23 REASONS WHY THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY WILL FOREVER BE A BLIGHT UPON AMERICAN HISTORY

On November 11th, 2016, I wrote a blog about why I thought the impending Trump presidency would be a horror, and everything in it came true. I had no idea at the time that it would be exponentially worse than I could have thought. I've never been a particularly political person, never paid too much attention to the comings and goings of presidents, senators, congressmen, governors. I just lumped them all into a category with lawyers, used car salesmen and Nigerian businessmen with millions of dollars to give me. I've voted Republican at times and don't consider myself particularly liberal, definitely not Socialist. Trump changed all that. All of a sudden I had to choose a side or risk falling into the same ideological abyss that followers of Hitler did. We'll be digging out from under the various messes Trump has either created or fostered, for decades. Here are some of them.

-All Those People Who Died Are Never Coming Back.
    Hundreds of thousands of American people died during the coronavirus pandemic. No one knows how many could have been saved by a competent, coherent, national response, but most experts have estimated that the percentage would have been significant. To Trump they just represent a number of losers, old people and people who were going to die anyway. To their families, and perhaps to society, they are irreplaceable.
    Today it was determined that a possible vaccine may be 95% effective. Trump immediately took credit for the discovery of the vaccine, as if someone who directly impeded the input of respected scientists every step of the way was now somehow responsible for their success. Trump IS directly and personally responsible for scores of thousands of deaths by his inaction and negative actions, and the implementation of a vaccine will take place in spite of his fouling of the process, not because of it.

-NEVER Rising Above It
     Trump has never let any criticism go unanswered, and his answer is to strike back harder. Not with facts, cleverness, guile or even common sense, just insults and taking the conversation (if that's what you would ever call it) low, lower, lowest. A bigger douchebag the world has never seen (see what happens?).

-Attacking the Free Press
    Trump never holds press conferences the way other, capable presidents did. Do you think the reason is that the press didn't treat him fairly? No, it's because he knew he couldn't hold his own with smart reporters who came prepared. He couldn't control the message and couldn't prevent them from catching him in another lie or saying something stupid.

-Abasing the Office
    The office of the President of the United States has never looked more foolish to the rest of the world. Someone who addresses the world with a 4th grade vocabulary does not command its respect. I remember traveling in Europe, embarrassed that George W. Bush was my president, a personable man of integrity who seemed out of his depth. These last four years, I would have been overjoyed to have him back.

-Lying as a Way of Life
    Every time Trump told another lie, then doubled down on it, and convinced people who aren't sophisticated or educated enough not to believe it, he sowed the seeds of confusion. Those who didn't know where to look for information believed his half-truths, errors and outright falsehoods because he told them with such conviction. He unabashedly told lie after lie, and seemed to enjoy the challenge of getting people to believe them even after he was proven wrong time after time. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me 20,000 times (per the Washington Post, and still counting), well, I'll need a slide rule for that.

-Science Denial
    Remember when Trump suggested to his panel of experts that maybe we could somehow ingest disinfectant or hit the body with ultraviolet light to get rid of the coronavirus? If you don't know anything about science perhaps you should let the experts suggest things to YOU instead. They've read books, studied stuff. They excelled in their field because they were smart, they didn't just SAY they were smart. The world will long remember how Trump treated Dr. Anthony Fauci, and how brilliantly Fauci handled Trump.

-Disdain of the Military
    Can you imagine a Commander in Chief who calls the United States Military "suckers" and "losers?" And people just brushing that off as if it were nothing? I can't and never will. "John McCain is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you." This quote is from a coward who ran away from military service by getting a doctor's note saying that he had a bone spur. I like people without bone spurs, okay? I hate to tell you.

-Lowering the Social Fabric
    I don't blame Trump for being Trump, he's always been a louse, a petulant annoyance. But the people who voted for him, stuck up for him, made excuses for him, enabled him and gave him power, they don't realize how negatively that will affect civilization. That's right, you heard correctly. Because every time you elevate someone like that to a position of power, you tell little kids all throughout the world that all you have to do is lower everyone else in order to elevate yourself. History always proves that thinking wrong, but imagine the spawns of Trump, even more vile and grotesque, that we will have to endure in the meantime. Trump is a cartoonish oaf, but there will be those down the road who are much better at his game.

