The Covidian Age, part 9: The Batmans. And, I’ve outlived John Lennon.

172.

Well, I’m about to turn forty-five, goddammit. I’ve outlived Marvin Gaye, Ted Bundy, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I passed Jesus over a decade ago. 

173.

I used to write poems on my birthday, but this year I’m writing about Batman, and yes, it feels like a failure. I tried but with covid and the war in Ukraine and the rest, I just couldn’t find the inspiration. Poetry has seeped out of my soul. 

174.

So I watched the new Batman movie. I realized, two hours in, that this is the ninth Batman movie I’ve seen, and the seventh actor to fill the cape and cowl: Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and now Robert Pattison. I’ll circle back to my thoughts on the new movie, but I’ll start by quoting my cousin Keith: it was . . . fine. 

175.

I’ve been a fan of Batman since I was a child, reading the comics and watching the gleefully absurd old TV show. Batman has been a staple in my life since I can remember. 

176.

I saw the Tim Burton Batman when I was in eighth grade. It came out the same summer as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I was a huge fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and felt like all the hubbub over Batman was an insult. (I saw them both multiple times.) Movies were a big part of my life, even then. 

177.

Critics at the time felt like Jack Nicholson dominated the movie. A camp counselor that summer told me in a dismissive quip: “They should have called it The Joker.”

178.

The Joker does dominate the movie. He gets a much richer backstory than Batman. And Nicholson plays him like a savage adult reprobate, over the top and vicious, borrowing not a little from Cesar Romero, who was brilliant in the same role. 

179.

(Six actors have played the Joker: Romero, Nicholson, Mark Hamill [on the animated series], Heath Ledger, Jared Leto, and Joaquin Phoenix.) 

180.

The film cleverly attaches the origin stories of the Joker and Batman. They’re linked in an intriguing and satisfying puzzle; the Joker created Batman, and then Batman created the Joker. 

181.

The sequel, also directed by Burton, has Catwoman and the Penguin as its villains. It’s a kooky, oddball film, vacillating between cartoon hysterics and grim ’90s vigilantism. It also focuses on the villains. Critics liked it, but I was left cold. It felt like a sequel to Edward Scissorhands, and not in a good way. 

182.

(I’ve never been crazy about Burton’s films. I sat in on a press conference with Tim Burton, years later, on the junket of Big Fish. He came off as arrogant and dismissive, a nerd who became a king. He also said apropos of nothing that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a better movie than Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Madness.)

183.

Joel Schumacher directed the third movie, Batman Forever. Burton produced. I saw this in the theater, too. It’s a freaky hot mess, anchored by good casting with Kilmer and excessive turns by Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. I imagine it’s aged like rotting fruit. I’ll never forget Carrey in his skin-tight green costume tossing bombs into Wayne Manor, left and right, and dancing while the explosions ingite all around him. 

184.

(Because he made some dumb movies in his uneven career, Schumacher is often derided. Which is crazy. He isn’t some hack. He made The Lost Boys, St. Elmo’s Fire, Falling Down, Flatliners, Tigerland, and 8mm.)

185.

Seal had a hit song in the movie, “Kissed by a Rose.” I hated it then and I hate it now. It doesn’t sync up with the film at all. It made Seal an enormous star.

186.

Schumacher was wrong for the material, but no one seemed to care. He made a fourth movie, Batman & Robin, and it’s a fucking disaster. Everyone is miscast, everyone’s acting is terrible, and the plot is insipid. The costumes have nipples on them. The movie made some money, but Warner Bros. canceled the other Batman movies in the pipeline and the character got to rest for a few years. I remember a friend of mine mooning over Uma Thurman’s acting in it. Wow.

187.

In the interval, Marvel characters began to appear, including two Spiderman movies and two X-Men films. Only a fool would argue that Spiderman isn’t richer, warmer, funnier, scarier, or that the X-Men franchise isn’t packed with more interesting characters and a more relevant underlying metaphor. 

188.

Christopher Nolan rebooted Batman with Christian Bale, wandering Asia, practicing his fighting technique and refining his plans. He runs afoul of Ras Al Ghul, an eco-terrorist who can resurrect himself if he is lowered into the lazarus pit soon after he’s died, and Scarecrow, a mad doctor type who induces nightmarish hallucinations. The movie reshuffles the Bruce Wayne mythos, hinting at a deeper backstory involving his parents. It’s filmed in shadows and rain, a gray palette of urban decay. 

189.

