Deviant Rambling

Earlier today, I was in the middle of one of my tasks for the day when I received a text from Mom and a picture was attached. She routinely sends random pictures, memes, etc. so it wasn’t unusual until I opened the message. What I saw infuriated me and reminded me that the world we live in is similar to the one I experienced as a child.

A thousand words:

I can remember a time not that long ago when the Klu Klux Klan showed up in our town to have a loud demonstration on the steps of our courthouse. To be clear, it has been decades, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was a child and we were driving through town for errands and there was a group of white-hooded thugs flying their Nazi flags, Nazi saluting the passing cars, and flipping off anyone and everyone who appeared to be not white. At the time, the total non-white population in our town was probably less than 5, so the middle finger was rarely used.

But I have this image seared into my memory because it was a moment when part of my innocence died. These purveyors of hatred murdered it, and I didn’t know at the time how I could live in a world that allowed this kind of thing to exist. I was a child, and hateful messages were being yelled at full volume for all to hear through a megaphone. In the MIDDLE of our town.

I consider that moment as much of a blow to that innocence as the moment I learned about death. I have experienced so much life since then to help soften the blow of bigotry. I have been lucky to lead a happy life, all things considered.

But it is now 2024. I am in my 40s and the wound I sustained as a child reopened with this image. I was reminded that no matter how many things change, some terrible things remain true. Hatred is alive and well and it has a public sympathy I have never seen before in my life.

The white, Christian Nationalists will soon have a strong man in office and the floodgates of hatred will fly open on January 20, 2025. I suspect it will be the beginning of a truly dark time in the story of the United States of America.

Nothing feels outside of the realm of possibility in this version of the world. It feels like it is only a matter of time before hate groups are freely lobbying in the once-hallowed halls of Congress. They will have no one left to stop them, and a leader who encourages the worst instincts in them.

On January 6 of 2021, we had a preview of what this might look like if it were a drunk and disorderly force of ill-informed rednecks and out-loud pieces of shit. The next time it will be men dressed in suits who are cordially invited.

We aren’t better than this and it is a reckoning we will all have to have. I have had mine and I will counsel others when they have theirs. There is no coming back from who we have become as a nation. There is only a chance to rebuild once it all inevitably collapses.

I live in a small town in the Midwest with a population around 6,000. I was born and raised here and I know a lot of people just by a factor of being here over 40 years.

Throughout my life I have traveled and I’ve visited every state except Hawaii. I’ve also visited 18 other countries and counting and I feel my consciousness grows with every addition to the list. Travel has made me better as a human being and gave me an appreciation for the quiet part of the world I live in.

This is a preface to say I have seen many countries and other ways of doing things so that I can make a comparison to where I live. I have visited countries that were far worse off, and I’ve visited countries that I’d move to tomorrow if opportunity presented itself.

With the recent re-election of Donald Trump and the clear and present danger he poses to American Democracy, it has me reexamining the place I live with a fresh perspective and a heightened cynicism. Just for the sake of transparency, the county I live in voted 75% for Trump.

The real life bind I find myself in is now clear. If I see four people I know by name but not close enough to know their political affiliations, I have to assume that three of them voted for Trump. It means that I have to reconsider any interaction I may engage in from now on, and this feels like a violation that I will never recover from. I didn’t choose for my life to be like this, but over the past 8 years, our divisions have become so severe that we have to realign our entire lives to accommodate.

I hate Donald Trump to the core of my being because he makes a mockery of our institutions. It is hard to prioritize which adjectives to use to describe him and there are dozens. None of them are good. I am part of the 25% who can’t see a positive from this outcome.

The quality that concerns me the most is his neverending thirst for power. He has fooled millions of people into believing it is just bombast but he is saying exactly what he intends to do when he is in office again.

Project 2025 and Agenda 47 are the precursors to the American autocratic movement. These insane policy proposals hope to bring us back to the earliest days of our nation when the wealthy owned people literally. It is hard to overstate how bat shit these proposals are, but it would make the country inhospitable for anyone who isn’t a white Christian nationalist.

