Here At The End Of All Things

There's something almost liberating about Tuesday's election results.

No I haven't lost my marbles. Well I have, obviously, but that was true long before this week's exercise in mass cultural suicide that was the 2024 Presidential Election.

When the inmates first took over the asylum in 2016 it felt more complicated. America, we've always been able to believe, is a great country and Americans are a great people and when bad things happen there is an unfortunate and immovable structural reason for it. The electoral college is dumb! Jerrymandering distorts congressional results and disadvantages Democrats! Confederate States make it so much harder for minorities to vote!

So when Trump won in the electoral college but not the popular vote, it was easy to lean on these to explain how a country most of us want to think the best about could still be saddled with a comically incompetent, racist, buffoonish molester in the White House. By a significant margin most of the voters in 2016 had in fact picked the mentally stable candidate, but were let down by a few thousand morons in some key states.

But 2024 is an apocalypse of a different order altogether.

Of the people who showed up to vote, most of them looked at the chaos of 2016-2020, the absurdist campaign rhetoric coming out of a clearly sundowning brownshirt and said Yes, let's go with that option, please. It is no longer possible to pretend that this is a country of good people merely trapped in a failed system, because the people who didn't vote this time around - and there are at the time of this writing perhaps ten million of them who took this year off after 2020 - clearly also looked at all of that and said, Sure, whatever.

Don't give me Bernie Sanders' timeless grifting about a Democratic party that has failed workers and driven them into the arms of the Republican party. This election featured one side which actively campaigned on wanting to make things worse for working people: A tax plan everyone with more than three braincells has been able to see would only benefit the Tech Bro Billionaire Class (which openly colluded with the Trump campaign), gutting the services ordinary working class Americans depend on, the mass deportations of innocent people, tariffs that will make just about everything ruinously expensive, and an open desire to kill the planet and ban life saving medicines and medical care. Opposing them was the side which has spent the last 4 years forgiving student loans, expanding critical services to vulnerable people, and championed regular human beings and the rights of everyone to live in an equal society, all while overseeing the quickest economic recovery in American history.

But sure, do go on Bernie. There's already been a revolution and it turns out the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" crowd were the winners.

The lesson from this election could not be more clear: The American People, as a whole, will either actively or passively fuck over the health and safety of their families, friends, and fellow citizens for a whiff of an illusion that they'll save a buck or two, and they don't care how ignorant, selfish and uncompassionate they are doing it. Western Civilization as a concept - an alliance of secular humanist governments bound by the rule of law, respecting the rights and liberties of individual citizens - is over. Its heart has been ripped out.

I don't know what will follow it, but if you're Queer, a Woman, Disabled, not-White, or even a straight white dude who wants the planet to still be habitable when your kids grow up, it is now your moral duty to understand and operate in this reality - that you are surrounded by people who will eagerly feed you to the fucking wolves because someone has promised to make gas two cents cheaper. That's the price they've placed on your lives.

There is a clarity and simplicity in that truth that, while less comforting, is much more straightforward than maintaining the delusion we've been living with for the past two decades that the American People are capable of being better than that, despite evidence to the contrary.

Observant readers may see that this is the first update I've made here since pretty much the last election. Every couple of years I come back and write a thing and then rhetorically ask "am I back?", and then I never am. Am I back this time? Who knows. Perhaps even more astute readers will remmember that the title of this page - Mayblossom Senility - comes from Hunter Thompson's 1970 screed "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", which I will leave you with for now:

My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought that Ralph had brought somebody with him — a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God — a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden caricature … like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was, of course, my own. Horrible, horrible.

Good luck, everybody. I'm glad you're still with me here, at the end of all things.

The Hour of The Wolf

While it is the policy of this publication to report the news and not interfere in the activities of the Meat Space, it is the explicit belief of the Writer that his thoughts accidentally control the Universe and that if he openly states a prediction or opinion with any confidence, Reality will reorganize itself for the sole purpose of spoiling it. Therefore, out of an abundance of caution for the millions of lives at stake, the publication of this entry has been withheld until after the US Presidential electoral contest or alcohol-related death of the Writer, whichever starts - or ends – first

The Hour of the Wolf, the dearly departed Max von Sydow once explained in Ingmar Bergman's underrated horror flick of the same name, is the hour between night and dawn. The hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghost and demons are most powerful.

The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.