The same talented people released The Dark Knight a few years later. It’s a great movie hobbled by bullshit binary thinking, arguing that the people of Gothan can have murderous anarchy or absolute control. Heath Ledger plays the Joker as a cross-dressing dandy, and it works. But Harvey Dent is the main character, a decent man deranged into Two-Face by the madness around him. It has a couple of dynamite scenes, the performances are great, and because of this we forget the ridiculous ending and the weird trip to China that eats up the beginning. 

190.

Still, it’s the best of the bunch, crystallizing the kicky fascist overtones of Batman and the wretched violence of the supervillains, the regular humans stuck in the middle. Ledger is remarkable, bringing a shaky vulnerability to the role, and having Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine as supporting players does wonders for the film. 

191.

By this point superhero movies were dominating the entire industry, Marvel on the one side and DC on the other. Thanks to Nolan, and to a lesser extent, Zack Snyder, DC’s films got grimmer and grimmer, humorless and dour, taking the notion of superheroes too seriously. Even Aquaman is presented as a moody goth teenager, while the Marvel movies were expanding in different directions, different flavors. 

192.

Batman hurtled along. Nolan took another crack, his definitive statement, with The Dark Knight Rises, a miserable movie that clocks in around 2 hours thirty minutes, with Bruce Wayne in middle age and suffering from arthritis, and Bane attacking Gotham for convoluted reasons. It’s all too fucking much. The movie barrels at you with half a dozen storylines, none of them coherent. The germ of the film—a city regresses to the middle ages after being isolated through cataclysm—works, but the rest is a farce. 

193.

I gritted my teeth through this one, watching it alone in a crowded theater, hating myself. It held no surprises, no tenderness, no excitement, nothing. Nolan fucked off to make Dunkirk. Bale moved on, too. 

194.

The Ben Affleck movies were next. He plays opposite Superman and Wonder Woman and the rest. They’re exhausting to watch. Overlong, over-serious, overdone. I tried to care, I tried and failed. 

195.

Then The Joker appeared, Todd Philips’s bizarro mashup of 1970s urban squalor movies (The Panic in Needle Park, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Taxi Driver, to name a few) the plot of The King of Comedy, and the edges of the Batman mythology. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is marvelous, crackling with inner eldritch fire, but the movie is terrible. The best bit involves the Joker believing he might also be the son of Thomas Wayne, but it walks this back. Instead it opts for outright plagiarism, taking the plots of a handful of the above-mentioned movies. 

196.

I hated it. I really, really fucking hated it. I kept waiting for Arthur Fleck to become Joker in some meaningful way, for the movie to click into place as a dark counterpoint to the origin stories of all the heroes. Instead he stops taking his medicine because he loses his insurance. Then, somehow, he becomes the ultimate baddy. Each scene doesn’t quite sync up with the one before it, and I couldn’t discern the message or the point. Is the Joker really just a poor depressed sap who didn’t take his medicine? I don’t believe it. 

197.

But what do I know? The movie made a billion dollars worldwide. 

198.

The new movie tries a different take, the Batman as a detective. The look is decidedly from the 1990s, borrowing heavily from Seven. There’s endless rain and wreckage everywhere, with the past and the future colliding in strange juxtapositions. A city hasn’t looked this squalid since The Warriors. The Riddler is rejiggered into an online anarcho-terrorist. The Penguin is now a (weirdly stereotypical) Italian gangster. The Riddler is killing people, leaving notes for Batman, who is always one step behind. It all kind of works . . . until it doesn’t. 

199.

I saw my first Batman movie when I was 13. I’m (almost) 45 now. That’s 32 years of Batman. It’s not so much a monomyth as an information system. Jim Gordon, Catwoman, Joker, Riddler, Penguin, corrupt cops, Alfred, malaise, out of control gang violence, exhaustion, weariness, fist fights, ambushes, and a feeling that none of it matters. I wasn’t bored. I was taxed. I was browbeaten. 

200.

The James Bond films—I’m not a fan, I really kind of hate them, but I’ve seen almost all of them—reboot with new actors in the role and, often, a different tone and a different setting. Bond gets shuttled to New Orleans, Mexico City, Scotland, Budapest. Each new actor brings a different persona to the role, from glib and campy to brutal and louche. Doesn’t Batman need something similar? Aren’t we ready for some kind of break from this routine, the feel-bad humdrum misery of municipal failure? 

201.

