A la Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Macbeth, natural phenomena go haywire. The earth becomes feverous and shakes; lions are seen strolling up K Street. By clock it is day, but night has strangled the sun, casting darkness about the capital. When Trump places his hand upon the Bible, his palm and fingers are seared. Franklin Graham blames all of these unnatural events on the LBGTQ community.
Kid Rock recites an Inaugural poem.
O-Da-Lin in the USA
Yo,Yo,Yo, Yo Da Lin in the USA
A delicious break from socialists.
Yo Da Laheeeeoooooooo
Here we go, Prez; take it away!
Cash bars are set up at all of the Inaugural Balls. Trump pockets the profits.
The Rest of January
Led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Congress scraps Medicare and replaces it with vouchers and tax credits entitling bearers deep discounts in burial/cremation services.
February
Lorne Michaels goes missing.
Trump signs an executive order making Moscow Washington’s “Sister City.”
President Trump nominates Roy Moore for the Supreme Court.
March
Attorney General Jeff Sessions charges Hillary Clinton with treason.
President Trump signs an executive order replacing Arabic numerals with Roman Numerals.
NBC cancels SNL.
April
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
May
Jared Kushner successfully accomplishes a hostile takeover of the New York Times. The New York Times buys the New York Post. The New York Post buys the Washington Post. The Washington Post buys The Village Voice.
Celebrations break out in trailer parks across America as Congress abolishes the Estate Tax.
June
President Trump celebrates his LXXI birthday at the Eastern Whitehouse in St. Petersburg, Russia. He and Putin announce a new joint Trump/Putin resort in the Crimea.
July
Hillary Clinton begins a hunger strike.
August
Trump takes a month off. Congress recesses.
Card carrying communists Santa and Mrs. Claus drown in Arctic Ocean.
SNL replaced by comedy show starring Andrew Dice Clay.
September
Trump awards Howard Stern a Presidential Medal of Freedom Award.
The Statue of Liberty takes her own life, and Trump replaces her with a statue of Melania.
October
Evangelicals lobby Trump to ban Trick or Treating as a satanic communistic ritual that encourages the redistribution of candy among the masses.
Trump refuses in what the NY Times editorial board calls “the greatest act of personal heroics since Sir Thomas More was beheaded for his convictions.”
November
Congress repeals the ACA and replaces it with free first aid kits to all uninsured families (while supplies last).
It was four thirty in the morning, and we were walking down the road, no telling how far we were from Skopje—or anything. I just wanted to sleep. The bus had dropped everyone off in the middle of nowhere instead of Skopje’s bus station. The driver had called his friend, a cab driver, to take us the rest of the way. It was par for the course for there to be some unexpected “tax,” some unexpected scam; it was too late for these things to be surprising.
Still, the scam pissed off Josh. We didn’t really have a choice, but somehow Josh chose anyway. He refused to be pushed into paying for a taxi, keeping his honor and money intact. But there was no telling how far we were from the city, how far away from the hostel, how far away we were from sleep. It had been a ten hour ride…
It’s been a week since the surreal realization came to me that Donald Trump would become the 45th President of the United States, an outcome that seemed about as likely as Harlan County, Kentucky, being named by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the top resort destinations in the world.
By the way, I don’t personally believe in the 5 stages of grief. Although Trump’s victory surprised me, there was no denying it (step 1). Not only did the headlines scream it, but the faces of my colleagues at work wore a degree of despondency I hadn’t seen since I walked the streets of Leningrad in ’89.
Nope, there was no denying it, nor, for that matter, any relief in getting pissed off (step 2). I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird. I can “crawl” into Trump supporters’ skin and see things from their perspective (fear of the Big Bad Other), even if I can’t figure out why lower middle class service employees want to end the estate tax or why rust belt denizens believe Trump has their backs when he’s admitted he’d grab their daughters’ “pussies” if he found them attractive. Bargaining (step 3)? With whom? Satan? No thanks. I’ve seen Faustus (Richard Burton) dragged off to hell in that ‘60s movie, and it’s not a pretty sight.
No, I’ve skipped those first three steps and have settled into the 4th stage, Depression with a capital D.
To combat the existential-horrorshow-country-going-to-be-run-by-an-incompetent- megalomaniac-too-slothful-to-even-bother-getting-a-transition-team-going blues, I’m boycotting political media, drowning my sorrows in high gravity IPAs, and assuming fetal position every night at 9:00 pm in hopes of attaining at least a fitful version of sleep.
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
Come to think of it, a vacation to Harlan County might not be such a bad idea after all. It suits my state of mind.
