April in Halifax, or I'll Remember April

What? Where ... is that? And why are you there? What, exactly, will you remember?

Oh, but I didn't say I was here, or there. Or that I liked or did not like Green Eggs and Poutine. I'm not sure where I am. And it's only a title. As well one as another, as Molly Bloom hinted; as well that title as the more loquacious Senator Cruz or Lying Ted? Which One Is It? And Wby Not Just Call Him One of The Greatest Assholes of All-Time, Bigger Even than I Am, Though Not as Funny, Not as Entertaining, Not as Rich, So What's the Point?

Or the slightly tidier, Prince: How to Become and Remain a Great Artist Rather than a Stinking Celebrity

Or, going the other way, the more fulsome, TLC: Trump Loses to Clinton. Better to Realize It Now and Not Waste the Next Six Months As You Might Have Most of the Last Year 

If you enjoy the machinations of politics and its sensationally dramatic packaging by much of the media, if you are thankful, moreover, that it isn't all whipped up and finished within 45-60 days like it is in so many other countries—Canada, for instance—and are further thankful that there is plenty of private fortune to fund the extended-play, director's cut version, thereby keeping the better-looking, more telegenic and predictable journalists busy, economies in places like my home state of Iowa, and also New Hampshire, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, more flush than they otherwise would be, then by all means play on—

But if, like many, you find yourself saying, My God, I am so done with this, just tell me what I need to know to stay informed, so I can get back to working more, training more, reading Proust, monographs, motions, corporate reports, entertaining Craig, cooking wonderful meals for him, making sure he has coffee in the morning with a glass of water when he wakes up, rum or port to sip with his cigar, a television to watch sports on when he's done with his reading, his writing, his running around, well then by all means read the following, and be 100% guaranteed—assured—that come Wednesday of the first full week of November of this year, you'll look back and say, Wow, if only I'd bet my uncle Cecil $100 on each of these points (below), I'd be in so much better shape going into the all-important holiday season ...

Point #1: Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. Don't be surprised if he gets over the delegate hump with his win in California in June. Don't be surprised if the July convention ends up confirming the disaster, even if it ends up less exciting than many television series' finales. Don't blame Trump, blame the rest of them, and the wheat the GOP has sewed for a generation. Jeb was a schlub, Rubio a twerp, Carson better suited to inspiring sales for natural laxatives, Kasich won Ohio but remains alone, and kind of a bobblehead, and Rand Paul must have known that thriftiness across the board has never been popular with voters, half of whom at a minimum need to believe they're getting something for their contribution.

Point #2: Hillary is going to be the Democrat(ic) nominee for president. Sorry, all you impassioned Bernie supporters. You're going to have to take consolation in knowing that your guy was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to her rather than imagine what would have happened if the first Jewish Socialist from Brooklyn would have busted up the banks and made Manhattan affordable again. Maybe Hillary will pick Elizabeth Warren to be her running mate. Or maybe she'll pick her husband, and they'll be like Claire and Frank in "House of Cards," which everyone knows is about them anyway.

Point #3: Hillary Clinton isn't going to be brought down by the FBI or anyone else, not for her emails, not for Vincent Foster's death, not for the scandal the special prosecutor looked into and found nothing except that her husband had gotten a blowjob in the White House, not the cattle thing, not Iraq, or Libya, or screwing up the health care thing over twenty years ago now, none of it. She's going to win. But not until the 2016 General Election becomes more fun than "Celebrity Apprentice" on lots of Colorado dope. Needless to say, afterwards something like 40% of the country are going to be mad as hatters, which is understandable after eight years of the Muslim guy from Kenya whose name rhymes with The Terrorist Formerly Known as Osama.

Come November, you're going to say, Not bad for a guy who thought the Cubs were headed to the World Series back in 1969. Who figured the jury would convict OJ regardless of the glove. Who figured they'd find at least one or two weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Who thought AC/DC sucked back when he was a kid and still thinks they suck ...

And then there was Prince.

Cream shaboogie bop ...

Another deal entirely.

RIP

Peeing There

I was up early, around 5:00 AM, watching it snow and working on my novel and wondering who I would REALLY NOT WANT IN THE SAME ROOM WITH ME WHILE I'M PEEING ...

I counted the same number of people who, in my opinion, threaten my marriage with their questionable activities and life-style choices.

Still, I decided, after weighing out the pros and cons, the privacy issues, that if Caitlin (formerly Bruce, the two-time Olympic Decathlon Gold Medalist) Jenner wanted to pee in the urinal next to me even if she was in heels and a dress and I could glance over and sneak a look at her cleavage—which I wouldn't do, by the way, anymore than I would look down to check out her retained from former days "cash and prizes," as someone close to me once said—it would be okay. I'd be fine if Caitlin wanted to hold on and have an old school comfort pee beside me like she might have back when she was Bruce.