So three out of four times I see someone, I have to operate under the assumption that they voted for autocracy. I can never look at people the same because it makes me suspicious of everyone equally. I have only been in public a few times since the election but every time I have felt myself on edge like never before. I genuinely hope I don’t see anyone I know who I might have to do the math before I greet them.

And then I visited the store and was confronted with this exact issue. I saw a person I am on a first name basis with and it had been friendly in the past, and I want to keep the relationship intact in that memory. So before he saw me, I made sure he didn’t, so that we didn’t have to reach an impasse. My gut tells me he is one of three and it would have been a full-throated approval of Trump and the coming shift. 

I suppose that eventually I’m going to have to start ripping off bandaids and confronting the topic, but I am still determining how to best handle that. I don’t want the decision stripped from me in the way that Trump foisted it upon me to reconcile. I want to hope that the world will not stand for the threat of an American autocracy and that our institutions will hold but I have serious concerns that they can’t.

Trump won the Presidency.

The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative super majority, 3 of which were elected by Trump. They are in his pocket and they don’t even bother hiding it any more.

The Senate has returned to Republican control, where they will sit and await Trump’s marching orders.

The House remains to be counted but as I write this, Republicans only need to fill 6 4 more seats to retain control.

This represents a full sweep of the apparatus of the federal government for the Republican party, which is now led by a potential dictator who intends to weaponize these institutions to exact his vendetta against all who have wronged him, real or imaginary. He spent all 4 years of his time off letting us all know this is exactly what he would do and now he has every possibility to get what he wants. The party spent all 4 years helping to carefully orchestrate the takeover and go further into debt to Trump politically. Every one of the man’s worst instincts will be encouraged by his sycophantic coterie, and his ego will grow to a size never encountered in any democratic leader. Because he isn’t one of those. He is our Hitler.

I have been hesitant to apply the label to Trump because this is not a small charge to levy against anyone’s character. But Donald Trump has no character. He is whatever people want him to be for the right price. He is a conman that has just scammed over 74 million Americans into believing he is their savior. Their honest to fucking Christ savior. He has gone so far as to say that he survived two assassination attempts because the perfect, blonde haired, blue eyed Christian god wanted him to rule. He desires unwavering support and flattery, and expects obedience always. If you do not possess these characteristics, then you are the enemy within. He has given every indication that he will use his now vast resources to exact his revenge on this roster of people, which numbered around 70 million when the dust had settled at the polls. 70 million of us are in completely uncharted waters now as we consider that we may become targets of the federal government and the unfathomable power it wields.

So now a trip to the store triggers a real-time threat assessment of every person I see, regardless of whether or not I know them. 

• Three of four people support the violation I experience as I assess them.

• Three of four people support the willful violation of people I know and love as family because of their identity.

• Three of four people support the wholesale violation of women’s rights. 

• Three of four people are indifferent or complicit in the violations that over 70 million of us will experience in the coming years. An additional population of immigrants numbering in the 10s of millions are also being threatened, but they can’t speak because they are the first official targets.

• Three of four people support the most insane, unplanned, mass deportation that the country has ever seen, too ignorant to look into how that may affect them.

• Three of four people support the candidate who has indicated his full cooperation in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

• Three of four people support Russia’s fight to conquer and absorb Ukraine.

• Three of four people are willing to hand their government to billionaires who have nothing in common with them and are using their endless wealth to gain further control of the world.

• Three of four people are willing to allow a convicted felon to evade justice entirely through his duly elected position and his ownership of the highest court in the land.

• Three of four people have become more like the man they voted for: completely concerned with themselves and their bottom line.

• Three of four people couldn’t bother to take 2 minutes to look up what a tariff is and deduce that they will have higher prices on everything if tariffs are imposed across the board.

• Three of four people sold me and the rest of the 70+ million out for cheaper eggs, which the conman convinced he could deliver with those regressive tariffs and by eliminating unnecessary waste like the Department of Education, the CDC, and the FED.

But he was lying about his intentions. He wanted power. And three of four people I see where I live bought the lie without bothering to read any of the fine print to see what it will cost them. The cost is democracy, and all 335 million of us will pay.

