Stuff Happens

I should have known it would be a bad day when the morning paper didn’t arrive. Then my shoe lace broke. When the toilet backed up I called the plumber. (What’s a “b” doing in there?). The guy swiped $75 from my drawer when I was in the kitchen ruining Peggy’s blintzes, one of which opened up. The crooked plumber then wanted to replace a root-encrusted pipe for $3,000 which prompted my landlord, in a drug-induced stupor, to scream at me till his wife told the guy to get lost.

I then drove to the airport to pick up my daughter, Lauren, at the Southwest terminal. Push button but no ticket. The gate of the parking garage won’t open. Five cars behind me are cursing. We all have to back up in a stream of traffic. I could fudge and report that when we tried to leave we were hemmed in by a construction truck whose driver decided to park behind me blocking our way…but that happened the last time I was at LAX.

To conclude the day, the World Series game ended badly for my team but worse than that the remote control was inoperative. I couldn’t get the mute button to work so we had to endure all the commercials.

It is tempting to make of this a metaphor…something to do with Trump… but sometimes, Dr. Freud, a cigar is not a phallus; it’s just a cigar. No women I know have penis envy, I think. In fact, if a bunch of guys were trying to problem-solve it would help if one of them had a vagina. But I digress.

When things go wrong it has reached the point that we, (alright, I) re-contextualize the schmutz, the broken blintz, the stuck gate, and assign every unmuted ad, a false attribution. The danger is in aligning our own moments of existential angst and random despair with the political minefield and wasteland. There may be a correspondence but we can’t allow this Age of Blight to contaminate our psyche and reinforce our cynicism.

Yes, the guy in the Oval room is beneath contempt. Yes, we’ll be fortunate for the planet to weather his tantrums and inanities but let’s not cede our inner landscape to his ravages. Eventually gates will open, news will arrive and it won’t be infantilized commercials.