-The Supreme Court
    I don't know what the Supreme Court will do in the future, sometimes people will surprise you. But what shouldn't surprise you is an elevation of corporations and religion at the expense of the erosion of personal freedoms. Here's just one example: The 2019 decision that basically says that if you checked that little "Terms of Agreement" box on, well, just about everything, and something really bad happens to you, you won't be able to sue, you'll have an arbitrator decide the merits of your case, and it probably won't go too well for you. Good luck with that, and all the other attacks on society that a radicalized Supreme Court could cause for many, many years.

-Dumbing Down the Presidency
    It seems obvious to me that Trump has never read a book. Ask him sometime what his favorite book is, and what it was about, and see if it was published in the last 40 years. Someone who says they know everything has no capacity to learn anything. I may not be the smartest person in the world, but I know one thing Trump doesn't. I know what I don't know.

-Mortgaging the Future of the Planet
    Trump will be long dead before this planet is unable to sustain life, hopefully much, much sooner. The quicker people are gone who don't believe that their actions can change the trajectory of man's abuse of his own environment, the quicker change can happen and the future can begin. If it doesn't, World War III will be about water, not oil.

-Courting Racism
     Trump's racism is of the most insidious kind: implicit (sometimes). By courting racist groups he condones racism. By addressing only the violence of Black Lives Matter protests and not their cause or solution, he forces racists to choose "law and order" over compromise and inclusion. But black people and other marginalized races aren't going anywhere, so racism is only a recipe for division. Intermarriage blurs the lines more every day. Do you plan to be just a little bit racist if someone is just a little bit black?

-Courting Misogyny
     By comparison, our pussy-grabbing president's misogyny is not implicit at all. It's right out there in every tweet. Every woman who voted for Trump should look in the mirror and see for themselves what a great idea that was.

-Governance by Whim
     Since Trump had a majority of sycophantic senators at his disposal, he was able to punish whomever he wished at any time, and since he is so weak-minded, anyone who insulted him or even said something he didn't like was pushed into that category. And then he felt free to make governing decisions based on only that, whether it was regarding a Korean dictator of the Governor of New York.

-Filling the Swamp
     When Trump tweeted constantly using the phrase "draining the swamp," everyone figured that it meant purging Washington of all the lobbyists who suddenly find themselves in influential government positions after leaving the corporate world. Instead, the first thing he did was stock his cabinet full of more lobbyists. Esper, Coats, Pruitt, ethically questionable assignments like DeVos and Tillerson, not to mention the glaring nepotism of his unqualified daughter and son-in-law, were part of administration that included many more lobbyists than either Obama or Bush before him.

-An Administration Full of Temps
     When Trump knew he couldn't get an appointment approved by Congress, he simply didn't fill it at all, delegating a lesser official in a working title, or filling positions with the word "acting" in front of them. No consistency of policy could ever be achieved this way, and branches of the government were left as noticeably inept as their president.

-Cheating at Everything and Calling it a Strength
     When what is supposed to be the highest role model of the country, the President of the United States, cheats at EVERYTHING, what are you supposed to tell your children? Taxes, golf, appointing justices to the Supreme Court- hey I got away with it and won. The rest of you are losers.

-Eroding Public Confidence
     By politicizing every facet of human life, Trump can (and does) claim that everything bad is bad because the Democrats made it bad. And everything that doesn't fall his way doesn't because the system is rigged in favor of the Democrats. He spent all the remaining days of his presidency after his failed election bid to try to overturn the results by intimidating Republican officials in high places instead of dealing with the national tragedy of the pandemic, which was made exponentially worse by his ineptitude and disinformation. It didn't work, but it erodes the confidence of those who are not savvy enough to see through it. If Democrats could rig elections, why in the world would Mitch McConnell still exist?

-Non-existent Healthcare Reform
     Trump has made no secret of the fact that he wants to dismantle the ACA, perhaps Obama's greatest accomplishment. As with almost everything else, Trump offered no solution to the problem, just criticism of Obama, his favorite tired routine.

-Incoherent Foreign Policy
     I won't pretend to know much about foreign policy, but I know that as a major industrialized nation, having one is probably a good idea. Foreign policy means a coherent set of strategies designed to safeguard peace and foster trade, and stuff like that. When you taunt a nuclear country such as North Korea one week and then say you're having a love affair with its cruel dictator the next, it not only seems bipolar but a little gay. Maybe a lot. Not that there's anything wrong with that of course, but but it's a stretch to label it foreign policy.