** FILE ** In this Nov. 5, 2008 file photo, Bruce Springsteen plays his guitar in New York. On Wednesday, Feb. 4 , 2009 Springsteen said he was furious with Ticketmaster calling its selling practices a “conflict of interest” after complaints that the vendor was redirecting fans to a more expensive ticket seller owned by the company. (AP Photo/Stuart Ramson, file) NY128
As I write this at 8:07 EST on Election Day of 2016, I feel obligated to throw out a couple of clichés, for we couldn’t really exist without clichés. Without clichés, we’d have to be always original, which would exhaust us, and I’m pretty much always exhausted anyway.
Cliché #1: “This is the most important election in our lifetime.”
You hear this cliché every election, even during the 2012 presidential election, which featured two very rational Christians with opposing economic views, who, by the way, had both ushered through a program to provide healthcare to their constituencies.
This election, on the other hand, pits two very different people against one another, one, a rationalist, the other, a megalomaniacal Exposed Nerve of Spasmodic Resentment.
So this time around, the cliché is valid: this is the most important election in our lifetimes.
For whatever reason, many people tend to despise Hillary Clinton. Part of this antipathy, I think, is the product of a long history of [cliché alert] hatchet jobs perpetrated by the Far Right, which dredged up the White Water non-scandal, accused her of murdering Vince Foster, and now of being funded by the same people who bankroll ISIS. If you keep hearing over and over accusations of misconduct, you eventually come to believe that a person accused of so many misdeeds must be dishonest.
Plus, her being an uppity woman doesn’t help
Of course, it’s not as if Clinton doesn’t possess flaws. She’s calculating (viz. the Iran war vote) and can pay fast and loose with the facts, as we’ve seen with the private email server; however, when it comes to mendacity, ain’t no politician I’ve ever encountered can [cliché alert] hold a candle to Donald J Trump. Here’s a handy linkin case you doubt it.
What terrifies me most about Trump is his disdain for democratic institutions. According to the New York Times, he’s contemplating creating a Super Pac to fund entities dedicated to avenge people who opposed him during this election. In other words, he’s assembling an enemies’ list. If he were to be in charge of the executive branch, and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, he would be in position to actually make his radical ideas reality by building a wall, deporting millions, establishing a religious test for immigrants. I can see him embracing rogue agents of the FBI and colluding with Putin, emulating him by ruling our Republic as if he were a mafia don, in other words, turning the US into a thugrocacy.
Cliché #2: Today’s election is the only poll that matters/turnout will determine the outcome.
Well, duh.
So here are the choices.
Stay home reading the collected poems of Ezra Pound.
Embrace self-sanctity and vote for Jill Stein. As you watch the Dow plummet with Trump’s election and your retirement savings [cliché alert] go up in smoke, at least you can go to sleep at night knowing you were true to your ideology.
Vote for Gary Johnson. Ditto the Dow and your retirement savings. So what if he thinks Aleppo is subgenre of Jamaican ska, wants to abolish the fed, favors banning student loans and allowing people on no-fly lists to keep their assault weapons!
Emulate Ted Nugent and vote for Donald J Trump.
Emulate Bruce Springsteen and vote for Hillary R Clinton.
Emigrate to Costa Rica, Ireland, Portugal, etc.
One last cliché: The choice, fellow Americans, is yours.
I’ve resigned myself to a Trump victory and the subsequent dismantling of our democracy, have been relentlessly seeking a corrupt apothecary willing to sell me some suicide pills to swallow after the conclusion of my show trial and subsequent sentencing.
After the inauguration, I suspect that one of Trump’s first acts will be an executive order calling for the construction of hundreds of gulags, and he’ll award the contracts to Trump Inc. (creating thousands of jobs!).
Lefty bloggers like I-and-I will be forced to don baggy gray prisoner garb and compelled to spend our days performing backbreaking manual labor. We’re talking deep dystopia, fellow doomsters, a shitshow world that will make Orwell’s Eurasia look like a Club Med resort in Capri.
So while the getting’s still good, I thought I’d take advantage of my First Amendment right of freedom of speech and for one last time mock Trump and his minions.
[cue Pete Seeger] Where Has All the Irony Gone?
In the Age of Irony, how is it possible for Trump to have triumphed? In a land where every late night host is as sardonic as Jonathan Swift, the nation has turned to a despot whose sense of irony robust as Lenin’s corpse.
It’s mind boggling.
Dig this: Just yesterday, in her thick immigrant accent [cough, cough], mechanically looking back and forth from teleprompter to teleprompter as if she were watching a ping pong match in super slo-mo, Melania Trump spoke out against cyber bullying – CYBER BULLYING!