I’d like to see a film about Bruce Wayne attempting to live a normal life, fighting with his alter ego, the two of them at odds with each other, fighting for control. I’d like to see a movie where Batman might be the problem, not the solution, from the point of view of the honest city workers trying to do their jobs. I’d like to see a movie where one of his proteges becomes his arch-nemesis. I’d like to see anything, really, other than a failed city overrun by gangsters, with Batman there to pummel them into submission. 

202.

Beth (getting into bed with some work undone): Well, you know what this means, I’m saying fuck you to future Beth.
Me: You have an army of your former selves conspiring against you.
Beth: I hadn’t thought of it that way.
Me: It’s why things are so hard. And your present selves never seem to side with future you. Future you is always alone. 
Beth: . . .

203.

Beth: The real enemy is the conceptualized self. This is the you that operates inside the story you’ve told yourself about yourself. The accrued beliefs you have in your successes and failures. It’s the you that passes judgment on your lack of accomplishments. It’s the enemy. 
Me: That would be a great novel. A woman’s conceptualized self manifests as a different person, and they start fighting for control. . . . There aren’t any female doppelganger novels or movies that I can think of. You could make a million bucks. 

204.

I watch Ikiru, a movie I’ve been avoiding for twenty years, the story of a bureaucrat who realizes he’s wasted most of his life just as he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. It’s astonishing, full of more life, more humor, more mystery, more darkness, more thrills than all the Batman films combined. I’m transfixed by it. It’s the kind of movie that makes you want to live a better life. The perfect antidote to turning 45. 

The Covidian Age, part 8: Ghost houses, Hitchens, and other ephemera.

150.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, I’ve been trying to recreate the contours of my friends’ houses from my childhood, using my imagination and memory. It’s weird. I can visualize the architecture, even the smells, of a lot of their houses, but there are shadowy bits in my mind, the places I didn’t go to very often. The memory is there, but not there. If I focus hard enough, I can see the lingering ghosts of the people and events in these houses in my mind. I can see friends’ parents as idealized drawings, make out some of the art on the walls.

151.

One house in particular. Alex’s. I can see the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the backyard, but none of the rest. And no matter how hard I stretch my mind, it’s just these shadowy outlines. My mind grows stretchy, like gooey clay, if I push too hard.

152.

I’m working on a new intro for a new manuscript, as well as two different essays for two different websites. Must also design a cover for the next book, and revisit the director’s bio. My plate is crowded. 

153.

“Why would people who distrust authority choose to subsume themselves in a strongman?” — John Gunther wrote that some 80 years ago. It remains one of the essential questions of American politics. Yet another of our contradictions. 

154.

Republicans have rolled out their midterm election strategy. I’ll sum it up for you: public schools can’t teach slavery or reconstruction; women’s access to healthcare should be minimal, and abortion illegal; gays should go back into the closet; voting should be as onerous and difficult as possible, but only in left-leaning areas; and we should both declare war on Russia and simultaneously do nothing while Russia destroys Ukraine. It’s appalling. Why would anyone vote for any of this? 

155.

And I’m not talking about Republican voters. The party itself, as I see it, stands for little more than tax cuts for the wealthy, racism, sexism, and environmental ruin, pushed through by the angry double-speak of right-wing radio and Fox News. Some sixty Republican congressmen voted against staying in NATO just this week. 

156.

(I’m not claiming the Democratic Party is perfect. Far from it. But we aren’t dealing with differences in philosophy or governance right now. It really is a political party working to govern and a deranged cult of personality, hell-bent on rolling back the second half of the 20th century.)

157.

Right-wing pundits obsess over sinister symbolic failures of Democrats—they seethe over little slights—but refuse to read symbolism in their own candidate’s actions. Trump in particular brings this cognitive dissonance to the fore. Defenders lay waste to their own beliefs and the morality of every major religion when they circle the wagons around this guy. Just last night he refused to say anything negative about Putin, a crackpot butcher ordering his generals to raze cities and target civilians. It was weird seven years ago and it’s even stranger now. 

158.

And because the right-wing echo chamber is so strong and so insulated, the result really is two Americas. Jared Kushner used his position inside the White House to get a couple of billion dollars from Saudi Arabia for his bullshit private equity group. He then did a number of sketchy things to help cover up the murder of an American resident, as well as—I’m extrapolating here—push for various policy positions that favor the reigning royal family. All of this is unethical, most of it illegal. And yet, Fox News won’t stop talking about Hunter Biden, a lost and fucked up dude who traded on his father’s name. Was Hunter wrong to do this? Yep. But Hunter’s shady dealings reveal nothing about President Biden, while Kushner’s illegality reveals everything about President Trump. 