I spent the entire day Wednesday, November 6th wondering how more than half of the country decided on four more years of Trump. I heard all of the reasons given, chief among them the economy and the border, and none of them were sufficient in my mind to justify the risk we have just taken.

I am well aware of the typical Democratic stances on things and I understand the frustration of these people. But they have been sold a series of lies yet again by the most inexplicably successful conman.

They want the economy to improve but he will destroy it with regressive tariffs, reigniting inflation and shoving us directly into recession territory. He has literally said how much of his platform relies on these tariffs and has a fundamental misunderstanding about how they actually work. It is now public knowledge that importers almost always pass the tariffs on to consumers in raised prices, meaning the favorite argument they made for him will actually harm them instead. They were so desperate for change and relief that they chose a man who has zero regard for their struggles and is actively railing against them with this policy.

They want the border closed and a great deal of them support the truly insane mass deportation plan he is proposing. I completely understand the necessity for a better solution to the border problem, but the deportations will destroy the American economy overnight. Nevermind the massive debt that this will incur at the expense of… wait, who will it be? Yeah, the fucking taxpayers. The estimates for this backwards, racist, xenophobic policy start at $315 billion all the way up to just shy of $1 trillion, and you’ll get the bill every payday in the form of higher taxes. You know, the high taxes that they said they’d never levy against the working class? That’s who pays for all of this shit, you.

He promised to take America to a new Golden Age, harkening to the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world. He didn’t bother mentioning the explosion of wealth inequality that occurred during this period in history and how all of the wealth consolidated near the top just before it all imploded in the Great Depression. Within the first two days of his victory, the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet gained almost $100 billion in net worth and far as I can tell, those of us on the bottom just got to watch the divide grow exponentially.

The policy positions that had Americans voting will also open the door for potentially permanent changes in the way our government functions at the federal level. As usual, the concerned voters could only be bothered with surface-level details about who would probably be better for their checkbook, and they went with the Republican because they thought it was better than what the Democrats could do. This opened the door for the Republican party to sweep all three branches of the federal government and with the Supreme Court already on the payroll, they can make changes that will take decades to undo. The most hyper conservative among them used the playbook from 1981 and updated it for modern times and it will be on the desk of President Trump the second he sits at the Resolute Desk. The team assembled around him is an all-star cast of the most dogmatic conservatives the planet has ever seen, and they will hand him a stack of dozens of executive orders to sign on day one. Any action that requires Congress will have zero argument because Trump has battered the entire party into playing ball or having their careers extinguished. If the Supreme Court needs to be called upon, it will only take a free vacation or two to get the votes necessary. But the fact of the matter is, the justices would have done it for free, because they are no longer afraid to break the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution.

The people have spoken, and they said “We can’t be bothered to look beyond the surface level details of a candidate who has promised us the world. We take him at his word unless it is about how he intends to become a dictator, then he was just kidding.”

And maybe those of us who tried and voted against him are just raising alarm bells and nothing will come of his presidency. But why the fuck would you risk the alternative?

Another Trump presidency pushes our country closer to authoritarianism and it is more important than ever that good ideas are allowed to exist.

Resistance comes in many forms, and in keeping with the spirit of how our country got started, it doesn’t always have to involve violence. It is always preferable for peace to be the overarching theme and I believe that is still the case now.

But our words can serve as the fuel for our never-ending fire for the American Democracy. The flames may dwindle in the face of the harrowing years ahead, but so long as one ember remains, so must our commitment.

Our country is sick and it will require a combination of treatments to return to the health we have known in the past. It is incumbent upon us as creatives of all kinds to administer the sort of life-giving medicine the country so desperately needs.

In this time of uncertainty and with the potential abyss we see before us, we must stand firm and create with reckless abandon. Our protest is in the work and the world will know the spirit of America is alive and well in the hearts, minds, and talented hands of creatives.

If ever there was a moment to protest it is now. We must do so in our work and become fearless in our expression. The task is daunting but you will enjoy the unlimited support from other creatives who will not stand for injustice.

Use the First Amendment as the weapon it is. It’s placement atop the list makes it hard to touch no matter how brazen the threat.