I would also be fine if Caitlin wanted to have a seat in a stall next to where my wife was peeing, if she was peeing, in a public facility where this is done, even if she, Caitlin, still had her original equipment, her cash and prizes, as it were, it would be okay—

All I'd want to ask Caitlin if she were peeing beside me was if, now that she had breasts, all she did was play with them all day. Did she? Because that's what most of us guys who haven't made that life-style choice imagine we'd do if we actually had our own tits to play with: that we'd do nothing but play with our tits all day.

I'm sorry, I know that's coarse, but that's what we call them when women aren't around to hear us. Imagine making a life-style choice where you go one day from being someone who says tits to someone who says boobs, from being disgusting and coarse and kind of okay with it to being, well—

Which is why I'd probably say boobs or breasts to Caitlin if I was peeing next to her and asking her that question, because my guess is, having made that life-style choice, she would probably prefer boobs and breasts to tits. It's only polite, her deciding to have a pee in the men's room, where all us coarse and disgusting fuckers gather, notwithstanding. Who knows, maybe she decided to come in and pee in the men's room because she didn't feel all that comfortable in the women's room. At least not yet. Frankly, it's not a stretch to imagine she'd be a little uncomfortable in both. Which makes you wonder why she made that life-style choice. Why after winning two gold medals and marrying the Kardashian girl with the ... well, that he had to go and complicate things.

People sure are funny ...

But honestly, my wife and I, we don't care. We don't care either way. We don't care who we relieve ourselves next to or who does the same next to us. Maybe because we're weird and aren't adequately fearful of the threat to our privacy, though it seems to us that maybe those of us who haven't made that life-style choice are a bigger threat to the privacy of those who have made that life-style choice. Which I know sounds crazy, and you're thinking, That can't be! It has to be the other way around!

But we figured if we ever pee'd in the same room with Caitlin, we'd probably—shit, who are we kidding, we'd absolutely—be talking about it with everyone we knew for days, maybe even weeks. And everyone else who pee'd in the same room as her that day and every day to come—I mean for a long time, at least until people quit thinking it was such a big deal—would be telling everyone, too!

It wouldn't be that different than not so long ago being that gay couple dancing at a wedding and having everyone at the wedding that hadn't ever seen anything like that before telling everyone they saw for weeks to come that they saw two queers dancing at a wedding ...

Earl, get out your IPhone, I just saw a tranny go into the toilet to pee ...

I know, things like that don't happen anymore. Hardly ever. And they'd happen even less if certain people didn't just decide to throw their life away and be weird in their life-style choices, and make it uncomfortable for those of us (not me, of course, or my wife, or my children) who are already pretty comfortable, but is it too much to ask to be more comfortable still?

For instance, what possessed Paul Ryan to grow that beard when he was hunting deer last year and then decide to be weird and make people uncomfortable by not shaving it off when he got back to Washington and being a respectable Speaker of the House? Who did he think he was, Abraham Lincoln? What kind of asshole does shit like that?

And Hillary. What are we supposed to call her husband once she becomes president? Did she think about this when she decided to, I don't know, become the first woman president? What if he decides, now that he's vegan, that for the sake of propriety and tradition, he's going to make another big life-style choice? Who's going to stop him? His Secret Service detail? Who is going to stop him if he decides he wants to be a full-on FLOTUS?

Named Billie.

"What's Billie the FLOTUS doing, Mrs. President?"

"He's playing with his tits. Which, just let it go, is better than a lot of other things he could be doing."

There are still three months until the middle of July, and the GOP Convention that's supposed to be such fun. Paul Ryan has categorically said that he doesn't want, and won't accept, the nomination, since (give him credit) he didn't run for the job. Privately, my sources tell me that if they push him he's going to grow a hipster beard and put his hair up in a man-bun. Which would show them.

So, we have that to look forward to.

One way or another it'll be a nightmare for about 40% of the land.

See you next Sunday!

Pissed Off Nation

I got a note from an old friend this morning wondering how I could resist opining on this year's General Election. Especially, he said, after all the smart and funny and highly entertaining stuff I wrote back in 2012. And 2008, for that matter.

It's a mystery. But, here are a couple of possibilities:

1) No one is paying me. Of course, no one was paying me back then, either. Perhaps the idea of not getting paid just irritates me more now that I'm older and haven't made as much money in the stock market as I'd hoped back when I sold my shares of Cisco for $77 back in early 2000. Also, I still haven't found anyone to buy my first novel, which is to say I haven't gotten paid to write that either, or the one I'm writing now, and by now you're probably thinking, well, he's probably just bitter and angry and depressed about all that, like a lot of us are bitter and angry and depressed about our own shit, and that could be.

