Deviant Rambling

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.

Yesterday I woke up feeling a little off and by the middle of the day I was in a full-on state of depression. Nothing could get me out of the valley I was in and it felt as though I was determined to stay there.

Today is a much better day but the root cause of this foray into despair remains. I have recently come to fully grasp the state of my life and how it has essentially been brought back to the beginning of adulthood. That is to say that in some sense, I am right back to feeling like I did fresh out of high school. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life so I punted and took the simplest path forward, to take part in the family business. I figured I’d get going and take a new path once one presented itself, but no path ever appeared so I maintained course.

Decades later, I had given so much of myself to the business that I could hardly recognize myself outside the context of that endeavor. And the rest is the history I’m trying to pick myself up from still. Two years ago now the primary reason for keeping the doors open died, so I pulled the plug on the business and resigned to take some time to figure my life out.

I’ve been spending most of that time shifting my service from the needs of the business to those of the household I’m a part of and the family I live with. But in doing so I’ve traded one evil I know for another, making zero progress on determining what my actual purpose is and focusing on those needs. Now I feel it is time to pull back on those efforts and truly focus on myself to establish who I am and what I want to be doing with my life.

At 42.

I realize it is somewhere in the middle of the potential game, and that many folks have made their greatest works after even 50. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling daunted by the prospect of starting from zero. I feel the same things I did as that naive young man, but with the wisdom to know that one fact remains true. I am capable of anything I set my mind to. It is that old nugget of inspiration that my folks gave me like so many supportive parents did for their kids. I honestly believe it’s still true, because I have seen first hand what a steady practice can accomplish in any field. Greatness is seldom spontaneous, it’s normally the work of many years behind the scenes.

The work I have been doing all of these years behind the scenes primarily revolves around my writing and I have to acknowledge it as my most profound gift. Transmuting that effort into money takes a lot of work, but the payoff is worth it for the way it makes me feel.

Travel is the other thing that brings me to life just thinking about it, so it follows that I need to write about travels. I also need to approach it as a business and make it the bulk of what I spend my days doing, the way I did with the traditional business I helped run with the family. I don’t need to go for broke, I’m already there.

I consider myself a person who is able to experience the creative works of others deeply. I commit to a complete understanding of the work and the motivations that brought it to life, and I am utterly fascinated by other creatives. This extends to every conceivable medium and it is an amazing time to be alive because the sheer amount of content to consume could serve as a full time job.

Now if there could just be a full time job that allows me to consume creative works non-stop, I’d be good to go for life. I could spend my time immersed in the worlds others dared to create and share. I could promote the works I feel the strongest about and hope that doing so could encourage others to bring their creations to the world.

I believe that the creativity we all possess in some form or another is the primordial spark used to light the flame of consciousness burning in all of us. This spark lit a fire in me decades ago and the fire has never went out, at times consuming everything. Yet other times the flames will be absent but a bed of hot coals remains ready for new fuel indefinitely. So long as I breathe, I continue to provide one of the key components to this infinite combustion.

I want my life to be about the pursuit of creativity. The creativity in others is every bit as crucial to me as my own, and I want to champion this superpower that so many of us possess. How I go about doing that in a way that helps me pay the bills is still just beyond my understanding, but I feel it is possible. It is a task that I am certain I’d be great at, and it would thrill me to no end.

Now that I’m able to stomach the news cycle again, I clicked on an article on NPR that was detailing the polling for the presidential election. The default map displayed is referred to as the “Electoral Weight” map and it shows how much of an effect each state has on the overall election.

It looks something like this, stolen without any sort of permission from NPR:

Pretty self-explanatory, right?

Those of us out here in the middle country are small-to-medium sized squares, almost exclusively dark red. This represents the states that the GOP can reliably count on securing in November. That should come as no surprise when you look at the states in question, many of which push some of the most backward and regressive policies the country is capable of. Perhaps a more important detail is that you can see with few exceptions that most of these states have much less of an effect on the electoral college than the ones on either coast.

I just think it is a fitting picture of how little the concerns of Middle America actually register when it comes to decisions of leadership. This is reflected in the words and actions of both campaigns as they blow tons of cash in the “yellow” states in order to persuade as many independent and undecided voters as they can. Granted, you can make an argument that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are all considered Middle America, but they are exceptions, not rules. But for those of us who aren’t conservative and Middle American, it can feel like we are being abandoned.

I completely understand that it is sound strategy to go for broke in the states that actually decide the election, and I have come to terms with the fact that I don’t live in one of those states. I live where we routinely go back in time 50 years to a simpler, more openly discriminatory state.

It should be noted that all of this is educated guessing based on poll aggregation on today’s date. So if the election were to happen tomorrow on Tuesday the 27th of August, it might turn out like the map shown. This is just data as it stands, and it should be treated with a healthy dose of doubt. I am honestly amazed that there are so many states that are effectively a toss-up, and I’m confident that this election will be another that won’t be decided for several days or even weeks.

I am also confident that if Donald Trump loses, he will refuse to accept defeat. This is not a statement of praise, it is an admonition. He refuses to believe any result that involves him losing in anything, and he’s been that way his entire life. I am not confident I know what will happen next, but I am sure that it will have his face on every news channel and publication for months. The exact thing he strives for to his core will be his if for a brief time: attention.

If he wins, I fear it could be the end of democracy. And although it can feel as though democracy died decades ago out here in the middle, I know that it is alive and well elsewhere in the country.

I spend entirely too much time in my own head bemoaning the direction my life has taken. None of this does me any good but it can be a hard trap to free yourself from.

I am 42 and I need to figure out what I want my life to be about because all it had been about for decades is no longer relevant. That life doesn’t exist any more, so I am left to build one from nothing. I am unmoored and drifting and I am ready to right this proverbial ship once more.

The nothingness is daunting, though. I fail to see an ideal direction to take so I do nothing. I focus on a task or series of tasks, look up, and hours have passed. No meaningful progress has been made in achieving traction, and I feel once again discouraged. The days blend together in a meaningless cycle and it makes me question whether this is all there is or not.

There are so many different lives being lived by others right now and I can’t help but think that many of them are waking up to a dream every day. I would be happy with that being the case for any portion of time.

Some days are better than others. Today isn’t great.