I don’t think I have ADD or anything, but it’s getting harder to sit and watch an NFL game for any length of time. I’ve always been a channel flipper if the game starts turning into a runaway, but lately I’m just turned off by the game itself, no matter who’s playing and what the score is.

Part of it is because of on-field behavior; the other part is an over-the-top amount of advertising. I recently attended the Kansas State-Colorado game and saw that there is actually a standard bearer who comes onto the field with a clock that he/she rotates to let the crowd and teams know how much of the commercial break is left before play resumes. This happened a lot, and most times it was 3-4 minutes, sometimes more, of commercials. So teams get way more than three Time Outs per half, and advertising adds an hour or more to a telecast.

Anyway, football, to me, has become just a bunch of rabid fans rooting on their musclebound “warriors” who are trying to physically punish each other, and then hugging and shaking hands afterwards, like all the head-bashing is forgiven and they’ve all just been through such a battle together. I’ve had my fill of the testosterone-fueled legal mayhem, along with the penalty-worthy end-of-play displays of dominance and something bordering on rage.

I guess I can see why many players declare, “It’s a war out there.” Even though it isn’t. A war.

I’ll give a pass to touchdown celebrations, but don’t get me started on the time wasted celebrating after an interception or fumble recovery. I wonder what the refs are thinking while they wait for that nonsense to subside.

I don’t know. I guess it makes me wonder where the game and a bunch of other things are headed when everyone is always trying to kick things up a notch. There was a time when people just went to a game to watch… the game.

What will be the upper limits of trying to erase all that boredom? Man, I hate that word.

That’s entertainment, though. Gotta give people their money’s worth, right?

Either Trump’s pending cases were simply the result of partisan, whine-soaked politics destined for dismissal on a lack of true merit, or justice has not been served.

It’s confusing, because the message is sent that everything is relative, merely a matter of perspective, and that deep pockets matter more than due process and a guilty verdict that, to many, would have felt like the more deserving outcome.

It’s confusing because January 6 becomes water under the bridge; a phone call to Brad Raffensperger suggesting he find 11,780 votes now counts for nothing; boxes of documents stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago become nothing more than mythic red herrings; misogynistic and criminal assaults on women languish in the ether of “men being men.” Making a stand and the warning shots from former Trump loyalists take on the character of fools’ errands.

Meanwhile, a festering, pus-infected eruption gets to return to the White House, which may sound harsh, but Trump brings out the best in all of us…

A recent editorial in the local paper contained an itemized list of reasons why Trump won the election last week. It was a true litany of grievance and slights, an accumulation of slings and arrows that apparently wounded this man’s soul so deeply that Trump’s victory provided the catalyst for a cathartic release of pent-up venom.

He remembered a lot of things, like Joe Biden’s admittedly ill-timed and ill-advised declaration that Trump supporters were garbage, yet he is apparently OK with a whole island of people being called the same. He remembered the “too liberal” acceptance of transgender people and cross-dressers. He remembered the woman’s march the day after Inauguration 2017 when women had the gall to sport headware that looked like a vagina, while apparently overlooking Trump’s comment about grabbing women by the same. He remembered 95% negative coverage in the news, which means he must be a consumer of at least 95% of whatever it is they’re peddling on Fox.

He said he gets called a racist and a Nazi simply because he has different views than others of us, when, as a counterpoint, it could be because such labels frequently go unrecognized and he probably doesn’t spend much time looking in the mirror.

I guess what irks me about this person’s remarkably detailed and thorough listing of insults and attacks is, first of all, that he must have been keeping a running tally along the way, and, secondly, that what he sees as insults and attacks I and many others understand to be the thin-skinned perceptions of someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid, who hasn’t stopped to evaluate his allegiances, who has taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker, and decided that an angry manchild who is incapable of giving a shit about him and his family is somehow the guy who can solve all his and his family’s problems.

It’s the insidious deception, you know? It runs deep. The net is very large, and the yield continues to mystify and astound.

We, by default, were once again forced to settle– if one chooses to look at it that way. When the main impetus for voting is to keep a metastasizing cancer away from the White House, one’s only option is to vote for whoever the other candidate is, whether they like him/her or not. Whether this person is right for the job or not.

Or they just don’t vote at all, which is an avoidable waste.

The cancer is spreading, the monster wins another one. And the list of reasons why that is so detestable will also continue to grow.

On the 6^th, I was basically relieved that the campaign season was over. There were (and still are) down-ballot races to be decided, but the noise at least had subsided for a time, until next week, when things start ramping up for the 2026 midterms.

I wasn’t really bothered by the fact that a majority of people had decided to cast their votes for a budding megalomaniac and all-around farce of a human being. I’m not sure it was even shock or grief that accounted for the lack of affect. But now, as the dust settles, reality is creeping back in and the realization emerges that we have to watch as Trump once again chooses people to fill certain key positions in his administration.

Family members will likely get a nod again—if they want it. It sounds like Elon Musk will be way over-utilized, put in some position(s) for which he will be some sort of flailing fish out of water. And then there’s RFK, Jr. The vaccine-denying, brain-wormed son of the Democratic Party icon may be put in charge of HHS, NIH, FDA, you name it. Only the best people in the Trump administration.

There will be fewer competent figures this time around, and many more deals with the devil.

The whole process is or should be fraught with vehement disgust, covered for what it is: some sort of grievous, anomalous error in judgment that should have never happened. But instead, it’ll just be another transition from one administration to the next, with the added feature of feeling more like watching one’s own execution.  

Trump doesn’t want to govern. He wants to get even. He’s been given permission to do that.

Nice going, America.

It is tragic—the losses in the Mountain Fire, out in CA. But let’s say out loud that which apparently is supposed to remain unspoken: duh.