159.

Put another way: Yes, I know about Hunter Biden’s goddamn laptop, but how many Republicans are aware of Jared Kushner’s Saudi bribes?

160.

I read Philip Kerr’s A Man Without Breath, one of his Bernie Gunther detective novels set during World War II. It’s set on the Ukraine/Russia border, and charts widespread war-time atrocities. Despite it’s brilliant conceit—what does a murder matter in the middle of so much death and barbarism?—the book is a bit too preachy, a bit too schematic. 

161.

I read Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens’s memoir. I have a soft spot for Hitchens; years back, I started watching his debates with religious leaders over the existence of God. He was slashing, erudite, but also moral. He kept pushing against the notion that religion is what gives people moral precepts. He was brilliant, problematic, at times inconsistent, often funny, sometimes wrong, often controversial, and happy to piss off people of all political persuasions. He belonged to a class of English writers that seems to have read everything—Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes, and Peter Akroyd, to name a few—and write with an enviable flair that combines wit, perversity, history, and cynicism.

162. 

And it has me thinking. Of my own reading life. I cut my teeth on comic books. I read thousands of them. Comics led to pulp fantasy and trashy sci fi. I read all the time, moving on to horror—Stephen King and Dan Simmons and Peter Straub—and literature really didn’t start for me until I was 19, when I read Babbitt, All the Pretty Horses, The Awakening, and Love Medicine in a two-month period. I was hooked. 

163.

But I wonder if I didn’t miss out on a stronger foundation. Hitchens can rattle off all manner of details about history and chunks of romantic poetry; I know the alter egos of all of Spiderman’s foes. He was writing essays in the New Statesman before he graduated college; I was working on my first novel, an utter failure. But Hitchens details his own love of American pulp in what is probably the book’s best passage:

164.

“. . . in spite of endless parental disapproval I would sneak off to the corner shop and waste my pocket money on cheap Western and gangster stuff. . . . it made America seem huge and violent and coarse, and in places half-wild. Presidents got shot. People got lynched. A man named caryl Chessman—a bizarre enough name as it seemed to me—was put to death for rape after a long legal wrangle in California and (this being the detail that held my youthful attention) put to death in “a gas chamber.” I mean, I had no idea . . .”

165.

He sums it all up thus: “America seemed either too modern, with no castles or cathedrals and no sense of history, or simply too premodern with too much wilderness and unpolished conduct.” and a bit later: “How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?”

166.

The book chronicles his friendships with the literati, his peregrinations in the late ’60s, involvement with leftwing groups, meetings in Paris and Greece and Spain. As a reporter, he met all manner of heroes and villains, and he evokes the nightmare years of Argentina with hair-raising intensity. He later moved to New York in the 1980s, then to DC, working as a political commentator inside the Beltway. He wrote essays. He debated on TV. He became an American citizen and, in his way, famous. 

167.

Hitchens fell out with the left over his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He joined with other former leftists, falling in with the neoconservatives. But he never fully joined them. So he’s a weirdo, a bit of an outsider. I’m interested in his thinking. He challenges me. In his own words he distrusted tribal thinking and if a staunch anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist, he was also open to privatization and other right-wing experiments, and an enormous supporter of regime change in Iraq. 

168.

He was a lone wolf. He was wrong as often as he was right. He was witty, dedicated, sometimes a fool. I wish I had known him. His memoir is quite good, similar in its combination of anecdotes and warm writing to Roger Ebert’s Life Itself. Near the end, he writes, “It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time.” 

169.

Jesus Christ, I just learned that Jeff Bezos lived in Pensacola for two years in the late 1970s. And, Stone Cold, the trashy biker epic par excellence takes its hero, the Boz, there for a few key scenes. Pensacola shows up everywhere.

170.

We’ve lost close to a million citizens to Covid. It’s a stunning number, still scorned as a hoax by some Americans, disregarded by others. We’ve lost thousands of years of wisdom, knowledge, memory, and joy. We’ve lost novels and music and plays and poems. We’ve lost teachers and nurses and actors and artists. We’ve lost stories. We’ve lost collective memory. It’s a tragedy outside the scope of human imagination. 

171.

“Until you have done something for humanity, you should be ashamed to die.” Horace Mann said that. It’s sound advice. 

The Covidian Age, part 7: I appear on live TV.

117.

