Nothing To Get Excited About
An essay about presidential candidates, gambling casinos and Irish pajamas…
The cartoon you just looked at occurred to me when I read the phrase “Super Tuesday” five too many times and realized Donald Trump and Joe Biden were probably going to win their primaries (turns out they did) and nobody – with the possible exception of Donald Trump, Joe Biden and their respective Kool-Aid Drinkers – were all that excited about it.
The last two presidential candidates I remember being worked up about were the Kennedy brothers and when they keep shooting the people you care about in the head it’ll severely dampen your enthusiasm for politics.
The issue I actually thought about while drawing the cartoon was why the guy I depicted showed up wearing the same shirt two days in a row.
Did he go on a bender?
After using that word I wondered where “bender” comes from and according to the infallible internet it may derive from “bending” an elbow, but I wouldn’t count on it because the infallible internet also assures me there are tons of lonely women in my immediate area who would like nothing more than to have hot anonymous sex with older men who need to lose 10 pounds and also lie about how much weight they need to lose.
(It’s a sizeable demographic.)
The issue of showing up wearing the same clothes as you wore the day before because you got shitfaced, stayed out all night and didn’t go home to change, was dealt with in the excellent Netflix series Loudermilk about a group of recovering alcoholics when one of group members showed up wearing Yesterday’s Outfit and an English guy in his best posh accent said:
“In England, we call those Irish pajamas.”
A racial slur I assume I’m allowed to use because:
A. I’m Irish and...
2. I’ve been wearing the same sweatshirt since Monday.
When you’re semi-retired and not going anywhere or seeing anybody, standards tend to slip, a fact that was impressed upon me when I was unemployed in San Diego and could get away with wearing nothing but boxer shorts around my apartment all day. Right up until I went to check my mail, but unfortunately my mail box was located at the end of my building and I suddenly realized I had taken a lengthy walk through my apartment complex wearing nothing but a pair of Fruit of the Looms.
But thankfully for me and my neighbors those days are over and while I change T-shirts every day, in the winter I’ll wear a hoody until it has too many food stains on it, which among sports writers still wouldn’t disqualify it from being considered “semi-formal wear” and suitable for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.
P.S. I tried to find the Loudermilk Irish pajamas scene on YouTube, but couldn’t, so here’s one with Ron Livingston commenting on annoying Valley Girl voices and I really need you to watch it because I want them to make another season worth of shows.
I’m not sure anybody wants to take financial advice from me because my investment philosophy involves coffee cans full of money and a shovel.
I’m also the guy who grew up 90 minutes from Lake Tahoe and visited gambling casinos numerous times, but have never placed a bet or put money in a slot machine, so I’m not exactly a high-risk-high-reward guy. My anti-slot machine philosophy went pretty much like this:
“So you invented a machine to take my money and all I have to do for it to work is to put my money in your machine. And you’re also going to make me use tokens so it doesn’t seem like real money and have no clocks or windows in the casino so I lose track of time and keep serving me drinks delivered by women with what appear to be Gravity-Defying Breasts because when men are drunk and horny we tend to make really impulsive decisions which is probably the best explanation for the popularity of Pornhub.”
And now a word about those Gravity-Defying Breasts
Back when I was running around my apartment complex in boxer shorts, I briefly dated a former Playboy Club Bunny and she told me they achieved those “about to reach lift-off” boobs by rolling up nylons and sticking them under their breasts which pushed them up into the vicinity of their chins. Which sounds really really uncomfortable so you can see why women who have to do this five-days a week to make a living tend to resent men and our infantile fixation on unlikely breasts.
What if women required men to walk around with massive erections achieved by wearing an Evel Knievel Snake River Launching Ramp inside our BVDs?
OK, enough about artificially enhanced body parts and now I’ll attempt to answer the question you must be asking if you haven’t been distracted by my sophomoric digressions: if I didn’t gamble why did I spend so much time in casinos?
Because I had less-cynical friends (if by “cynical” you actually mean “logical”) who had “sure-fire systems” which kinda made me wonder why they lived in a trailer with a broken air conditioner and thought they could outsmart someone who lived in a place called Caesar’s Palace.
Turned out all their systems eventually went something like this:
1. Announce you want to play just a few hands of blackjack before dinner.
2. Then refuse to go to dinner because you’re either A. on a hot streak or B. need to win back what you’ve already lost.
3. Keep gambling until you’ve lost absolutely everything including the money you were going to spend on dinner and if you really got desperate, the deed to your shitty trailer house.