And also yesterday, the Emperor of Orange announced
“I think I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever. Because I have a winning temperament. I know how to win.”
And here’s Kellyanne Faustina Conway, who swapped her soul for book royalties. Certainly, if she were to write a truthful account of the inner workings of the Trump campaign, she would find herself alongside Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in one of those above-mentioned gulags.
No sense of irony here:
The most joyless presidential candidate is running the nastiest, most substance-free campaign in final days. Even sadder? Comes from a woman
True, it would, but on the other hand, if a rose went by the name ort[1], it might not seem to smell as sweet – you purchase a dozen red orts for your love; life is certainly no bed of orts; may I introduce you to my fiancée, Ortmarie?
Because I’m so attuned to the auditory essences of words, it sometimes surprises the combination of sounds parents choose when naming their newborns.
Take the name Michaela Loeb Krawcheck, for example.
Although Michaela’s a lovely name and Michaela Krawcheck’s okay, the first and last names don’t meld well the the spondaic middle name Loeb. It’s too much of a mouthful. Plus, your tongue has to go on a rollercoaster ride up and down the palate to spit it out.
No doubt Loeb is a family name, and homage is being paid. Here’s an alternative: Lila Loeb Krawcheck. Or ditch the Loeb and go Americana with Michaela Lou Krawcheck, or if that’s too low rent for your taste, Michaela Louise Krawcheck. If my last name were Krawcheck, I might go all out with Michaela Loquacia Krawcheck, copping a rhyme with the twin trisyllabic first and second names.
Now, you’re talking.
However, most people are more visual than auditory, and of course, most names have origins, which people may be interested in karmically copping, e.g., Lucas = light-giving, as in lucent (or Lucifer).
Here’s a small sampling of newborn names that are trending in 2016. First, let’s check out female names cited by the website baby center.
Romance is on the rise: Amelia, Olivia, Gabriella, Ariana, and Camila are hot names for newborn girls in ’16. Very Shakespearean.
What I call soap opera names, gender-neutral surnames, remain popular. Among them Addison, Brooklyn, Peyton, and Sydney. These names suggest old money, whether there’s any or not.
One last trend features rather old-fashioned names like Sadie, Ruby, and Hazel, which is interesting because my grandmother was named Hazel, and she had two sisters, Ruby and Pearl. No Sapphires, however. I certainly hope girls who receive these names are blessed with beauty. A homely Hazel or sadsack Sadie might be better off as an Addison or a Brroklyn.
Okay. What’s happening on the Y-chromosome side of the ledger.
Switching to the mom 365 website, we find they actually have the boys’ names ranked according to popularity. Here’s the top ten: Noah, Liam, Mason, Michael, Elijah, Jacob, Ethan, James, Aiden, Benjamin.
What in the world are Michael, Jacob, James, and Benjamin doing in there? I know some Mikes, Jims, Jakes, and Bens, though I suspect that none of these names will be shortened if the school where I teach is any indicator. Michaels are not rare there, but you’ll never encounter a Mike under 30.
Of all the names I ran across in my cursory research, the hot trending name that most caught my eye was Jagger. It sounds cool. It conjures cavorting Mick. But, like I say, make sure it goes well with the other names. John Jagger Jones sounds a lot better than Jagger Tate Garbowski.
Oh yeah, here are a few names not trending in 2016:
Jezebel
Lucretia
Ellie Mae
Hulga
Adolph
Ebenezer
Esau
Onan
[1] Actually, ort is the Anglo-Saxon word for table scrap.
Five years ago when I was a younger whippersnapper in my late fifties, for Fall Break, Judy Birdsong and I rented a house in Saluda, North Carolina. That was the weekend when the brilliant South Carolina running back Marcus Lattimore blew out his LCS, a seeming disaster that had me rending my garments and sending bootless cries to deaf heaven. Given the travails we’ve faced in the last two years, the sorrow I suffered over Lattimore’s not–anywhere-close-to-life-threatening injury seems a colossal waste of my precious time and a lesson in the importance of perspective.
The very next weekend, our hometown, the City of Folly Beach, celebrated Follypalooza, one of the frequent offseason festivals when the authorities close off vehicular traffic on Center Street. Follypalooza provides an opportunity for local businesses in the offseason to replenish their depleted coffers as daytrippers promenade up and down the boulevard drinking beer, purchasing sidewalk prepared food, and listening to various bands playing jazz or rock from strategically placed makeshift stages.
In the week between the visit to Saluda and the celebration of Follypalooza 2011, I had written this rather unkind comparison of the two resort communities:
Saluda’s affect – if you can use that word to describe a town – is the complete opposite of Folly’s tawdrylite. Saluda is your great aunt Christina, once a formidable beauty, now a graceful matron, whereas Folly is your second cousin Brandi who sports a giant Minnie Mouse tat on her shoulder and way-too-short cutoff jeans that slice into her thighs.