When I was fourteen, I had an unfortunate mullet. It looked bad. It was . . . dispiriting. There was . . . no party in the back. Flash-forward thirty years. A fourteen year old tells me I should look into growing a mulley, as he calls it. I tell him I used to have one. He tells me it must have been awesome. No, I say. It wasn’t. He points at his own and smiles. There’s a strange spirit of irony at play in the world. 

118.

My wife and I have three daughters. Every night devolves into a white-knuckle panic. Here’s last night’s running soliloquy:

119.

Did you brush your teeth? It’s bedtime. Turn the music off. Did you make your lunches? What are you reading? No, no. No. No. Did you remember to floss? Where are your pajamas? Come on. What are you— Brush. Your. Teeth. I can’t believe I have to repeat myself this many times. It’s almost 9 o’clock! What time is your bedtime? I don’t want to hear it. Shit. God. Can you just— Please, please, please. Go to bed. Now. Right now. No. I can’t—

120.

And on, and on. It’s enough for me to move to Spain and let my children go to bed when they want, wander the streets, I don’t care, just let me sip this wine. 

121.

I had two short TV spots on the Academy Awards to publicize The South Never Plays Itself—I know, I know, it’s weird to me, too—so I watched all the best picture nominees and stayed with the stories and the drama. I was as shocked as anyone when Will Smith, an actor I like and admire, slapped Chris Rock on live TV, after Rock gave a semi-funny joke that butted up against Jada Pinkett-Smith’s medical condition. It was grotesque, coloring the rest of the night and overshadowing all of the great stuff—and it was a strong year for movies—by this act of violence and weird non-contrition. 

122.

The act was so strange and uncalled for that I worry for Smith and about his frame of mind. And yet defenders came out of the woodwork, which is madness. Discussions on the slap dominated pop culture for a week. For my money, Pedro Almodovar had the best response. It’s worth looking up. 

123.

It was a strong year for movies: 

124.

Nightmare Alley—Adapted from a stunning novel about a hard-bitten hustler falling in with circus sideshow acts. The movie has a jaw-dropping first thirty minutes, followed by a mediocre second half. It’s almost a great movie, in some ways the most frustrating kind. The failure feels personal, somehow.

125.

Dune—a very fine science fiction film of a complex novel, about royal families and the spice, all of it inspired by the great game wars in Afghanistan back in the 1800s. Director Denis Villaneuve utilizes top-notch art design and reliable grim sincerity serves the material well. The biggest flaw is the abrupt ending. The film feels unfinished, as opposed to a chapter in a larger story.

126.

King Richard—The story of how Richard Williams raised two greatest tennis players in the history of the sport, his daughters Venus and Serena. The best kind of sports movie, where culture, money, oppression, history, and personality get intermingled with the sport itself. (Other great examples: Sugar, Moneyball, Bull Durham.) 

127.

West Side Story—A strange remake that succeeds and fails simultaneously, resolving some of the original’s contradictions but creating more of its own, misunderstanding the delicate sophistication of the original. Despite great choreography, this one just didn’t quite work for me. (And I like Robert Wise, but I’m not a huge fan of the original, either.)  

128.

Coda—A crowd-pleaser that takes the basic elements of the coming of age genre, then shakes them up. A remarkable movie in a lot of ways, simple and direct but with a single unforgettable scene that shifts the audience’s point of view in a fascinating way. 

129.

Don’t Look Up—A personal, heart-breaking film about the political roots of human inaction, attacked by critics on strange grounds. Is it perfect? Of course not. It never quite settles on a tone, shifting from broad satire to slapstick to anger, and because of this wobble some really fine performances (especially Mark Rylance) is lost. 

130.

Power of the Dog—Probably my favorite of the bunch, a mythic western that goes hand in hand with There Will be Blood, delivering a portrait of a misanthrope filled with self-loathing, where who is weak and who is strong is misunderstood. 

131.

Belfast—I didn’t see it, not yet. 

132.

And The Last Duel. And The Green Knight. And French Dispatch. And The Lost Daughter. And Licorice Pizza. And Spider-man: No Way Home. And Pig. And The Card Counter. And Tick . . . Tick Boom. And The Worst Person in the World. And Cruella. And The Hand of God. And Being the Ricardos. And Red Rocket. And Munich: The Edge of War. And Man of God. And Summer of Soul. 

133.

Did I like all of them? No. I loathed a few of them. But it is an impressive list. One of the better movie years in recent memory. 

134.

