Mobility is the key to being discharged, they say, and I knew if I kept sitting around doing nothing until I feel better I'll be found dead, naked, and half eaten by my cat in a dank apartment. I needed to jump start my brain and jump start this post and picking up a copy of the National Enquirer to read its apparently groundbreaking revelations seemed to be just the thing for the job. Besides, it would do me some good to get fresh air and some soda water for my medicinal whisky (brown liquors are incredibly restorative home remedies if you use them properly).
Suburban supermarkets in Ottawa on a weekday are a spectacle to behold. Everyone is either a new mother or a widow and they all read their tabloids. These rags make their livelihoods on giving titillation to the tedious. I spent five minutes in the checkout line with a woman whose name must have been Gladys (or Hazel, or Mable...something matronly) talking about the latest details of Shark Tank/Dragons' Den alum Robert Herjavec's tawdry sex antics contained in this issue.
"It says here 'His twisted sex life involves trips to S&M dungeons, threesomes, and plenty of hot girls!'" Gladys read out, mortified. Which I suppose was a fair reaction for her, though I myself hail from the generation that successfully weaponized internet pornography and finds the claim that Herjavec once spent $700 on sex toys to be a little poseur. You've been on television shows in two different countries just for being incredibly wealthy, Rob, stop pussy footing around and commit to some real depravity. Which brings me to Ted Cruz.
After getting home I found out I'd purchased the wrong edition of the National Enquirer and aside from the horoscope ("This is not a week or even month to try and accomplish everything") and a scoop about Ron Goldman's sister once passing up a chance to run OJ down with her car, my primary source was useless. Distraught, I had to search the internet to find Ted Cruz's press conference on the scandal instead.
There's no real way to avoid it: Ted Cruz is a weenie.
I don't mean that he's a prick (although he most certainly is one of those, too), I mean he's...well, no, there is no better word for it. He's a weenie. He's lame in the most cringe-worthy way. He's that kid in high school whose parents sent him to a strange church youth group and who took sadistic delight in tattling on his friends whenever they risked doing something remotely interesting. Only now he's all grown up and destroying the credibility of the United States Senate to score some airtime on national television. I imagine he still says words like wee-wee even when there are no children around, and thinks the party is going to get out of hand because somebody brought a six pack of light beer.
Watching the press conference threw me into an apoplectic rage. This specific primary cycle aside, I'm used to watching successful politicians (and presidential candidates in particular) emphasize their wholesome family friendliness and General Audiences rating, but Cruz's press conference was a whole new level of unbearable misery. "I would note that Mr. Stone is a man who has 50 years of dirty tricks behind him." Cruz said, "He's a man for whom a term was coined for copulating with a rodent. Well, let me be clear: Donald Trump may be a rat, but I have no desire to copulate with him."
"It's called Ratfucking!" I howled at the screen. "Its got a capital-R and the word 'Fucking' right in there! Don't be a baby! Call it what it is!"
For you innocent readers not conversant in the dark arts, the glorious term goes back to the 1970s and ranks as the greatest achievement of the Nixon Presidency, or at least my favorite. Usually these days we just say dirty or sleazy tricks, or sabotage. We don't call it "copulating with a rodent" for the same reason that I'm not sitting around all weekend "copulating with a canine" instead of doing my laundry, or "discarding the children's toy" instead of screwing up. It may have been the one opportunity in all of professional politics for someone to justifiably drop an F-bomb in public and this is what we got instead. What a waste.
Cruz went on: "With this pattern, he should not be surprised to see people calling him 'Sleazy Donald'", and I could tell he was being serious because it sounded like he was naming someone from Sesame Street. I shouted for him to aim higher and then hit my head on the desk a few times. It's more effective than pouting.
I don't actually know whether the allegations against the Senator are true or not but it feels too late for truth anyway: Even if he isn't a philanderer the man remains a world-class prissy tight-ass. He's no Dragon, at any rate.
I needed to consider the evidence. On one hand it's impossible to think that there could be more than one or two living women in the world today who are mad or crazy enough to sleep with Ted Cruz. Even if they exist I can't imagine he'd actually know how to conduct the act itself without on-the-spot coaching from an alternative couple's therapist who would spend the rest of their life traumatized ("I swear, I had to tell him to take his pants off, he didn't know what to do until I told him to pretend it was a Continuing Resolution!"). Cruz also isn't wrong about Roger Stone, an open Trump supporter and a Grand Wizard of Ratfuckery in his own right. Stone's claim that this story is being pursued by other and far more legitimate media outlets has yet to come to fruition. This makes it very hard to believe the allegations are at least all true. Show me the bodies, then we'll talk.
On the other hand, public figures tripping over their own dicks is actually one area where the National Enquirer isn't completely hopeless: They broke the story on Tiger Woods' birdies, and damned near won a Pulitzer Prize (a real one too, not the chocolate kind) for their coverage of John Edwards' affair and love child. The whole sordid story is also just be too delicious for me to discount altogether, if only because existence is cold and we all need something to cling to keep us company in the dark. The Family & Morals candidate crisscrossing the country to decry decadent-homo New York values and Trump's prolific marriages is chasing skirt and oozing into bed with other women? Hah! That'll do nicely.
Maybe there's hope for us after all.
All of this is by way of introducing you to Mayblossom Senility. I really loved the last blog but by the end it was getting a bit too cold and a bit too specific for me. A few weeks ago, in a fit of either depression or rage or arousal I backed up all of my internet life - all of my social media, all of my photos, all of my many blogs - in anticipation of leaving the internet forever to go wander the mountains like a homeless sage. Life changes and if we're lucky we manage to change with it.
In the end, I concluded that I didn't need to abandon my beloved internet but I did need more than just a change in font or wallpaper. I've been off the blogs for a few months but the sobriety can never last - I need a place to rave and think and swear and jabber. To find my voice again, and chronicle my slow descent into madness in the waning days of Western civilization. Yes there will always be politics, and yes there will always be swearing. You may even still end up hearing about how I'm eating vegetables or taking zen meditation in between bouts of drinking whole bottles of whisky and cavorting with prostitutes.
The title is lifted from one of my favorite Hunter Thompson passages from The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, and fits my soul like a glove in these dark days:
"Mayblossom Senility (Steadman's phrase)...burnt out early or maybe just not much to burn in the first place. Not much energy in the faces, not much curiosity. Suffering in silence, nowhere to go after thirty in this life, just hang on and humor the children. Let the young enjoy themselves while they can. Why not?"
Keep your helmets handy, everyone. Things only get weirder from here.