However, we wouldn’t want it any other way. As my late mother used to say, “It takes all kinds to make the world/Variety is the spice of life.” So during halftime of the South Carolina UMass game yesterday, a glorious, crisp, sun-splashed Day of Saturn, my spiritual advisor James T Crow and I walked the six blocks from our homes to Center Street to check out the festivities.
headed up Huron to Center Street
One unfortunate change from the Follypalooza of five years ago is that to imbibe on the street, you have to purchase a wristband ($2), which means standing in yet another line. The nice, chatty first grade teacher in charge joked about not feeling compelled to have me extract my wallet to provide proof that my date of birth was sometime before 22 October 1995.
waiting in line
As I stood in line, Jim rustled up some barbecue, and we met at the Jack of Cups where we had a front row seat for the bucking shark ride.
outside the Jack of Cups
Yes, there were a few young kids, a sprinkling of teens, a fair share of tattooed millennials; however, the vast majority of sybarites were old enough to have AARP cards in their wallets, and I witnessed – and what a sad sight it was – doddering hippies, you know men with shoulder length white hair, dressed in tie-dyed t-shirts, wobbling along at a slug’s pace.
My mind wandered off to the nursing home of my future, and I pictured myself among wizened hippies trading stories about how in college they drove halfway across the continent to Mardi Gras while tripping on windowpane acid. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was once their dearest slogan, but as Ulysses once said to Achilles, “Time hath, me Lord, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms to oblivion.”
Yet as Jim and I were preparing to leave, with these melancholy thoughts darkening my day, I bumped into a former student and her mother, a former colleague, pushing in a stroller their son/grandson “Prince Henry.”
Prince Henry
Ah yes! Let’s focus on the positive, not the negative. Let’s quit wasting our precious time lamenting the rightful inevitabilities of existence and enjoy the bright sun, the crisp autumn day, the deep blue sky.
Ladies, gentlemen, bulldogs, and babies, I’d like to introduce you to Henry Heppleworth, a product of the brilliant comic imagination of my expat pal, Charlie Geer, author of Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston. Do yourself a favor and cop a copy here.
Charlie and his wife Concha, who live in Andalusia, Spain, visited Judy and me last summer during an extended stay in Charleston, and I passed along to Charlie a copy of WJ Cash’s The Mind of the South, a fascinating, intuitive study of that section of our great nation that Winston Churchill called “a minstrel show wrapped in an episode of Hee Haw inside of a Euripidean tragedy.”
Yesterday Charlie sent me a link featuring Henry with this message:
[The clip is] Heavily inspired by The Mind of the South, for which I thank you dearly. The clip started out as satire, but is starting to feel like tragedy [. . .] The original script was much more nuanced, but alas, there’s not much room for nuance on YouTube. Hopefully future installments will redeem Henry in some way, once he understands he’s been used and abused by the people he votes for.
Things weren’t exactly off to a hot start. I was waiting at the square at the Isani metro stop, sitting as far away from the homeless as possible. And the stray dogs. It was early, around 7:10, the guide wasn’t supposed to meet me until 7:30, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone besides him. I was tired—I’d been on the road almost a month, and even a private room isn’t the same as your own bed. I looked up and saw a drunk and tough looking man approaching. He was a taxi driver and wanted me to ride. “Rustaveli 10 lari,” he said.
“No, I stay here,” I replied, overly enunciating.
“10 Lari, Didube.”
“I wait for tour. Tusheti.” It didn’t really bother me that he approached. Rather, it bothered me that he was trying to charge me three times the local rate. You can argue double is…
Chances are if you’re waiting at the so-called International Airport in Charleston, SC for a loved one’s arrival from a cancer treatment junket in Houston the day after you discover water dripping from a lighting fixture over your breakfast bar (the consequence of two tropical storms within 6 days having bitch-slapped[1] the barrier island you call home), you might come to the conclusion that your karma sucks, that the odds of your loved one’s arriving on schedule are about the equivalent of Donald Trump’s announcing he’s dumping Melania for Caitlyn Jenner.
if only
And in my case, you’d be right.
Of course, I could have just sat there among those perhaps Pentecostal women in their fusty Little House on the Prairie outfits and watch them stare into their cell phones, or I could decide to make Amoretto Sours out of lemons, to grab the jazz combo by the horns, to get the hell out of there.
It was 7:30, and the flight was now rescheduled to arrive at 9:00.