  * * * * *

I can remember it vividly: It was 6pm, I was standing on the street corner with a friend of mine, on the way to the bar we’d booked to watch the 2016 election. We were so sure of the result. We were so sure. We’d even made last minute adjustments to our pool picks, it sounded like Clinton was probably going to win Florida, after all. I took a long deep drag of a cigarette, threw it on the ground, and stomped it out. “Alright,” I said, “Let’s go watch this fucker get taken down.”. By 2am I was sitting, alone in my living room, staring at my phone. Three bottles of champagne in the fridge and a few cigars in the humidor, waiting for an afterparty that never materialized. It was the end of Western civilization, they’d pulled the whole temple down on themselves.

If nothing else, the 2020 election cycle is giving us all a chance to re-examine the assumptions and understandings we previously took for granted. We're revisiting what polls are important and the need to look at state-level predictions and not just the national picture. We're learning how states count ballots and how cable newsrooms determine when and how to call the races. I'm about to find out just how bloated my liver and heart can get before each rip themselves out of my carapace and crawl away.

These are all important pieces of data to have.

As I write this, I don't know who won the Presidential contest (if, indeed, anyone has yet), and I don't really know how they did it (or didn't). I don’t know what the senate or anything looks like. I've had many thoughts though - oh, yes - but I dare not put them on paper or speak them out loud. I've become neurotically superstitious about US elections (all elections, really, but few have the power to vaporize me in atomic backwash), and I'm convinced that basically anything I say will jinx it. If I tell you I think Biden will win 350 electoral college votes he'll lose every state, if I tell you Trump will win 350 electoral college votes, he will. There's no winning against this impossible universe.

So I'm trapped in my own Hour of the Wolf, it seems. All bets are off. There are no rules. I have no idea what will actually happen and my imagination is running rampant with all sorts of possibilities I'd never had to consider before. Civil War II? Scorched Earth Lame Duck Presidency? It's like my first time all over again - on one hand unbelievably exciting; on the other, absolutely terrifying.

For the last few months I’ve been scribbling out little notes to myself. Thoughts on how the race and campaign was developing. Some of it literally scratched out on random pieces of paper around my pandemic bunker apartment, others as three or four sentences sitting in a draft blog post, seeping through in a tweet or two. What follows here then are some of these notes, condensed and smoothed out, and somewhat organized. Just things that have been in my head that I need to get out before I burst. By the time you read them the die will have already been cast and hopefully I can’t fuck any of it up, we're just waiting for the universe to unfold now.

*****

Let's start off with the basics: it seems impossible to me that Donald Trump can conceivably win the popular vote. Not just because the polls clearly don't suggest that, but because little in the past 4 years strikes me as likely to make very few groups of people MORE pro-Trump but many groups of people substantially LESS pro-Trump. Additionally, the polls consistently point to a sizeable shift in some groups compared to 2016 (heck, compared to 2019): Biden ties or leads or comes much closer among all age groups, among white women, among men, in nearly in all regions than Clinton did 4 years ago. Of course it can all be hogwash but it agrees with the fundraising numbers, and it jives with the bizarre Grand Coalition the Biden campaign has stitched together where I now receive emails from Bill Clinton-era cabinet secretaries, Bernie Sanders and the AOC squad, and Bush II administration war criminals all on the same day and all pushing support for the same ticket.

I’m old enough to remember declaring that demographics would make Texas a toss up state after 2012 and that Romney represented the last hope of a Republican party determined to focus entirely on older white men. Obviously I was wrong then and I’m far too spooked to make such a bold claim yet, but it’s hard to imagine that the damage Trump and his enablers in the GOP have done to their credibility among huge and growing portions of the electorate – in particular women - will be soon forgotten or undone. That so much of this goes hand in hand with enabling the kind of tin pot authoritarianism of a young adult dystopian novel, I think, makes the damage that much more permanent. We can’t go back to the way things were, not while McConnell and Graham and Sessions and Pompeo and Cruz and Rubio still draw any water in that party.

The 2016 election was like finding out your neighbor did time as an axe murderer. It doesn’t matter how polite they are or how good a neighbor they are now, you’re never letting your kids go over there alone.

*****

The electoral college is trickier to predict, but here history helps calm my nerves. There are three states Trump won in 2016 which were surprising - and incredibly close - upsets, which control the balance of electoral college, and which had been Democratic states for many years beforehand. Biden not only keeps polling in the lead in all three but tied or leading in a bunch of other states too. Trump likely needs to sweep all of the 5-8 genuine battleground states, Biden only needs to pick up a few of them, and the poll suggest he has a few strong prospects to choose from.