-Making a Farce of Organized Religion
     I don't care too much for organized religion myself, it's often been exposed as an easy way to wield power over society's easy easy pickings, women, the old, the weak, the poor, Trump's favorite targets. Its rampant hypocrisy has never been illustrated better than by its embracement of Trump, someone who tramples over the Ten Commandments every day, and gleefully. I just hope that before it's all over, somebody does unto him all the things he has done unto others, if not in this life, maybe the next (if I only believed in such things!).

-Rewarding Lack of Empathy and Compassion
    If you can show me any footage of Trump emanating something so simple as an actual laugh (not a sneer, or a chuckle at one of his own jokes) or a heartfelt tear, I'd love to see it. But you have to care about other people to exhibit emotions based on their welfare, and Trump possesses no feeling for anyone but himself and has proved it in each and every sentence, tweet and facial expression of his shallow shell of a life.

-Failure by Comparison
    This is a bit mean-spirited, and more Trump-like than not, but if Trump had followed Nixon, he wouldn't have seemed as bad. Following Obama, who was so much cooler, so much nicer, so much smarter, with so much more personal integrity, was just a tough act. Factor in Michelle, who jumped wholeheartedly into the role of First Lady, and the adorable kids, and add infinite points for being a role model to both blacks and whites. I can't fault Melania for being an ice queen, look what she has to come home to, and Trump's detestable acorns didn't fall far from the tree.


If I ever have occasion to meet Trump, and hopefully that day will never come, I won't have any pressing desire to address him as "Mr. President," and no one else should either. There is no law that says I must, as far as I know. "Mr. President" is a term of respect, and one thing Trump doesn't understand is that, as much as he craves respect (it's the ONLY thing he wants), you can't buy it. You can't steal it, you can't cheat someone out of it and you can't make the taxpayers get it for you. It's given to you, and only when you earn it. You have to give respect to get it, and there is nothing and no one Trump respects. Only his own sad, broken reflection in the mirror.

OUT WITH THE OLD

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-14-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     In an ordinary year I'd be spending New Year's Eve at my friends Dave and Rachel's house party, and I'd while away the evening at the dessert table not far from the chocolate-covered pretzels, trying to find a paper hat that makes my outfit "pop" and trying to avoid dancing where anyone could see me. But this was not an ordinary year, and parties are a thing of the future. We spent this December 31st weekend with my sister Kath and her husband at her place in the Poconos, since we're all playing by the same rules and co-voiding covid. Lately, any evening spent with mammals who don't have four legs seems like an Ibiza rave, and our talent for manufacturing fun where previously little could be found has been finely honed by the pandemic.

     My sister had picked out a murder mystery for us to watch, which is perfect for me. I can identify any number of suspects during the movie, and I think the average DA would be overjoyed with my theories, right after cuffing me to the soda machine. We got so caught up in the movie we almost forgot to tune into Times Square to wait for the ball to drop. I always watch the ball drop, even though I've seen it enough times already in the Giants' passing game. "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve" was a bit more subdued this year, with only a handful of spectators and even the inflatable wind puppets properly socially distanced.

     They had an interview with Joe Biden, his last of the year, and he shared a message of "unity and hope." Trump also shared a message, which I am too much of a lady to print here. They allowed a small group of well-deserving "first responders" to view the celebration in person, much to the chagrin of the "second responders," who made it to the accident a little late due to a nail appointment that was REALLY hard to get. Also in attendance were a sampling of essential workers, which I should have been a part of. I work for the Big Television Network, and if I don't do my job correctly your Jets game could end up in Kuala Lumpur, much to the chagrin of Kuala Lumpur.

     J-Lo appeared onstage wearing a huge, furry white outfit that looked like a polar bear that got caught in a hay baler, but as the performance wore on and on she wore less and less, until she was left with just a sexy sequin jumpsuit and a sexy sequin microphone. This may be why it takes women so long to get dressed: if they can't decide which outfit they simply wear one on top of the other. There were some additional performers, Cyndi Lauper and Machine Gun Kelly, and from Los Angeles, Ciara, Miley Cyrus, Nelly and Doja Cat. I was hoping Doja Cat might give a performance of "Say So," with Joe Biden doing the Nicky Minaj part, but maybe next year.

     Finally we were ready for the countdown. My sister heard of an Irish tradition where they welcome in the new year by opening the back door to let the old year out, and then the front door to let the new year in. I tried to calculate exactly how long to hold the door open for the whole year to leave, I didn't want even a week of it hanging around. There was a wind blowing in from the outside the back door, so I hope none came back inside. I don't want 2020 to claim that New Year's Day didn't really happen, while offering absolutely no evidence and still getting a whole bunch of dim bulbs to believe it.

