31

Today I enter my thirties in my own right. I know it's my birthday because in the last 24 hours Stephen Harper has resigned his seat in Parliament (after waiting MONTHS, I might add), Donald Trump continues to tank in the electoral college, and Anthony Weiner has been caught in yet another sext scandal.

There's no way those events just get randomly thrown together, all willy-nilly. This is the Universe's way of telling me that it may be cold and indifferent, but every now and then - every now and then - it's still good for a laugh. Of course, on the same day it gave us all of this it also took away Gene Wilder. So perhaps it's good for a laugh so long as it's a suitably nervous one.

It's been a rotten year, since the very beginning. I'm not saying David Bowie held the universe together but every day since his death has been at least a little shittier than the day before, and it's hard not to think the whole of existence just flailing out of control without his presence to steady it. There's no need to deny this, we all know it to be true.

Whether it's failing health, finished relationships, the passing of countless icons, the interminable rise of Donald Trump through the primary and the nonsense chaos of the general election campaign, or the growing malaise that comes from realizing that the new Star Trek movies are here to stay and that both MacGuyver and Lethal Weapon are slated for television remakes, it's hard to believe we are living anywhere other than the End Times.

So we have to take comfort in the little things that make each moment special, like hitting a patient friend at 100 yards with a water balloon by surprise in the middle of a summer's day, or a cheap but tasty bottle of Bordeaux. Personally, I'm getting through this tough period with deep prayer and introspective abstinence cheap drugs and the thought that after all these years and all of these essentially identical scandals, someone still lets Anthony Weiner have his own phone.

Fuck me, you might as well let a toddler run around with a stun gun.

I mean, honestly, how hard is it to NOT send pictures of your genitals to people? Especially when you're a has-been public figure married to a still-is public figure? Especially when you have an embarrassing and career-ending history of doing this exact thing? Especially when your very name is Weiner?

Jesus, maybe he's just trolling us. You know, building up hype for his new TLC reality show called Weiner's Schtick or some other dumb bullshit. The man needs to be put out to pasture.

At any rate, watching the former-future-Mayor-of-New-York-City casually fuck up yet again is exactly the kind of thing that's going to get us through 2016 (that, or more pictures of Bill Clinton kicking over-sized balloons on a convention stage), and God willing it'll either be better next year or Trump will win the election and none of us will be alive to make the comparison.

At any rate I suppose I will have a Happy Birthday.