We all have the power to bring our nation back from the brink but we must be bold and refuse to accept defeat. This isn’t some coded message about the validity of elections. Harris lost, conceded, and guaranteed a peaceful transition of power from the administration. Because that is how it has always worked with one huge asterisk next to 2020, a year filled to the brim with asterisks.

I speak instead of the kind of relentless conviction we need to cultivate in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

There is darkness in the uncertainty, but the light we possess is as the sun: infinite, life-giving, and illuminating. Shine this light for all to see. It may be the only way to see us through whatever comes next.

The clown show that is the 2024 election will conclude tomorrow when polls close. We all understand that although that will be the end of voting, the counting will take a few days to conclude.

Here are a few of my predictions based on what I know about the candidates, our system, and the time we are in.

Trump will declare victory sometime Tuesday evening.

This particular elephant will try to be in every room on every tv screen as he declares victory in the election no matter what the evidence suggests. He will also say that any votes counted after he has declared this premature victory are fraudulent. The 2024 episode of The Big Lie will commence in full force, and the lawsuits will begin in earnest on Wednesday, just a few hours after he’s declared victory.

Republicans historically have a lead into the evening, and it even has a name. The Red Mirage happens because they will see early voting totals favor them as in-person ballots are counted first and this favors the Republicans. Just as it looks like they might run away with it, the Blue Shift occurs and Democrats make up the difference and even get ahead sometimes. It happens every single election cycle and this time will be no different.

As has been the case for the past couple, one candidate will be crying foul the second the Blue Shift begins to occur.

If Harris loses and it is called by the media, she will accept the news and offer congratulations to the other party.

I would stake all of the money in the world on this one. Harris hopes to unify and in the event of a loss, she will do what politicians have done since the beginning of our little republic. She will bow out gracefully. But the fury will be right behind her eyes because she understands what is at stake and the direction we might be headed now.

She will not declare fraud of any kind, and she will request recounts as they are warranted and justifiable. Because she is a reasonable person who understands that certain margins can call for a recount.

The Battleground States might be close enough to have automatic recounts.

I can honestly say I don’t understand how an election between these two people can be as close as they are calling it, but if it’s remotely true, the Battleground States will close with razor-thin margins. They may be so close that they’re automatically recounted, but if not that will bring me to my next point.

Trump will demand recounts everywhere he needs to secure electoral victory, no matter what the margin is.

He’ll say it is because of the non-existent fraud that is taking place at a federal, institutional level. The lawsuits started after the 2020 election and they have been jamming the dockets of every court in the nation since then to push the lie. It has been enough to convince plenty of rational, well-meaning citizens that our elections are somehow unsafe and unfair when nothing could be further from the truth.

Just because you lose doesn’t mean the system is the reason. Sometimes you just lose.

If Trump wins and Congress flips to all-red, it could be the end of this experiment in democracy.

With fewer guard rails in place and control of every aspect of the federal government, the Republican Party will do its best to set back the clock on everything 50+ years. We will begin our descent into autocracy and I believe we’ll be a stone’s throw away from another Civil War. This is an extreme that I will not stick around to be a part of because this country is not worth fighting over. I don’t believe any country is because it’s an imaginary concept with a line drawn on a map.

I will be thrilled if I’m just being dramatic, but I’m prepared to get out of here if things go the way I fear they will.

Polling could be meaningless.

Essentially every poll in the nation indicates that this is a coin flip. If it’s just inaccurate data, this could be a landslide one way or the other. I suspect it will be close but the polling indicates that it will be Bush 2000 close. That makes me sick to my stomach because…

The Supreme Court could decide this election.

The 6-3 conservative super-majority in that court tells me that any requests made of them will result in a Trump victory. Half of the 6 conservative justices owe their position to the man, and I completely understand how they will see things. It is insane to believe that any group of humans, no matter how small, can be truly impartial. If it goes to this court, Trump wins.

If Trump loses, there will be political violence.

He will tell his followers outright this time. No coded language about fighting like hell. To be clear, just like the last time, he will say it and then walk the other way. He will not be part of the actual violence, he’ll just cause it and blame everyone else. It’ll start as soon as the day after the race is called, but I’d say it’s a possibility from now until Inauguration Day in some form or another.