The X factor to me is the unbridled, unmitigated, bald-faced fascism of the ailing husk of the Republican party. What depraved depths are they willing to go to in order to cheat their way into a few more years of power? Throwing out ballots is small potatoes for these goons, so surely nonsense lawsuits and armed insurrection come as second nature to them. They're all Sons of the Confederacy anyway, getting shot to death by the National Guard is practically a family tradition.

The campaign itself has been a whole different roller coaster. Issues, dear boy, issues. It's only early November as I write this but already the week the President had covid seems like a distant memory, but it was less than a month ago. At the time it seemed like it could have been a craven attempt to gain public sympathy but I don't think so - the last thing the Trump campaign needed was anyone to be reminded that the bodies are piling up in the morgues and this pandemic is raging on unchecked (as I type this I see Ragin' Cajun' Jim Carville has just tried to coin "it's the pandemic, stupid!" and predicted Trump will be the loser by 10pm on election night. Carville is my kind of crazy but I'm not putting any money on that). The pandemic is hitting the pro-Trump places who until recently insisted the virus didn't exist, and I think that reality is unravelling the whole narrative Trumpers have been using to hold their world together.

Hunter Biden too, seems to be largely a miss by the Republican strategists and the closer they cling to it the more desperate they seem. The accusations of cronyism or corruption or insurmountable entrenched entitlement stuck harder against Hillary Clinton because she was, after all - despite an exceptional career in her own right - a career politician who got her start in politics from the starboard side of her husband's White House and was not very successful at hiding the deep rooted belief that it was her turn, both in 2008 or in 2016. The Clinton family has always seemed like the real life analogy for House of Cards' viciously ambitious Underwoods and the more they replicated that imagery the easier it was to make the more ludicrous accusations against her stick.

By way of contrast, the Hunter Biden story largely seems to remind people that Joe Biden has always been a remarkably kind and well-liked family man who has endured significant personal loss but still managed to do his duty while being a loving parent. Every time they try to make hay of the father-son relationship (candid photos! leaked text messages!), voters get a peek at what it would be like to have a caring, human father in the Oval Office instead of the cheating, groping, crude, child abusive sociopath they have now. I was reminded of the Conservative attack ads of our own 2015 campaign: "Look at Justin Trudeau, look how HANDSOME he is and look at all of the disgusting NORMAL JOBS he's had before just like you! Outrageous! Vote for our boring robot leader with a titanium golf club wedged up his ass and who absolutely hates you."

It's almost hard to see why it's not resonating.

At least not with everyone, mind you. Clearly there's a significant portion of the US electorate firmly willing to be thrown into a burning cauldron and reduced to their bones for their beloved Fuhrer. We've seen it throughout this campaign but it's reaching a particular fervor at the close...the Y'all Quieda trucks draped in Trump flags trying to surround Biden campaign busses (a comparison to Al Quieda is actually unfair, in my opinion, as doubtless the American version insist on using Made in America trucks which is fucking insane. Any good fanatic knows the value of a used Toyota Hilux), or legions of supporters trapped after their covid superspreader rallies in the cold and dark by a campaign that actively hates them, is trying to murder everyone, and hasn't been afraid to hide it. To each their own: My advice to the die-hard Republican supporters is to go on and die.

But back to Covid. Carville's not wrong - the pandemic is the prism through which the entire election has turned. It perfectly exposed the administration's complete idiocy and willful negligence. It drew a perfect contrast between the calm, steady, competent experience of a caring former Vice President and the indefensible childlike tantrums of the dementia addled corrupt incumbent. It's been raising the stakes all year and giving regular folks on the ground the growing understanding that nonsense comes out of whichever failed amateur pornstar is currently briefing from the White House podium is disconnected from their reality and is entirely self-serving.

*****

So that's what I've got. I said at the start I don't know what's going to happen. I still don't. It's the Hour of the Wolf and it may be rapturous or catastrophic but you came for some thoughts and maybe a prediction so here it is: Biden reclaims Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. That's enough to end it, but I believe that one or two of Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona will flip too and seal the deal with ~300 electoral college votes. That's what SHOULD happen, anyway, if I haven't fucked it up by typing this all out.

Christ I hate this. I will see you on the other side.

Dispatches From The Bunker: Rome has Fallen and the Visigoths are Running The Show

I can only assume there is - or shortly will be - a Trump family brand of coffins to sell to rubes and sycophants.