Weirdly, the short TV interviews didn’t ask me any questions about the awards at all. (Here’s a link to one of them.) I couldn’t see the news anchors, so it was an odd experience. I was talking to myself.

135.

On to other things. I find two bits of paper in books Beth is reading filled with my indecipherable handwriting. Both have the heading “Crow/Bullet” at the top, and appear to be notes on a poem, or maybe a noirish short story? I can’t unpack my own thinking. Do other writers have this problem? Still, I love this kind of thing. Here’s a sample bit that I can decipher: “But he carries the hard weight of past failure as a bitter stone in his thoughts. ‘The money is what matters,’ Crow says in a staccato, clipped voice.” 

136.

(Not particularly good writing, I know, but noir is like that. It always runs the risk of sounding like parody. And  might have been writing some kind of parody here, who fucking knows? The mind is an enigma. The older I get, the less I understand. Crow/Bullet?)

137.

Here’s a word I hate: impactful. God. Whenever I read it I think: that writer didn’t know what to say so they just shit the bed. When this word appears, a stench wafts off the page. 

138.

Worldwide, over six million people have died from Covid. In countries with vaccine shortages, it’s still deadly. We’re seeing unexpected long-term effects, including hearing loss, lung damage, and what a friend of mine is calling, “manopause.” (He had it, was sick like the devil, and now has trouble with regulating his own body temperature. He’s hot when everyone is cold, cold when it’s warm, etc.) 

139.

Meanwhile, the Russian war in Ukraine, a war they are decidedly losing—while inflicting horrible casualties on the Ukrainian people—is causing another refugee crisis in Europe. More and more it’s looking like Putin’s advisors are scared to tell him the truth, and have misled him all along. Russia is regrouping, intent on winning through terror and bloodshed. Which never works. 

140.

In the bizarre news category, Elon Musk challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat to end the war, while Putin has asked Syria’s Assad for reinforcements.

141.

Here at home we have our own series of scandals. An idiot of the finest caliber, representative Madison Cawthorne accused his Republican colleagues of orgies and cocaine use. Matt Gaetz inches towards prison-time, and it’s clear that half a dozen Senators and congresspeople actively worked to overthrow the 2020 election, using less than legal means. Trump asked Putin to help him again—again!—dig up stuff on a potential political opponent, while continuing to fleece gullible Americans with his grifts, cons, and super PACs. Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence, was directly involved in the January 6 attempted coup, and yet he refuses to recuse himself from the myriad cases pouring out of the whole mess. It’s one scandal after another, reminiscent of the Trump presidency. 

142.

Plus, eight years ago Barack Obama wore a tan suit. 

143.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, went through the masochistic ordeal of a confirmation hearing. She was strong, sharp, smart, and qualified, but they all have been and are (save for Kavanagh with his wretched weepy self-pitying). 

144.

Actually, I can’t get into this. I’m still furious about Gorsuch, and the smorgasbord of facile illogic, Republican demagoguery, and creepy ad hominem attacks and innuendo is a lot to take.  

145.  

The Republicans behaved like imbeciles, save for Ben Sasse. Ted Cruz and Noah Hawley—one’s a smug asshole with ridiculous opinions and ill-considered fascistic leanings and the other is Ted fucking Cruz—did their best to make her look like a defender and friend of child pornographers, a charge that is reckless and demonstrably false, Marsha Blackburn rambled on without saying anything, and Lindsay Graham behaved like an utter jackass, embarrassing himself and everyone who ever voted for him. 

146.

They’re ignorant poltroons. Yet we’re stuck with them. 

147.

I’ve been listening to Cole Porter, the Chromatics, Ryan Adams, and Tchaikowsky’s violin concertos. Cole Porter for his sophisticated joy, the Chromatics for their chill-wave weirdness (think the soundtrack of a fourth season of Twin Peaks), Adams because his music soothes my anxieties in ways I don’t quite understand, and Tchaikowsky because his violin pieces are intricate yet beautiful. I never regret listening to music, and often wish I listened to it more. There’s wisdom in there, somewhere. 

148.

I dress for work, putting on blue slacks, a white button-down, and a black vest. 
Beth: You look like a waiter. 
Me: What? No, I don’t. 
Beth: You do. You look like a poor waiter. A poor waiter who isn’t good at his job.
Me:  . . .

149.

Pearl walks into our bedroom wearing bunny pajamas with her hood up. 
Pearl: She looks like a normal human . . . 
She yanks down her hood to reveal an eyeball sticker in the middle of her forehead. 
Pearl: . . but she’s not!