     For my resolution I decided that I'm going to better myself this year by becoming more knowledgeable in, well pretty everything. That's right, I'm going to become a Renaissance Man. The first thing I'm going to learn is what a Renaissance Man is and how to spell it. One characteristic of a Renaissance Man is free thinking, which had me at "hello" because I'm too cheap to pay for it.

     After the countdown was over and the ball dropped and the confetti finished drifting to the ground, the celebrities who were performing in the show kind of hung around a bit, trying to look like they had a good reason for still being out there in the cold. It reminded me of the group of smokers that loiter around the outside of the building where I work, who would have no Earthly reason to hang out together, other than to blow smoke at each other.

     Meanwhile, I'll continue my New Year's resolution to better myself through greater understanding. By the end of 2021 I will have bettered myself so much you won't even know me, unless you're simply pretending not to know me. I'm going to learn what a "Mandalorian" is, and even test-drive one or learn to play one, depending on if I guessed right. Maybe I'll learn a romance language, probably Latin, since you always hear about how romantic Latin lovers are. Maybe I'll learn a bromance language, too, if I'm in a self-didactic mood. I'm going to find out how the other half lives, and if I don't have time for the whole half, maybe just the other third or so. I'll see you in 2021, and you can feel free to give me a pop quiz. I wish everyone a safe and happy New Year!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (01-07-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     It's only the end of December and we've already had two powerful storms. A couple weeks ago we had a blizzard that dropped about a foot of snow. Don't worry about us, we were well prepared. We stocked up on the necessary items, knowing that it could be at least an entire day before help could arrive. We bought an extra dozen eggs, in case we were snowed in for two days and had an 8-egg omelet on the first day. And we bought extra milk in case I suddenly become lactose tolerant, and we bought extra salt like they told us on the news, for the omelets I guess. What if we're stuck in the house for three days? Can you imagine? What would we DO? I don't want to have to resort to doing whatever it is we've been doing for the last 9 months. What if the internet goes down, and I have an important project due at work? How can I explain to my boss that because of the blizzard I won't be able to stay home from work today, I'll have to come in. Do we need any more proof that we're in a weird place? The biggest waste of time and resources right now is plowing the roads. If you plan on leaving the house in the next three months, email the DPW and tell them where you're headed, and lets save some money by only plowing those roads.

     Then we had a wind storm that blew 70-mile an hour winds around Westchester. If I tried that in my car I'd get pulled over by the cops before I even left my house. There were trees down everywhere. The irony is that all across America we cut down a zillion trees for Christmas, and if we had just waited a little longer most of them might have blown down anyway, a good portion of them all over my lawn. We have a tree that hangs over the front of our property with such flimsily attached limbs that every time someone whistles "YMCA" or says a word with the letter "H" near it, 9 or 10 branches fall onto my lawn. This wouldn't bother me, because the lawn looks better with branches covering it, but they get caught in the lawnmower and even though I can bend over to pick them up 10 times I can only straighten up 5.

     The law of averages says it's going to happen again, we're going to get at least three 100-year storms in the next two months. I'll be at home just like you, figuring out where to put all the stuff we got under the tree this year. Where are you going to put that chia Trump that Mitch Mcconnell sent you? You need two light sources for it, one overhead to make the seeds come up, and one over on the side to make them bend horizontally for the comb-over. Where are you going to put that Peloton you got as an expensively unflattering gift? I know I'm going to regret having that Peloton in the house, criticizing me and exposing all my insecurities. The first words out of the Peloton's mouth when I turn it on are going to be, "Why didn't you put the me in the den? Just for that we're going biking in San Francisco!"

     I'll be here at home during the storm trying to get the cat off of the Roomba- he's using it as his personal Segway. And I guess I'll have plenty of time to clean up the kitchen, now that I bought my wife that "Forged in Fire" knife. I demonstrated it in a disturbing spree where I sliced four bottles of water in half, hung an albacore from the ceiling and bisected it, and screwed a tomato to the table from underneath and sliced it into 40 paper-thin disks. I'd like to perform an autopsy with it, but I'm afraid of what I might find. I won't bother trying to dig myself out of the driveway, instead I'll stay in and figure out the directions to a coffee maker that were published in Chinese, translated to English and then back to Braille, where they came from. 