January 6, 2025 will make 2021 look like a dress rehearsal.

All of this is just speculation.

I hope that I’m dead wrong about all of this.

I want there to be a peaceful transition of power and a return to boring normal politics. The kind of time where I don’t care what is happening in Washington because it won’t set us back to a time when separate but equal was considered normal. A time when we can get back to disagreeing with one another respectfully instead of everything becoming a life-or-death fight over identity issues.

We are all basically looking for the same things in life and most of the time the government simply does not need to be involved.

Today I had a routine doctor’s appointment to refill a prescription that I’ve been taking for over 13 years for my ongoing and permanent issues with my stomach. It should have been a regular visit, but my doctor has always been somewhat… eccentric. But today it took a turn that I honestly didn’t see coming.

Almost immediately, the conversation veered off the road into the ditch and we were into politics. I have learned many things since around this time in 2016 and chief among them is to keep my leanings and opinions out of the conversation unless I felt I was in friendly company. This strategy has served me well and helped me avoid what I can only assume were dozens of confrontations in that time.

Today was going to be no different and I honestly didn’t think it would be an issue. But my doctor immediately began discussing fringe ideas and gauging my receptiveness to them. I steered away from the truly insane things a few times and did my best to keep it on the level and about, you know, my health. Eventually we got back to why I was there and it went well for a few minutes before we were back off the rails talking about transgender surgeries and a dereliction of duty in the highest levels of government. You know, the shit your crazy uncle tries to bring up at Thanksgiving? Yeah, all of that.

So I continued to steer and as the appointment concluded and I walked out of the office, I felt a genuine sense of confusion about what had just occurred. This is a medical professional in his mid-60s. He has hurled some insane talking points my way over the years but today was uniquely unhinged. I never even approached the subject of his vote this year, but it’s safe to say from his verbal crucifixion of the Biden Administration that we might not be on speaking terms if I asked.

But the bigger concern I have is that a medical professional of any kind would allow this to affect his judgment as a physician. I am a good listener and stay quiet when I don’t have anything to contribute, so things never take a bad turn, but I can’t say for a fact that all of his patients would do the same. And that bugs me.

If our medical professionals can’t even remain objective in the face of the world we live in and the insanity of it all, then what does that say about our institutions in general? I’m not sure it says anything. And maybe his eccentricity is an anomaly in the industry. But if it isn’t, fuck. Just fuck.

Election Day 2024 is about two weeks away now and it feels like counting down the days to the next world-changing event I’ll experience in my lifetime. I’m just so accustomed to things going sideways that I expect that no matter who wins there will be fallout and I’ll get to watch people be their absolute worst until it settles down.

It is my latest ready-made excuse to sit and wait for something to happen, and paired with the necessity for relaxation caused by fractured ribs, I feel useless. This feeling extends to my creative work and strangles the motivation from me and I just want the time to be past so I can know the world I’ll live in for the next few years.

I don’t love feeling this way but it’s where I’m at and there’s no sense in trying to pretend I’m anything I’m not. I’m not alright but that’s alright.

While on a trip in Scotland, I managed to misstep my way into a hell of a fall and fractured three ribs. The moment it happened I was sure that something terrible had occurred and the resulting pain made me question whether or not to test the “free” healthcare available in the U.K.

I opted to go the route of all of the stubborn men who had died before me and gave myself some time to assess the pain and if it was proceeding to wane. Once I returned to the States, I made an appointment with my local clinic and got an x-ray. The x-ray indicated that I had fractured ribs 8, 9, and 10 on the left side. They informed me that if I was concerned, I could utilize a referral to orthopedics to review options. If nothing had improved at the first and second week mark, I decided that I would take this under advisement and see ortho to be safe.

Now that one full week has passed, I can safely say that my pain level is tolerable with acetaminophen and ibuprofen and taking it easy. Sleep is possible now and it’s only certain actions that cause things to flare up and remind me I am still healing. By the second week, I honestly believe the painful portion of the healing will have passed, and the rest will be happening without my knowledge.