4. Find me on whatever couch or chair or cocktail lounge booth I’ve decided to sleep in or on while waiting for you to go broke.
5. Drive home angrily while gripping the steering wheel so hard you’re leaving dents and when I ask exactly how much you lost, tell me to shut the fuck up.
6. Repeat steps 1 through 5 in six months when you have a new sure-fire system.
I was reminded of all this when I read that Bitcoin had achieved an all-time high in price, even though it wasn’t all that long ago that investors in the FTX currency exchange lost $8.9 billion and if you Google “Is cryptocurrency a Ponzi scheme?” you’ll find some articles saying it is and some saying it isn’t, most of which seem to be written by people who want you to keep investing in cryptocurrency.
Which apparently works because when it happened I read an article about a guy who lost his shirt in the FTX collapse, but reasoned now was the time to get back into cryptocurrency because prices were depressed.
Supposedly P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute” although as with most famous quotes there’s some debate as to who said it first and it might have been one or more Catholic popes.
Just in case you want further reading on the subject of cryptocurrency scams, here’s an article from the Securities and Exchange Commission:
https://www.sec.gov/files/ia_virtualcurrencies.pdf
Nikki Haley got beat 15 too many times and decided to call it quits which makes Donald Trump the Republican nominee for president for the third time in a row, despite the fact that he tried to steal the last election and encouraged a bunch of knuckleheads to overthrow the government when stealing the election didn’t work.
So why not have a second round of that?
As the following article points out, if we think his last term in office was like chugging a fifth of Jose Cuervo and then riding the Zambezi Zinger until we puked up that gum we swallowed when we were in first grade, that’ll be nothing compared to his second term because should he get one Trump has:
Vowed to take revenge on his enemies.
Called for the termination of the Constitution.
Called for mass deportation and detention camps.
Said he wants the Supreme Court to give him unchecked power.
Pledged to fire a bunch of civil servants and replace them with people loyal to him.
And if he’s got a free weekend maybe pull out of NATO and trash U.S. relations with our traditional allies and see if any dictators want to come to the White House for a sleepover and take a look at all the secret documents he’s not supposed to have.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/06/politics/trump-presumptive-nominee-analysis/index.html
I was once crossing the footbridge between Tijuana and San Ysidro and looked down to see what I assumed were two drunk American morons getting in a fistfight. I assumed they were morons because they were having the fistfight in Mexico when the US of A was right there on the other side of the footbridge.
Helpful hint: if you’re going to do something monumentally stupid do it in the United States where the consequences won’t be as severe and you just might wind up with the Republican nomination for president.
My assumption that the fight didn’t involve the Theory of Relativity or Grand Master Chess Moves or Great Feminist Literature of the 19th Century was confirmed when a Mexican cop (who looked like he weighed maybe 90 pounds soaking wet) tried to break up the fight and one of the combatants took a swing at him.
Which resulted in a swarm of 90-pound-soaking-wet Mexican cops showing up in a hurry and holding the guy down and twisting his leg until it snapped. (I’m not really a doctor so maybe my diagnosis was off, but I’m guessing your foot isn’t supposed to be facing due South when you kneecap is pointed directly toward Canada.)
So the lesson there was don’t do really stupid shit in a foreign country because they’re not playing by our rules in which we think we can talk back to cops and get away with it. (Maybe you can if you’re White and driving a 2024 Mercedes-Maybach S-Class, but if you’re Black and driving a ’63 Buick Le Sabre you might want to think twice.)
All that occurred to me when I saw protesters attending Alexei Navalny’s funeral and carrying signs opposing the war and promoting Russia freedom because it takes some balls (and/or ovaries) to do that in a country where the Top Guy’s enemies have a tendency to fall out of high windows or ingest plutonium while eating their cornflakes and according to another story, a Russian human rights activist just got 2 ½ years for criticizing the war and “repeatedly discrediting” the Russian military.
Which means if I lived in Russia I’d probably be doing Life for the cartoon you just looked at, assuming I didn’t fall out of a high window first.
OK, that’s it for today and be sure to set your clocks forward tonight and enjoy the moment because while neither candidate is all that inspiring, if the wrong guy gets elected this November we’ll be turning our clocks back by centuries.
You made me LOL, or more bark, really. Love your writing.
Thanks for the push on Loudermilk. I keep not trying it. And thanks for the visual of you picking up your mail Diego mail.