     We'll all be inside together, and Dr. Anthony Fauci has already warned us of the painful few months to come. He tweeted that not only will there be many more covid infections, but that there may not be any new episodes of "Forensic Files" this year. Plus a new mutant strain of coronavirus has been found that has been shown to be able to give you a wedgie, just for starters. We're in for a long stretch of arguing about the immunizations before normal life resumes, assuming that my life could be called normal. We would have to reach "herd immunity," and we're not even at "gaggle immunity" or even "clowder immunity" yet.

     Since I voted Democrat this year, I'll have to wait in the queue until my number comes up for the vaccine. I'll be just behind the people in solitary confinement on Death Row, but ahead of raccoons, so I feel pretty good about things. I picture myself over 100 years-old, and the first person in line, but as I'm celebrating my good fortune I fracture my hip, and they ship me back to my private room at the nursing home for three months, and my immunity is wasted. Yes, it's going to be long, hard stretch until the spring and I'm going to get bored and stir crazy. Then "This is Spinal Tap" comes on the telly, and I feel like I just might make it through the winter.

 

HOLIDAY EXHALE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-30-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     As much as I love Christmas (it's my birthday after all), there's a little part of me that's thankful that it's all over. "There's a lot of planning and stress mixed up in one single day," that part of me says, so it must be my mouth. For one thing, exchanging gifts is a two-part process with me. I exchange them once with my recipients, and then they exchange them once more with the store I bought them from so that they can get what they really want, and in their own size, not the insulting size I thought they were. In my defense, something as simple as buying a dress is fraught with confusion and despair, because whoever thought up dress sizing is an idiot. Size zero? An entire person who is not a paramecium with literally NO size? That defies physics. Where would you sew the buttons? I'm revamping the system: Reese Witherspoon would be a size 13 because she's about the size of an average 13-year old. If you're a size 50, that means you're a little bigger here, and a little smaller there than you used to be, and now we all know what size everybody is. No more "plus sizes." Mathematically, how do I know how much you started with, and how much you added to it? From now on, "bootylicious" describes it much better. Sizing solved, you're welcome.

     I'm not so great at decorating for the occasion either. The guy down the street from us has a teeny-tiny yard and a zillion blow-up characters crammed onto it. If I had to blow up that many PSIs worth of crap I'd be in an oxygen tent at the hospital right now. He's got a Santa, some reindeer, a Grinch, a snowman and I think there's some stuff he forgot to take down from Halloween. I have a fantasy that a huge Nor'easter blows in from the Sou'west on Christmas Eve and the Santa and the reindeer go airborne, with all that hot air inside them. They travel for a few hundred miles and end up above a house in the suburbs of Cleveland, and inside the house a husband and wife are trying to break it to their son that Santa Claus is just a story that parents make up to prepare their kids for the many disappointments of life. They're enjoying the reality check a little too much, because the kid is always rubbing it in their faces that they don't understand the first thing about his math homework. But he has the last laugh when he wanders over to the window and points up at the sky, and there's Santa and the reindeer floating along, as plain as the red-nose on my face. Okay this story went on for too long but it has a happy ending when the kid ends up in the military. All because of these lawns full of blow-up dolls. If I ordered a blow-up doll and I couldn't make it explode, I'd send it back.

     When I was a kid we used to set up our tree on Christmas Eve, put the lights on and decorate it. The trick was not to be too heavy-handed with the tinsel. Just a couple strands on each bough should do it. Unfortunately, we always bought the tree from a sale at our church about a month before Christmas, and by the time Jesus was ready to be born there wasn't a needle left on the tree, just the ornaments and tinsel. I asked my Mom if there was something we could put in the water to make the tree last longer, and she told me to bring her six aspirins. Turns out the aspirins were for her and had nothing to do with the tree; she had six children.

     I'm so glad my Mom never made me go sit on a Santa's lap at the mall. Even as a kid I would have found the whole experience demeaning for both of us. What kind of conversation would I have had with him? We have nothing in common, he's just trying to ply me for information so he can tell my parents what gifts I want, but I may have already mentioned it to them in passing two or seven times. They're over there snapping pictures that they can embarrass me with in the future, goading me to do something I'll regret or say something about his breath. I'm trying my best to make small talk about free agents the Yankees might pursue but my mind is already on line at the pizza place in the food court.