2) I already know who is going to win. Hillary is going to win. I know, I know, at this point you're either saying A) thank you! Of course she is! or B) Fuck you! Fuck YOU!!! If she ends up being the next president I'm fucking moving ... I have friends in both categories. In fact, on a visceral level, I pretty much feel the same way about Donald Trump and (especially) Ted Cruz. But they aren't going to win. Hillary is going to win. And here is more or less how that is going to play out: She is going to win New York on the 19th, as she sure as fuck should, given that she was a senator for the state, during which time she cast a Yes vote, along with John Kerry and that weasel no one hears about anymore, John Edwards, along with virtually every Republican you can think of who was in office back then, to go to war in Iraq back in 2003—arguably the biggest foreign policy disaster in the history of our nation—but, you know, the people who don't flat out hate her for that and other reasons, many (though not all) irrational, would argue that she did her penance for that rather egregious sin back in 2008, which is why Barack Obama is president and she's still waiting. Anyway, Bernie Sanders, as James Carville, then the mastermind of Bill Clinton's campaign, said of the late Paul Tsongas back in 1992, after his victory in New Hampshire, [he] isn't going to win shit. That said, he's put the screws to Hillary in a way no one thought anyone would during this our extraordinarily long economic stimulus package we call our primary season. In effect, he's been a first-rate sparing partner for her—and she needed one, since she might be smart and more qualified on a positions held basis than anyone who's ever run for the office, but unfortunately she's not a very good politician. It doesn't come naturally to her like it does, say, her husband, or Barack Obama, or, if you prefer, Ronald Reagan. Fortunately for her, however, she is going to be running against one of the following: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Paul Ryan. This after the Republicans proceed deeper into their already relentlessly dissected (if poorly medicated) nervous breakdown, after their quite possibly "contested" convention in July (no party in modern times has ever emerged well, or won a General Election, after going through a sideshow-style convention, not in 1976, not in 1968, not in 1924), out of which nothing good, only further clarified disaster in November, is going to come. This despite their running against a Democratic candidate with "high negatives," who (finally) could barely get past a Democratic Socialist Independent Senator from Vermont, who, by the way, would also win against any of the three possible Republican candidates, Trump still being the most likely, though he isn't a Republican anymore than Sanders is a Democrat, which would make for an interesting set-up going into the fall, but, regardless, not going to happen, and Hillary is going to win. And to my mind, when something is so obviously a foregone conclusion, it's hardly worth writing about for free. So there's that.

Still, assuming I haven't alienated you completely already, I'm a writer with an out-sized ego or why the hell would I persist in something so obviously quixotic and (economically, at least) disastrous? And to have one of my oldest friends, a very smart friend, petition me to write my thoughts out here on my blog, well, it's hard for someone who craves approval as much as I do to say no ...

However, the glow of seeming approval was dimished when I went back to look at some of my admittedly smart and funny posts from back then (you should check them out, too, cuz I mean, Wow), I saw on many of them ZERO comments. Which isn't to say that nobody read them, or nobody found them interesting, only that it seemed to me that nobody was either reading them or found them as interesting as, say, "The Walking Dead" that night. And you might say, well, I was reading them, I just didn't want my name associated with your foul language and outlandish sentiments, or, if I did, I didn't want anyone to know I agreed with you, or I was too squeamish to tell you to go fuck yourself, or, frankly, I don't want my name out there for Google and Facebook and the Chinese to exploit, better that you do that on your own, Craig, Mr. Rattle & Hum Guy, on your own, and for free, you fucking dumb ass.

It's a lot to sort out, as you can imagine.

Anyway, given the season (and to see that you all read this far), I'm going to conduct a little poll and then take it under advisement, as the lawyers say ...

To the question, Should Rattle & Hum and its author consider a return to form, if no more than once a week, now that the General Election may as well be upon us, even though the author already knows who is going to win?

Please select one of the following:

I. Sure. What the fuck else is he going to do? Write another novel? Give me a fucking break!

II. Fuck that, and fuck him! If he thinks Hillary is going to be the next POTUS he must be insane, and belongs getting a job like a normal person, and then maybe he wouldn't have such fucked up ideas.

III. It doesn't matter, I'm supporting Bernie Sanders.

Post answers either as a comment here, or on FB, or on Twitter,  as a secret handshake, telling nod, when you see me, I really don't care where or how so long as you all tell me what you think I should do.

And don't worry, I promise not to share your address with anyone trying to get at your money.

Don't wait, do it now ...

Best—R&H