For the price he'll charge you might expect them to be made of something like mahogany or walnut but after your loved ones are dead and the National Guardsmen in hazmat suits are trying to place their corpses into a lime coated pit with thousands of others, it'll turn out to be made of that cheap backboard IKEA puts on their Billy bookcases, snap apart, and splut. Down goes some plastic-wrapped granny into a mass grave with all the dignity and grace of the office of President of the United States.

I mean, really, what in the good God damn is going on?

For a newshound like me who has been stocking up on nonperishable goods since January, the last month has been like watching a line of people playing chicken with a runaway freight train. Each person thinks they will jump out of the way in nick of time. Every single one of them fails.

And yet, every one of them sees the idiot ahead of them fail but thinks "Ahh, but that won't happen to me!" and when you ask them why, they reply "because I'll jump out of the way in time!" One could almost admire the audacity if the body count was theirs alone, and if Donald Trump didn't seem so eager to push the United States right back on to the tracks for reasons that escape even the most skilled shitbag whisperers. Fun and malice, I guess.

We are a species of morons, by and large. Dumb lumbering brutes with no effective sense of self preservation who would be perfectly content jump into a woodchipper if someone promised us a free soda because, Jesus, that sounds so much easier than doing something hard.

Nobody has truly been able to act in time, except maybe Iceland. Even here in Canada we aren't as smart as we love to say we are and for all of our pleas from smart experts and officials stressing the need to stay the hell apart and self-isolate we are still a nation with more than enough Boomer snowbirds who think all of this shit just happens to other people (like Natives or Mexicans) to overwhelm even the most robust of industrialized healthcare systems.

Watching a parade of brain-dead administration officials, conservative hacks, and Republican leaders talking up how noble it would be for the elderly to sacrifice themselves in a vain attempt to stem the hemorrhaging stock market and how 2% of a country of 320 million people isn't that much to ask to have a shot at reelection is total mind fuck. I've spent the last 48 hours wondering if I woke up in a parallel dimension where the only religion is a post-apocalyptic suicidal death cult, and everyone wears fetish gear and eats live babies. Nevermind that when the US goes continues on it's worse-than-Italy trajectory the fatality rate will be more like 10%, and not just among the olds. It's an invitation for the country to light itself on fire.

These are the same goons who used to try to scare Americans away from Obamacare reforms by claiming the healthcare systems in the rest of the civilized world had nefarious death panels. Boy golly, wait until next week when these fuckers get to see what battlefield triage looks like.

Any country that could avoid the deaths of more people than all of their wars combined 23 times over by just standing slightly further apart for a few months but can't even be assed to try that for more than a few days isn't truly meant for this world, and while personally I wouldn't have believed people would stand by a President who is fine killing 32 million of them out of a frothy combination of ego and dementia, I wouldn't have voted for him in the first place.

Apparently I'm supposed to be putting together a decent End of Days soundtrack, so here's your entry for today:

Did someone give you something to help you ease the pain?
Like the liquor in the bottle, we watched you slip away
And I feel as if I know you through the bars of a song
Always surrounded, but alone

But no goodbyes, you'll always be Miss America
We watched you fly but nothing's free, Miss America
And as you fall apart we just call it art
Was it so hard to breathe?

Wash your mangey hands you goddamn beasts.

Dispatches From The Bunker: Continuity of Operations

The publisher wishes to inform you that, due to inactivity on the author's part and the need to consolidate bandwidth in the face of ongoing global developments, this space was scheduled to be deactivated some time ago. However, when informed of this intention the author immediately - and over a considerable number of increasingly vulgar emails - demanded the space be retained.


In the middle was a big cauldron that they were stirring, stirring,
And there were trees around that they kept burning, burning.
I asked a toothless man who all these people were and
he said, "The soapmakers, and we are working, working."
So are we all fucked or what?

I mean sure, most of us probably aren't going to die. Most of us probably won't even get very sick. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that in a matter of weeks we'll all be medieval peasants - either toiling in fields with donkeys that have all manner of clattering pots and pans strapped to them or dead and buried in unmarked mass graves. At least we're hotter than the original breed of diseased medieval waifs, or at least most of us are.

It seems that it is critical at times like these to make sure to panic as much as possible. Really just go hog wild and get it all out of your system. Make flagrantly irrational shopping choices and strain all of the parts of the global supply chain that really haven't been pressure tested for this kind of thing to the breaking point because, honestly, a toilet paper shortage is never actually conceivable until we all turn into idiots lumbering around grocery stores like panicked cows.