     There's also so much pressure to look good. Everything that occurs between parents and children during the holidays is based on capturing a timeless photo of the event. Remember when parents used to take their kids to the portrait studio for photos? Here, sit on the sled in front of the tree and play with the presents, but you're not allowed to open them. It's the perfect way to get wallet sized shots of your kid with a look of abject sorrow on his face. My Dad would take home movies of us Christmas morning, coming down the stairs to open our presents. After staying up all night too amped up to sleep, he'd hit us with about 3 billion lumens of photography lighting, and there I am, immortalized at age six looking like Peter Lorre in "Hotel Berlin."

     Okay, I will confess to being a bit of a Christmas curmudgeon, but the only so I can plead down to a lesser charge. Whenever a Christmas carol plays during a car commercial I run for the remote control mute button, because I don't want to forever associate my love of Subarus with my hatred of "Carol of the Bells." But I still love hearing a choir sing something majestic, and I still love the smell of a real Christmas tree, and I still love getting together with friends and family when we're able to again, and I still love getting a year older. Maybe I should have ended with the family and friends. Happy holidays to everyone, and please stay safe!

A MERRY COVID CHRISTMAS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-23-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     We were longing for just a small taste of a regular Christmas season, so we sat ourselves in the car for a few minutes while we remembered how to work it, forced ourselves out into the cruel world, and headed for Manhattan just like in normal times. And darned if it didn't feel pretty good. To the casual observer (and this is why you should dress for the holidays), it seems as though we're in a bad scene in a bad movie right now, and Owen Wilson is there, and Vince Vaughn is in it and Steven Seagal is directing, and we're already over budget and trying to do re-writes on the fly and Rotten Tomatoes is going to make a salad of it. I wish we were at least getting paid to be in this bomb, but it's the only bomb we have.

     In normal times we'd have tickets to "A Prairie Home Companion," or a holiday-themed show in a tiny theater in the Village, something campy and quirky. But that'll have to wait until next year. So we wandered over to see the tree at Rockefeller Center, and that was a much different experience from previous years. Instead of being packed onto 49th Street wishing you were on the Number 7 train during rush hour because it was less crowded and a more pleasant experience, you could spread out and do a few calisthenics if you so desired. People were keeping their distance from one another, and I had so much space I was thinking of putting in a bocce court. It was almost civilized.

     We took a few selfies of my thumb with the tree in the background. This year's tree is a 75-foot tall Norway spruce from Oneonta. When they unfurled it they found a small owl hiding in the boughs. They named him Rockefeller, so he might one day be heir to a fortune. He had to travel 170 miles to get here, but at least he didn't have to come all the way from Norway like the tree did. The wildlife center nursed him back to health and released him onto Broadway, which had less people than the desolate forest he grew up in. We sometimes see a barred owl that hangs around in a tree in our back yard looking around for prey that he can swoop down and grab. He had his eye on my neighbor Paul, who was feeding branches into his wood chipper. It's possible that he could have made off with Paul, but he never let go of the wood chipper.

     We had reservations at Tony's on 43rd Street, our favorite Italian eatery. Usually you can look inside a restaurant and tell if it's any good by how many patrons are there. Now, it's quite the opposite, and for once, being scared of every living human seemed vaguely heroic. But the tables were properly distanced, and I was able to slide pieces of veal saltimbocca underneath my mask when no one was around. It was somebody's birthday, and they brought out a giant dessert with sparklers in it, blazing away. In normal times it would have brushed past me and almost lit my hair on fire, but neither the sparklers nor my hair had the heart for it these days.

     Ordinarily we'd head over to 9th Avenue and find a place to knock down a couple cocktails, but not this year. Bars are a breeding ground for sloppy behavior and people tend to let down their guard. Most dumb ideas that people regret were born in bars after a few drinks, and often the dumbest idea was that last drink. Peoples inhibitions go haywire. "Hey honey, you got a beautiful bridge of your nose, just let me see what you got under that mask. Just let me see one nostril and I'll guess the other." And who needs a taproom full of drunk covid molecules running amok? A covid molecule that you ordinarily wouldn't give the time of day can look SO CUTE after a Long Island iced tea.

     On the drive back home we saw so many deer on the side of the parkway that it seemed like they were the only ones having any fun. I asked my wife, don't deer hibernate? Shouldn't they be building a burrow underground or something? Not out carousing around in a giant stag party. I guess I'm a little envious- for once humans are the ones who seem like they don't have it together at all.

     Since our little night out, indoor dining has gone on an unfortunate hiatus. If you blame Cuomo, you're still not getting it. Public enemy number one is the relentless, invisible invader. A close second are large swaths of the entitled, the ill-informed, the mask-less. The reason experts exist is to know more than you and I, and now would be a great time to listen to them. Stay safe and let's all get to the other side together.