People decide to build their dream castles, along with other more modest homes, in the middle of pine forests on the side of a hill, with a view, or just out in the boonies, isolated the way they like it, but also in knowingly risky terrain—given California’s propensity for enduring an expanding wildfire (and mudslide) season that arrives with a predictability similar to that of tidal activity.

A few thousand questions pop up, perhaps none more glaring than why people build where they do, and why such conflagrations border on inevitable. It seems there’s always a spark, or always some idiot either doing something idiotic or intentionally incendiary. The Santa Ana winds do their thing, or climate change-enhanced drought does its thing in conjunction with dry— dry! —thunderstorms that produce lightning only, or there’s a spark from a power line, or something else.

In some ways, this seems like the inland version of building a home three feet from the ocean in Florida. What are people thinking? That it won’t happen to them? That they’ll just rebuild because they have insurance and they’re ridiculously stubborn or feeling entitled and they can’t read the tea leaves?

In all fairness, some of the homes in California may have been built before people started thinking in terms of global warming or accelerated climate change, but the Santa Ana winds arrive like clockwork, so it seems possible that there is just as much of a gambling mindset going on as there has ever been.

People don’t mind playing the odds. They want to build where they want to build, damn the torpedoes.

I can understand why there might be differences of opinion and perspective among those who live on the coasts and those who live away from the coasts, in the “heartland”—a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one, as if all the red in the country’s ever-expanding midsection is representative of the true, virtuous character of this nation.

What I don’t understand is how Donald Trump and the machinery that produced him could become the voice of so many voters—including Latino and Black voters— in so many places, including Center City Philadelphia and Detroit and San Francisco, and most any other urban area, I guess.

I get that the demographics are changing, but what I don’t get is why Trump is the guy.

Sure, maybe it’s as simple as latching onto whoever is saying what you want to hear, regardless of moral character or general lack of humility, and humanity. After all, who cares, as long as he gets the job done…? The insane amount of rationalizing and moral compromise going on here is stunning, and not a little disappointing. And let’s add confusing—the sides have apparently subscribed to different Sunday Schools of thought.

But beyond that, since when do we overlook glaring character flaws in someone running for the highest office in the land? The only answer I can come up with is that people are willing to overlook a lot of things. They are, by nature, greedy, self-interested, and surprisingly vulnerable to smooth talkers who can deliver a line.

Our god truly must be the belly.

The universe is not fair, obviously. It’s indifferent, at best. We of course should know better than to hold out for karma to bring sweet retribution and something that looks like justice. That’s unlikely to happen.

As it is, an ugly, loudmouthed, boorish bully with his nepotistic entourage will once again haunt the hallways of the White House and other buildings in our nation’s capitol. He won the popular vote this time around, so even more Americans got sucked into the Trumpian vortex of bullshit.

When people say America has gotten what it deserves, please don’t count the millions who voted for Kamala in that number. We’ve seen through the micro-thin veneer of “savior” since way before 2016, and will continue to do what we can to contain the damage of another term with this clown car full of dunderheads and hangers-on.

Surprise us, Donald. Make your legion of detractors all liars.

It’s amazing to me how the tenor of the conversation changed after the election.

People are wowed by the extent of Trump’s victory, as if the completeness of it is somehow vindication, and we should now think of Trump differently in light of this “mandate.”

That’s not gonna happen.

Turns out it was a one-issue election, and it revolved around doing a bang-up job of pinning economic pain on Democrats, along with the belief that Trump is going to make things better for everyone who feels like they’re just getting by. To that I ask, “And you believe him?”

Sure, the Dow did its typical Dow thing, jumping 1500 points on Wednesday—but then settled back to mixed on Thursday, after the world’s Trump-drunk billionaires made billions more. The world’s leaders are holding their breath and regrouping and plotting strategy because they know Trump will be Trump in matters of diplomacy and foreign affairs.

All the cases pending against him will go away, or at least back-burnered.

What remains are the threats—to the press and various pundits, to comedians and anyone else who badmouthed him, to anyone who he sees as getting in his way or making him sad.

Despite this post-election suspension of reality, we still are going to have to deal with an old man who’s getting older and probably lazier, but who’s still as vindictive as ever, still as inept as ever, who’s ready to steamroll, who has no intention of playing nice. We still all have to have eyes in the back of our heads and put up with the moral turpitude for another four fucking years.

I believe Trump may be only momentarily energized by this victory. But he will be endlessly emboldened by the dimensions of it, and this will be what should frighten us. The headwinds may not be as strong this time around– especially if Republicans end up winning both chambers– and we will soon see just how intent he is on carrying through with all the medieval mayhem.

He’s made a boatload of promises. But again, I wouldn’t hold my breath. These may well prove to be flights of fancy, and unworkable in practice.

Way to go, America. The “heartland” comes through again.

What gets me is the selective remembering when it comes to how great things were economically back in 2019 when Trump was President. There is an intentional avoidance of the fact that much of the last year of Trump’s first term—2020—was a nightmare because of the pandemic.

There was a pandemic which messed with supply and demand!

Covid 19 put a screeching halt to whatever good feelings people might have had regarding food prices or gas prices or money in the pocket. The Biden administration then had to deal with the fallout, work on bringing inflation down, put people back to work, reinvigorate supply chains, which it did but which was obviously overlooked by the Trump campaign because that wouldn’t be a very strategic talking point.

There’s a need to remember the pandemic, and that there’s a reason why many may remember fondly those days before it arrived as better days economically. They’d rather not remember that Trump was still in office when Covid 19 hit. And they’d rather not remember the mind-numbingly scatter-brained manner in which Trump and much of the rest of his administration handled it.