Alas, I've trapped myself in my Emergency Command Bunker - which is normally reserved for elections and any time we're landing something on Mars - with enough nonperishables and toiletries for a siege, enough fruit and vegetables to watch rotting away for weeks of entertainment, and enough booze and cigars to live out my own delusional Prince Prospero fantasy.

Wash your hands and stop touching your face and remember that mo End of Days is complete without a good soundtrack, so enjoy.

Must Be The Season of the Witch

So here we are, four years later and once more in the grip of a national election. I'm confined to the cheap seats for this one but Lord knows that won't stop me from bitching about it on the internet.

In the visionless, micromanaged era of Stephen Harper's Conservative party you could rely on the petty small-mindedness of the man at the centre to really only have one policy goal for Canada: that he be the one running it. The man would occasionally tinker and fiddle with knobs and switches but that was about it.

Power was really the only purpose of the last Conservative government and any backbench MP who could meaningfully threaten their polling numbers, or provide a point for the opposition to unite and rally around would be summoned by trans-dimensional screeching to the Prime Minister's Barad-dûr and suitably coerced back into silence. It was an uncomfortable era and it led to an unprecedented politicization and centralized command of institutions of government, but in the end very little actually changed and most of us - unless you were eating Gerry Ritz's disgusting listeriosis-infested meat - woke up alive every morning.

Yes, boutique tax credits fucked up the treasury and any scientist with a mouth was gagged, but if a right-wing evangelical nut job voiced an intent to use the Army to shell abortion clinics or gay marriages he would simply vanish overnight, and neither the Prime Minister nor his trusty lieutenants would seem to be able to recall the miscreant's name.

It doesn't feel like that now, though, in this age of the Baby-Faced Goon and his squadron of Nazi scumbags. It's impossible to believe anyone would be capable of maintaining such an iron-like grip on the tiller. Remember that Scheer actually lost his leadership race to Maxime Bernier and he knows it, and likely the only way for him to stay at the top of the party is to acquiesce to the lunatic factions that can keep him there...the ones that his predecessor never needed to particularly acknowledge or humour. I mean, Christ, the man can't shake a bystander's hand without looking like a spineless weirdo so the odds that he'd be able to - or even want to - steer the boring but ultimately uneventful course of his predecessor is wishful thinking.

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps this was inevitable. The Harper machine suppressed the hard-right White-Jihadi wing of the party so much they're started to bubble up out of the ground, seeping like sewage through the grassroots of their own party and spilling over into Bernier's PeePee experiment. As the bff of Rebel Media's Squealer Goldy tries to unseat an accomplished air force veteran and more racist tirades and homophobic rants and conspiracy peddling nonsense come out of the closet from an increasing number of staggeringly under-vetted candidates, Scheer knows if he asks them to do more than offer a perfunctory apology there's a chance his base will be won over by Maxime Bernier's insane ramblings about a terrifying new globalist UN Conspiracy to put fluoride in water and stop electrocuting The Gays.

So buckle your safety belts and put on your tinfoil hats. We're in a for a wild 30-something days.

There Are Tardigrades On The Moon

Oh fuck me, not you lot again.

I swear I didn't mean to take, uh, two years off of writing this time.

I swear I've been absent for good honest wholesome reasons like legal drugs or work or an underground boxing league or just being too manic-addled and unhinged to bother and opted - BRAVELY - to spare you poor souls the insane spittle laden ramblings of a half-sauced madman who constantly barks for more vino and whose heart will stop beating if the coffee supply runs out.

I swear I'll probably end up going quiet again fno matter whatever else I say in a fit of panic.

Not writing is a bit like falling out of a gym habit or giving up a healthy diet (both of which I'm also guilty of, thankyouverymuch). You tell yourself nothing's changed and that you'll be getting back into tomorrow or next week, but you actually just saying it over and over, until eventually years have passed and you're shelling out for a gym membership you've barely used while your knees are buckling under your rapidly expanding girth and your brain is so cluttered with tedious minutiae and snippy comebacks that it would take either electro-shock therapy or the world's best blowjob to clear it all out and settle down but neither option is available.

Ahem.

(I've found that if I jam myself in the thigh with a fork the jolt of adrenaline can usually help me contain myself and regain composure long enough to string a few sentences together, although as it now stands the fork is also the most contact my thigh has ever had. So be it.)