     We can't do all the things we usually do right now, but we had a really nice evening. We adjusted, we adapted, we accepted. In normal times we'll remember when there was a "new normal." I can't wait until that's the "old normal."
 

WE WENT DARK

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-17-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     In my other, other life, I've been a rock & roll musician for as far back as I can remember. Actually a lot further back than that, because rock & roll musicians can rarely remember back very far. It's been one of the great passions of my life, and as in other forms of art, there is no better way to process the trials and tribulations of life than to create something that says what normal words, such as "pandemics REALLY suck," cannot say. So I wrote a song about it. It's called "We Went Dark (love in the age of the coronavirus)," and I recorded it in my basement on my cheap 8-track digital recorder. I play all of the instruments on the recording, not because I'm such a great musician, but because when you tell your musician friends that you wrote a song about a highly contagious incurable disease and you'd like them to come over to your house and play on it, you might as well write a song about a dialtone.

     Not to be content with that (it's been a long, long quarantine), I decided to make a video to go with it. If you have four minutes to spare you can give it a listen at the YouTube link below, if you can fit it in between cat videos. I probably should have put some cats into the video, now that I think of it, penguins would have been even better. Or put the word "challenge" in the title and thought of something poisonous for people to swallow during the song. That would have increased my hits and made my song a hit. But it's just me, my camcorder and a cheap editing program, and if you want to swallow anything poisonous, that's hopefully not my fault.

     To mix things up a bit I had my two female bandmates sing in the chorus. I've never been in a band with two women before this one and it's a little different than playing with the guys. With the guys, you could drop a ten-foot Steinway grand piano out of a two-storey window straight onto the lead guitarist's head, and once the dust had settled the drummer, completely stunned, would say, "I didn't know we had a piano player." By comparison, when I'm in a band with two girls, I'm the odd man out, because I'm a man, and because I'm a little odd. I'll give you an illustration to show you what it's like: Pretend I just killed someone, like say, the guy who wrote the "Kars for Kids" jingle, and I refused to confess (although in real life I'd be kind of proud of that). The cops say we want you two girls to wear a wire, and  get him to admit it, do you have any questions? And one or the other would ask, "What color is the wire? Because I think I know what I'm going to wear with it."

     I bought a green screen and boned up on my special effects for the video. I'm pretty sure a nine-year old on Tik Tok could have done the same thing in about 15 minutes, but it took me three months. Part of the reason it took me so long was because of the facial hair. I play each instrument wearing different hair, and I remember sitting outside on the deck with my wife after more than two but less than six margaritas, thinking of different types of facial hair every band member could wear. The conversation was over once I realized how inane it was, and that fact that I ran out of margarita mix at the same time was purely a coincidence.

     However, I soon found out that I hate wearing a beard, and I can't believe that there are baseball players and sculptors and psychoanalysts and such that always have one. In fact, during the pandemic, just about everyone I know grew one, even the women. But I couldn't wait to get rid of it. After I took a shower it simply refused to dry, and food would end up in it, not even necessarily my food, and what if I got it caught in a metal lathe or broke off in an ice storm? A life with a wet, frozen beard full of food chewed up by a metal lathe was not for me, so I had some other variations on the theme, but nothing too extravagant. It's not like I could put my hair in a bun or anything, even if I had a bun that could hold all of it, and I limited myself to hairstyles that could be achieved in prison.

     The outtakes at the end of the video prove how valuable it is to have a qualified stunt man to do the things that you should have the common sense not to do. For instance, when I was walking my dog in the woods in back of my house I noticed this Tarzan vine, and I thought, wow, I should videotape myself swinging from this vine, and who knows, maybe it will give health insurance claims adjusters something to think about in their spare time. I don't know how people usually find out that you shouldn't swing from a Tarzan vine after you've had two knee surgeries, but I found out the easy way. Another shot I wanted to get was of me spinning around on a chair with the camera trained on me, so that it would look like the world was spinning around behind me. All of a sudden I'm Stanley Kubrick, only not as easy to work with. So I wedged a swivel chair between two logs in the woods and pointed the camera at my face. It's the type of thing that if your mother caught you doing, she'd say, "Don't do that, you'll break your neck." And if you kept on doing it SHE would break your neck to speed up the process. Long story short, I almost broke my neck.

     In closing, let me just say that as artists, we all suffer for our art. And during a pandemic, we suffer in solitude. So I can't wait until this whole thing is over and I can share my suffering with YOU.

