How To Get Through The Trump Years

You asked for advice and here it is...

A number of readers have recently asked me how people to the Left of Donald Trump (which includes approximately half of America) are going to get through the next four years and the fact that they’re asking me shows just how desperate they are.

Because I’m the same guy who recently misplaced his spare car key, forgot to put a second “E” in a cartoon about Ashville, North Carolina and because I have tinnitus in my left ear, once thought a young Taco Bell cashier was offering me a “Senor Discount” – which I’d never heard of and initially thought was some kind of crappy club you had to join to get cheap burritos – but got set straight when she said:

“No, I said SENIOR discount.”

Clearly, the last thing I need is some young whippersnapper rudely and accurately assessing my age and I’ll pay $50 per taco before I do any Old Guy stuff like accepting Senior Discounts or wearing hearing aids or getting a cell phone with numbers big enough to be read from the International Space Station.

Quick story even though I may have told it before (let’s face it, at my age I’ve probably told every story before and I’ve also used that line before):

My 99-year-old mother complained that she couldn’t get a dial tone on her cell phone and when my younger brother came over to help, realized she was trying to make a phone call using her TV remote.

Also, another younger brother once won $100 by putting his tongue on a bug zapper and did it just a few years ago when he was theoretically an “adult” so there’s a quick look at the shallow end of the gene pool you’ve turned to for help.

Nevertheless…

I’ll do my best and here are some time-killing activities to help you get through the next four years while we wait for Sanity to Return to our federal government and come to think of it, our federal government has never worked all that well or been all that efficient so you have to fuck things up on a monumental scale to make Americans think what we had during the Biden Administration was the “Good Ol’ Days” and yet Donald and Elon have managed it.

And a-way we go…

Watch Classic Movies

One of the few benefits of getting older is a failing memory and yes I said “benefits” because any time you get caught doing something you shouldn’t or not doing something you should you can now say:

“I forgot to pay taxes.”

Or…

“I forgot I was married.”

Or…

“I forgot I had children.”

And your failing memory also means you can now re-watch old movies and have absolutely no recall of what the plot was or who was in it or that in Casablanca Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman (SPOILER ALERT!!!) don’t wind up together.

Plus, if you’re like me, you spent a good portion of the late 1960s and early 1970s “watching” movies at drive-ins which at that time was the only place many of us could get some privacy for make-out sessions in which we tried to get to “third base” but often had to settle for a “ground-rule double.”

And while I understand where “third base” gets you I’m not totally certain about “ground-rule doubles” although it sounds like at least one of your balls goes into the crowd and the “umpire” (in this case your date) sends you back to “second base” and you’re incredibly disappointed because you thought you were going to “score.”

(The obvious lesson here is I carried that baseball metaphor way too far and should have stopped at the first mention of “ground-rule doubles.”)

Moving on.

In any case, I have a long list of movies that I didn’t really watch during my Drive-In Days (or more accurately, Drive-In Nights) like Jaws and Planet of the Apes and The French Connection and 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which I’m really looking forward to re-watching because before I convinced my date to get in the back seat of my 1966 Ford Fairlane and engage in a Steel Cage Wrestling Match—Best Two Out Of Three Falls—the part of the movie I saw made those two characters look incredibly likeable and charming so I’m sure the ending will be upbeat and heart-warming.

Also…

There’s a shark in Jaws?

Learn A Foreign Language

One of my great regrets is not learning to speak Spanish because I lived in San Diego for two years and often went to Tijuana and Ensenada before doing that could trigger an international hostage crisis and the only things I could say in Spanish were:

• “How much?”

• “I don’t understand.”

• “Another cold beer please.”

And…

• “Where’s the bathroom?”

Before I moved to the Midwest I was working on:

• “Why am I under arrest?”

Which I figured would eventually come in handy because my all-time favorite bar was and is Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada and Hussong’s had what appeared to be a police station and a drunk tank inside the bar so if you were going to Mexico, planning to get hammered and act like a moron, Hussong’s was one-stop shopping.

If you go this route and decide to learn a foreign language I’d suggest learning Canadian (it’ll come in handy because they’re about to become our 51^st state whether they want to or not) and speaking Canadian is easily achieved by adding “eh” to the end of every sentence, pronouncing “ou” as “oo,” citing hockey scores and being exceedingly polite.

And speaking of excessive politeness:

I was once at a Toronto Blue Jays game and an adult male fan knocked over a boy while they both chased a foul ball and the adult male kept the ball and the rest of the Canadians in attendance didn’t like that and began to rhythmically point at the adult male and chant “Out!” which sounded like 20,000 people saying:

“Oot!”

“Oot!”

“Oot!”

Until the adult male jerk got the message and left the premises and it was the most genteel ejection from a sports stadium I’d ever seen, which raises the question:

“Just how big an asshole do you have to be to not get along with Canadians?”

And now we know.

Develop a Drug Habit

Now that marijuana is legal in many places (there’s a dispensary a few block from my house) you could get high for the next four years and live in a perpetual state of “not giving a fuck” (a technical term used by mental health professionals) and you don’t need to worry about moving on to harder drugs because as one of my sons who is somewhat familiar with marijuana use once said:

“Weed isn’t the gateway to harder drugs; weed is the gateway to Taco Bell.”

(Remember to say no when they offer you that “Senor” discount.)

My son added that in the long history of marijuana use, nobody – lying in a stupor on their couch, watching reruns of SpongeBob SquarePants while eating fistfuls of Cool Ranch Doritos – has ever said:

“And now let’s go buy some crack.”

So there’s three solid ideas for killing time for the next four years and if you don’t take me up on any of those suggestions, you better focus on this last one.

Work On Your MAGA Republican Responses

We often find ourselves in conversations we don’t want to be in, mostly because Trump Supporters can’t shut the fuck up about their political opinions and when that happens here are some conversations stoppers offered by some of my favorite writers like Elmore Leonard, Joe R. Lansdale and Robert B. Parker:

• “Talking may be overrated.”

• “Take two aspirin and lie down.”

• “If it bothers you, why talk about it?”

• “I’m comfortable not thinking about that.”

• “One needn’t say everything one thinks of.”

• “I’d love a look at the data that supports that.”

If you’re a long-time reader and are currently thinking, “Didn’t Lee write pretty much the same thing about avoiding uncomfortable conversations at Thanksgiving dinner?” I have a two-word answer for you:

“I forgot.”

(See? It works.)

P.S. Upon re-reading what I wrote today I noticed an unusual number of F-bombs, but if I have to keep commenting on Donald Trump’s hijinks for the next four years, I think we all better get used to that.

Hang in there.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/