Interesting Times

Interesting Times May 10, 2017

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I hardly know where to begin.

I feel as though I had four or five blog topics picked out, but the news just keeps building up.

Perhaps I’d better just go through my day yesterday in chronological order.

It all started when I woke up, far too late, with my daughter demanding breakfast and my head in a fibro fog. I think I ended up serving her an ice cream cone.

I checked the news, thinking it would be a steadying experience. That was when I read the story about Milo Yiannopoulos’s “comeback party” in an abandoned Florida mansion. And I do encourage my non-squeamish readers to go ahead and read that embedded article from beginning to end, looking at the pictures, and reminding themselves every so often about that infamous public Facebook conversation wherein Austin Ruse of the Center for Family and Human Rights declared himself a “Milo fan.” Think about it while you look at that photo of Milo entering the party flanked by shirtless male escorts, wearing an albino boa constrictor as a scarf.

That boa may be the saddest thing about the party, frankly. The article claims that party guests were promised “Exotic animals,” but the only one mentioned is the snake. If I got an invitation to a party featuring exotic animals, I would presume there would be a petting zoo with at minimum pygmy goats, pot-bellied pigs, bison, a baby giraffe and a pony. I would come to the party, expecting to ignore the human beings and snuggle with the animals all night long. And there I’d be, stuck with Milo’s Boa and the Big Trashy Comeback Bash. Not my idea of a good time.

I decided that perhaps the news wasn’t going to be the pick-me-up I needed. I set Rosie up to do crafts and play with her Avengers action figures while I blogged about Saint Benedict.  Then it was lunchtime, and after lunch there were chores– still with the amusing bad head fog that makes me feel as though my eyes can’t focus. Then it was time to catch a bus to the Rural King, for seedlings for the vegetable patch.

Rural King is a cavernous, airplane hangar-sized store full of farming, hunting and gardening supplies.  It’s what America would look like if America was what America thought it was. They have free sacks of popcorn and overstuffed rocking recliners in camo print, fascinatingly ornate hen houses and torturous metal cages for immobilizing cattle. They have garden plants of all kinds at a reasonable price. They have ornate cowboy boots. They have enormous plastic barrels of generic cheese balls. They have cans of Manwich for ninety-nine cents. They have a floor model of a pond-aerating windmill, where Rosie stopped and played in the murky water for a few minutes. This time of year, they even have several varieties of live baby chicks.  If I ever hold a comeback party for myself, I will not hold it in an abandoned Florida mansion; I will hold it in Rural King.

I was thoroughly happy when I got back on the bus with my seedlings.

Then I found out that the president had fired James Comey, in a letter which was all over the news before Comey found out. This, of course, had nothing to do with the Comey investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, never mind that within a few hours it hit the news that grand jury subpoenas were issued to associates of Michael Flynn. Never mind that we now know that Comey had been seeking extra resources for the Russia probe. Nope. Nothing to see here. Move along. The president just felt bad about how Comey’s investigation of the emails handed him the election on a platter and decided to fire him without notice, all of a sudden, on a Tuesday night. That’s all. They even brought Kellyanne Conway out of stasis, dressed her in youthful pink and pushed her in front of the camera to assure us that we’re taking this the wrong way.

I am so glad that cooler heads prevailed in November and we didn’t end up electing a woman who deleted some emails. She might have gone down in history as the most corrupt president ever. Instead we got the Party of Personal Responsibility, the Party of God, the Party of Family Values, the Party of Abraham Lincoln and Milo Yiannopoulos and Donald Trump.

I switched over to the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That’s a better use of anybody’s time than the news Rose and I watched television and read bedtime stories; then I put her to bed and begged her to stay there for hours, as parents do. Finally, I was alone, but I couldn’t sleep. I was too afraid that the president would try to distract our attention and look “presidential” by bombing something again.

I realized it was the wee hours of a Wednesday morning, so I decided to distract myself with some escapist fantasy. I turned on the new episode of The Handmaid’s Tale. The houses are so clean and tidy in The Handmaid’s Tale. The costumes are so crisp. Everyone has such witty, nihilistic things to say.

At exactly two o’clock in the morning, ten minutes from the end of an extremely angsty episode featuring the usual rape, physical violence, machine guns, intrigue and suspense, the internet hiccoughed and I lost the video. I still don’t know how it ends. I’m not even sure I want to.

Still, it helped keep my mind off things.

When I woke up, Mitch McConnell was rejecting the call for a special prosecutor because there was nothing out of the ordinary here, and Sean Spicer had mysteriously taken another day off of press briefings.

I think I need another trip to Rural King.

(Image via Pixabay)

 

 

 

 


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