I didn’t need any reminders of my mortality and how close we are at any moment to the most excruciating pain imaginable, but the message was received loud and clear. The initial moments after impact had me comparing the pain to anything I have ever experienced and noting that the fall was equal or worse than any of those events. This includes recovery from open abdominal surgery and the initial shock of my hip replacement. It was that kind of pain for days, and I never felt sure that I could avoid it.

The prognosis for rib fractures is fairly good, and I am sure that mine will be fine once they have healed up. I will see to this with a follow-up after several weeks and request images to confirm things healed as expected.

I’m glad it wasn’t anything more serious and I’m bummed that it basically ruined a couple of days at the end of the trip, but the bright side is that everything will be alright.

Only through the persistent reminders of others can I understand that I can live a life that isn’t centered entirely around the goals of those around me. This is an epiphany that people should have at some point early in life so they can build what they want.

I started off by choosing the most obvious path that was laid before me, not realizing that I would shelve this epiphany for decades. Now I’m 42 and as I have alluded to many times, I am just now starting to understand this fundamental truth.

The life I want is attainable, but I first need to decide what it looks like. I find this to be as daunting as I would have as a young man because it is the first time I have understood this to be true. In reality, I could have done this all along. I could have abandoned the easy path in front of me in favor of a course of my own design, but being a young man at the time, I saw no advantage in such an unknown and potentially risky choice. So I took the easy way and convinced myself that I should do the same given any chance in the future.

I take responsibility for all of those choices now as a man who has decades more life experience to show me that even a road of easy turns can lead you to a dead end. That is where I have found myself. A long stretch of road sits behind me and a dead end before me that I coasted to get to. There are an unlimited number of other roads surrounding me, stretching in every direction imaginable. Every one of them is new to me, so I lack any understanding of the difficulties they may pose. So I am staring down a new life that I’m starting from scratch with the potential lives of many different stripes.

I am left to discard the life I have known because the baggage I continue to drag along from this chapter is a burden I no longer wish to bear. When I say “from scratch” I genuinely mean I am starting from zero. This means that I have innumerable and unknown challenges, but I will, perhaps for the first time, be entirely in charge of my future. There is no easy path. There is nothing approaching certainty.

But it will all be as I choose it, and for myself alone. So that I may become who I was meant to be all along.

I am sure there will be millions of posts today about the events that occurred on September 11, 2001 and I will be one of the voices in the chorus. It has been 23 years since that fateful day and those of us who are still around have seen more than our fair share of shit since then.

All of that extra experience thrown onto a pile of bad times takes nothing away from the memories I have of that sunny day in September. The horror as it all unfolded and the understanding that it would be our next excuse to send soldiers off to die in the name of vanquishing a foe that we helped to create. The fine details have become smooth with time, but the feelings I experienced remain as clear as ever.

Something fundamental changed in me that day and it fostered a healthy skepticism about the government and its intentions for the citizenry. I was skeptical and remain so to this day, bolstered by the many deliberate and unintentional missteps since. I will never trust them and that’s fine, that isn’t what today is about. I don’t want to feel anything whatsoever about our government because they just go to work and do their job every day, but that isn’t the world we live in.

Today is about remembering the fallen and feeling the familiar sting of a squarely landed blow to our collective jaw. We haven’t been the same country since, and many of us would commit a litany of offenses to return to the one we lived in on September 10, 2001. I don’t know a single person who was personally affected by this tragedy other than vague secondhand accounts, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting and it probably never will. It was the general human suffering that was on display for all to be seen.

The same kind of suffering we are seeing televised from all around the world now in places like Gaza and Ukraine. Pointless bloodshed for sociopolitical gain. Posturing to look tough while civilians are being bombed in appalling numbers. Instead of making the reasonable calls for sanity and a cease fire in every direction, we stoke the flames of war because we haven’t learned a fucking thing. We deserve whatever comes next based on our conduct and it doesn’t look promising for the world.

To those personally affected by the events on September 11, 2001, I extend my deepest condolences and the wish that some day you may find the peace you lost on that day.