Am I back? No. At least that's not what I'm saying, if only because every single time I write that I disappear for another six months to say it again. The history of these dumb scribbles has really never been much more than me simply repeating the phrase "I'm back to writing again!" over and over again, every fifty years, in between long decades of silence. Whatever. I'm here now, though maybe not for long and maybe not often. I've been circling around it for ages but the more things there are to write about, the harder it is to actually do - I get so overwhelmed with the possibilities that this year of our lord 2018 2019 offers that it's much easier to do nothing but bathe in the dark blue-grey glow of night-mode Twitter in a glaze of drool and crumbs with some obscure French synth-pop on constant repeat in my headphones than to sit still and focus and lend voice to thought.

All of which is to say there's no one particular thing which is dragging me back to my keyboard to write again, but I suppose if I have to start somewhere I would confess that I've been summoned back from the ether and re-materialized into this meat world by the mystical crystal magic of presidential candidate (and future Mother Goddess of some fucked up patchouli injecting commune) Marianne Williamson, and the effect has been so baffling and profound that I have decided to endorse her nonsense candidacy.

As far as I can tell she might as well be President. Why not? At some point you have to decide to lean in on the crazy and Williamson seems like a good choice for President of a country that really only exists as a grotesque work of fiction now. Sure, she thinks diseases and injuries are just the result of you not sufficiently willing yourself well hard enough, and that AIDS and Cancer can be defeated with "love"...like the Care Bears are going to show up and cure you*, but in fairness the current President probably thinks you rid yourself of AIDS by fucking your virgin daughter, so is she really that much further off the mark?

We live in an era where deranged billionaires and has-been musicians are competing to have the most dystopian sci-fi vision for their underage rape harems until Boris Johnson has them killed on behalf of the Royal Family, and the various husbands of Pamela Anderson swap political barbs on Meet The Press while Disney tries to make it 1990s again through endless remakes. Face it, chumps: the seal was broken in 2016 and all the dark shit of the underworld continues to spill out.

Nothing matters now. A self-help guru who identifies as a "Love Warrior" and thinks antidepressants and vaccines are secret mind-control devices slipped into the food supply by the CIA and/or the Prime Minister of New Zealand might as well be President of a country too stupid not to shoot guns at their own hogs/children. If it truly is that far gone, then surely - SURELY - the best hope for everyone around the world now is to just end it as quickly as possible and move on.

Anyway, Williamson it is. Let's embrace this chaotic dark age of ignorance and lunacy and live our lives like there really isn't that much time left because boy golly there really isn't.


*In fairness a Care Bear love beam is probably very radioactive and might actually cure/worsen cancer, or at least affect it in some way. Results on its efficacy against HIV remain inconclusive.

On Filicide

I'm sitting here eating my traditional February 14th meal of tacos and wine and watching a cell-phone video of a SWAT team clearing a classroom in Florida where terrified teenagers shake with fear holding their hands in the air. I find it jarring but I suppose that it's actually a pretty typical scene in a country that seems to have more guns and thoughts and prayers, than they do political brains or balls.

Before you get that wide-eyed look of panic: don't. I'm not going to write yet another thing about guns. If you're reading this you either already agree with me or you're planning on shooting me and either way I'm not really in a position to argue. Sure, I could point out for the umpteenth time that the United States is - by several orders of magnitude - the only country in the world in which this regularly happens, and I could demonstrate that that every jurisdiction in the Western world that makes it harder to buy guns and doesn't let you buy assault rifles experiences fewer gun deaths and almost no mass shootings.

Perhaps I could even point out that as I write this the number of fatalities is 17...10 more than were killed by Al Capone's gang during the 1929 St Valentine's Day Massacre that led to the National Firearms Act and the banning of machine guns, or that the same Republicans who insist the problem isn't guns but insanity are in fact the very same Republicans who gut mental health program spending and pass gun laws making it easier for people with mental health issues to buy assault rifles.

At any rate, the large-scale slaughter of their own children combined with a complete lack of political will to take even the most modest steps to prevent it seems to be the definitive property of the United States; the modern manifestation of American Exceptionalism.

Happy Valentine's Day or whatever, I guess.

[The Publisher has been informed that the author insists on making this an ongoing series and will return shortly to "call out that goddamned negligent father who murdered his kids with snake-oil quackery and then got a keynote sales pitched at a Wellness convention run by the shitheads who deserve to be drowned in a bathtub alongside the NRA national leadership"]