this case in my disdain for the outer directed, those who march ahead according to the dictates of a brutal status quo keeping themselves constantly too busy to ever question the orders they are following or why they are running full tilt all the time.  

The most engaging part of a person is their inner life, what they are like when nobody is judging them.  To be allowed to see the vulnerable core of another person, to me, is the greatest gift a person can give you.  The trust and acceptance involved in this kind of sharing is, to me, the essence of love.

I am living in a fucking dream world, of course.  I spend an hour or two every day typing, putting my thoughts and feelings, and sometimes my dreams, in order, making them as clear as I can, to myself and to anyone who might stumble on them.  Even if you are well-paid to write, and I am not, man (or woman) does not live by writing alone.  It is a beautiful and indispensable thing, to be able to write clearly, but it is not something you can do all day.

Generally, when I am stressed I have always gone for a long walk, or a strenuous bike ride.  Or do some pushups, which always get my heart pounding and make me feel strong.  A brisk bit of exercise is a wonderful thing for calming the mind, getting some air flowing through the stuffy attic.  Currently I’m unable to walk more than a block or two, complications from knee replacement surgery almost a year ago.  Pushups lately are also off the menu, as the pain from my left synovium seems to have migrated up the entire left side of my body, into my left hand and left shoulder.  Physical exercise, an old standby, is not one of my stress relief options these days.

I always feel better when I spend an hour or two playing the guitar, or, in a pinch, the piano.  My left hand, while willing and able, is playing on borrowed time before the pain in the fingers make it impossible to continue.  The fingers get the unmistakable message in about five minutes.  Ordinarily, in my frustration, I’d throw myself on the ground and grunt out some push ups, but, currently, that would only lead to shoulder pain in addition to the hand and knee.

So what do we say about these constraints on a contemplative lifestyle?  I’m fucked, in a word.

Luckily for me, I have inner resources many do not.  Unluckily for me, you find the outer resources curtailed enough and your inner resources become overloaded. 

Then, in a word, you’re fucked.

Trump judge MAGAs

Federalist Society member Trump lifetime appointee Aileen “Loose” Cannon ordered Trump’s lawyers and the DOJ to propose jury instructions based on one of Trump’s off-the-wall defenses. Trump insists that the Presidential Records Act, a civil law which was put into effect to thwart people like Nixon from doing illegal things with government documents, is complete protection against the criminal charges against him under the Espionage Act.

It is as incoherent as anything else that Trump says, but it has been embraced by MAGA Judge Cannon. Jury instructions are usually proposed and finalized during the trial. Here, Aileen Cannon hasn’t even set a date for trial, but made the unprecedented request for jury instructions anyway. Check out her beautiful in your fucking face Trumpian reversal of who the fucking idiot is, in ruling on the DOJ’s motion.

”Unprecedented and unjust”

The actual  “complex case of first impression” is how many ways a sitting judge appointed by a criminal defendant now sitting in her courtroom can abuse her discretion to protect her benefactor from accountability before she is removed from the case by the full panel of the appellate court.