THANKSGIVING LEFTOVERS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-10-20)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

     I hope everyone had a small and safe Thanksgiving- good things come in small packages these days. Turkey size is proportionate to gathering size, and even Governor Cuomo had to downscale his dinner after he took some flak about it. He was planning to invite his Mom, who is 89-years old, until people found out and called him a hypocrite for telling everyone else to scale down. I was actually planning to do the same thing as Cuomo, but his Mom wouldn't answer my calls. Everyone's looking for small turkeys this time around, but they're harder to find since they can hide more easily. Ours was sized somewhere between a cedar waxwing and a pileated woodpecker, but it was of impeccable moral character. My sister Diane said she got a 26-pound turkey for $26 dollars, which was quite a bargain. If you got the same deal in British money it would be pound for pound the best deal ever. I know there's a joke there somewhere but I was obviously unable to find it. Anyway, my sister posted a picture of her turkey and I swear it looks like it could bench press about one-fifty straight out of the oven. It had an actual 6-pack.

     I've heard people say that they spatchcocked their turkey, something that it must have taken a lot of guts to admit. To spatchcock a turkey you simply cut it down its back with a pair of scissors, remove its backbone, and, listen, I'm just not cut out for this sort of thing because I'm afraid giblets will be involved, and the thought of it is just offal so you'll have to figure it out yourself. We cook a regular turkey in the oven, just as the Pilgrims would have done it, if they had a regular turkey or an oven. You probably heard about the original Thanksgiving, back at Plymouth Rock. If I was there it would have only been because I mistook it for a rock festival. "Hey," I ask one of the elders (hard to find an elder who is older than me), "one question: why do y'all wear your belt buckles on your hats? The hat stays on fine, but don't your pants fall down?"

     Actually there is quite a rivalry going on between the folks in Plymouth and the Pilgrims down in Virginia, who also lay claim to a Thanksgiving celebration two years before the 1621 affair written about by colonists in Massachusetts. Either way, the English were in charge of the meal, and they are rarely mentioned for their exciting cuisine. If the Italians had popped over on the Mayflower I could be eating Margherita pizza while I watch the football game on TV instead. The traditional accounts tell of the settlers struggling through the long winter, and the Wampanoag native people helping by providing them with turkey seeds, or whatever, but the real story is of a much more complicated and wary alliance between two camps that needed each other to survive.

     There is also a rumor that Benjamin Franklin once proposed the turkey as the national bird, which is false, even though he did once expound on the virtues of the bird as opposed to the bald eagle in a letter to his daughter. Franklin WAS consulted about his thoughts on a national symbol, and his suggestion was a depiction of “Moses standing on the shore, and extending his hand over the sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm pharaoh who is sitting in an open chariot.” Those who were still awake by the end of the sentence immediately bonked themselves on the head with a ball peen hammer to try to induce a coma. I don't think the bald eagle is a bad choice, but the thing is bald, for heaven's sake. Certainly it's less risky to say out loud than "titmouse" or "peacock," and less time consuming than "undulated tinamou," so I guess it's fine. I think the founding fathers wanted a bird that looked like it wasn't going to take any crap, one that looked like it could swoop down and snatch your toupee if you said something unflattering about certain members of Congress, even though it was common knowledge.

     I saw an article in the Times that theorized that the reason Trump wanted to stay in office this badly even though he was so ill-suited for the job was that he loved to do things like pardon turkeys for Thanksgiving. Well in Trump's defense, who WOULDN'T want to do that? The president gets to choose one of them to live while sentencing the other to death, like in an episode of "Wiseguy." I would whisper to the chosen one, "I'm going to let you live for now, but take a good look at what happens to your little friend, and if you breathe one word about this to anybody, it'll be YOU next time. Do we understand each other?" And the turkey says, "We're live on four networks and everyone in America heard you." "In that case things aren't looking so good for you."

     By this time we've finished our tasty dinner, had our walk around the neighborhood and are sitting down to dessert, arguing about whether or not the Felix the Cat balloon once collapsed and killed someone during the parade. I don't know if there is alien life on other planets or not, but in my fantasy they come over to Earth (they don't call it that) and land on 6th Avenue right in the middle of the Thanksgiving parade (they do call it that). When they get on the radio they report back the findings to the home planet: "You can't believe the size of the cats they have here, if one sits on your lap it'll kill you." Happy holidays to you, your family and your cat.