Go west, Old Man.
Okay, here’s my advice if what happened to me last night happens to you.
Exit the airport and head straight past the Boeing plant, past the 526 on-ramps, straight on International Avenue towards Montague. Keep going until you see the first brightly lit strip shopping center to your left located on Tanger Outlet Boulevard.
That’s where we’re headed, to La Hacienda, specifically into a small barroom inside the restaurant.
the bar inside La Hacienda
I sat in the fourth stool from the left. Two stools over sat a diminutive African American who reminded me of a hatless Thelonious Monk and to my right stood a tall Ricardo-Montalbán-looking cat who was drinking one of these:
I ordered a small Dos Equis on draft and paid in cash. Thelonious was reading a newspaper, working on some chips, the bartender conversing with Ricardo in Spanish, so I decided to leave my beer on the bar and boogie over to Mr. K’s Used Books and Music, conveniently located two stores down. The joint is brightly lit yet cavernous, feels more like a library than a bookstore. I found the non-fiction section and bought a copy of David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
Back at the bar, Thelonious had been replaced by a different African American, a handsome twenty-something wearing a baseball cap cocked to one side and sporting gold caps on his front teeth.
So I reclaimed my seat and flipped to an essay entitled “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle.” The essay is about Sedaris refusing to change seats on a flight to Raleigh as a favor to a woman “wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs” so she can sit with her husband. The woman is the opposite of gracious. Once in the air, she takes off her shoes, and Sedaris, who’s doing the Saturday Times crossword, notices “her toenails were painted white and each one was perfectly sculpted.”
Eighteen across: “Not Impressed.”
Eleven down: “Whore.”
I wasn’t even looking at the clues anymore.
I chuckled a couple of times, but when I hit this paragraph, I let loose one of my godlike laughs:
It’s always so satisfying when you can twist someone’s hatred into guilt — make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns. The problem is that it works both ways. I’d taken this woman as the type who arrives late at a movie, then asks me to move behind the tallest person in the theater so that she and her husband can sit together. Everyone has to suffer just because she’s sleeping with someone. But what if I was wrong? I pictured her in a dimly lit room, trembling before a portfolio of dimly lit X-rays. “I give you two weeks at the most, the doctor says, “Why don’t you get your toe-nails done, buy yourself a nice pair of cutoffs and spend some quality time with your husband. I hear the beaches of North Carolina are pretty this time of year.”
The fellow with the baseball cap to my left said, “You sho seem to be having fun.”
“This book’s hilarious,” I said.
Just then my cell rang. The scoop with Judy, my beloved, is that even though an hour ago her flight was circling Charleston, it had to turn around to refuel in Charlotte. She was calling me to let me know they were getting ready to take off for the thirty-minute flight.
“But I’m having fun at La Hacienda,” I whined. “Why don’t you just take a cab home?”
She laughed.
“I’ll see you in about half hour,” I said.
The man to my left said apropos of nothing that he had beer at home but no liquor and that he just wanted a taste of liquor before he went home. He was drinking something cranberry-colored in a short glass.
I asked the bartender, who called me señor instead of sir, for the tab and told him to add the fellow’s drink to it.
“Thank you,” my friend to the left said. “That’s a blessing.” He shook my hand with the lightest of handshakes. He finished before me and tapped me on the shoulder to thank me again as he walked out.
I asked Ricardo what he has drinking, which was essentially a margarita getting slow-dripped by a pony Corona. It’s delicious,” he said with an elegant Spanish accent.
“Well, so long,” I said once my Dos Equis was history, having successfully resisted the impulse to say “adios.”
When I hit the airport the arrivals sign now said the flight would arrive at 9: 30, but just then I got the text “landed.”
So I waited for Judy, who eventually appeared, wearing her wig, trudging exhaustedly. Over at the baggage area stood the five pioneer-clad sect members. I told one of them that my wife could literally see the island where we live when the plane turned around to head to Charlotte, that it was like a Marx Brothers movie. They found the entire episode amusing and were happy now that Emily had joined them.
And Judy’s bags were the first two off. Maybe our luck was changing.
[1] I’ve searched the Dewey Decimal System of my pre-digital vocabulary for a better descriptor than bitch-slapped, but pounded, drenched,scraped, etc. seem too much or too little or too inappropriately concretely rake-like, so I’ve opted for an admittedly sexist cliché rather than going with the weaker synonym backhanded.
Ladies, gentlemen, bulldogs, and babies, I’d like to introduce you to Henry Heppleworth, a product of the brilliant comic imagination of my expat pal, Charlie Geer, author of Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston. Do yourself a favor and cop a copy 
You Do Hoodoo 