Let me be clear about something, in case any of you were wondering: I have absolutely no intention of reading this book. This is true regardless of how I acquire it, in fact; if anyone happens to give it to me I’m going to throw it away. Until this person’s taking residency at the White House I was somewhat proud of the fact that I owned at least one book about or by every US president; I have now amended that to every legitimately elected US president, and this person does not get to dirty my bookshelves. I don’t say his name and his stupid face does not get to appear on my website any longer.
It is clear from the excerpts I’ve seenI act that there’s nothing remotely surprising in there, anyway. It was abundantly clear from the beginning that this person was manifestly and obviously unfit for the presidency in literally every way one might be except for being a natural born US citizen and over 40 years of age. At this point I need no further evidence. There is nothing any book about him can do to add to my understanding of him; nothing has changed and everything was obvious from the very beginning. So, no. I’ve got enough bullshit in my life, and one of my plans for 2018, such as they are, is to spend less time letting other peoples’ bullshit into my skull. So I won’t be reading this book.
I actually had a brief conversation with my wife earlier today about what might happen were I to try and eliminate paying attention to politics from my life, even on a short-term basis. I’ve said this before; there would be a lot more political content on this site were it not for Twitter, which is where most of my politics talk has landed– which is probably better for everyone, as Twitter is better for spur-of-the-moment venting and I’ve already done the World’s Angriest Man blog, back during the Bush administration.
You know, the Golden Age.
I hear talk from people about how they’ve Decided to Unplug for a certain period of time; sometimes for a couple of weeks or a couple of months or much longer than that– usually this is in reference to social media in some way or another but sometimes it’s in reference to some topic, like politics, that is causing stress. I genuinely don’t think I can do that; I feel like paying attention to this shit is something I have to do as an American citizen, and “unplugging” or “shutting off” for a while feels less like self-care and more like an abdication of responsibility.
I dunno. I’m mostly free-associating. I might do such a thing if I thought I were capable of it; I don’t think that I am.
I woke up the other day and consulted my watch to discover that it was thirteen degrees below zero outside. I feel like we were largely spared polar vortex horror last year, for the most part, but this year has definitely picked back up on the trend of the last several years, which is that the weather at the end of Winter Break is horrifying enough that school being cancelled and the break being extended is at least plausible if not guaranteed. The boy goes back on Monday, finally, and I think the weather will be back to winter-normal by then, mostly, but holy fuck has it been cold around here lately. There’s maybe, I dunno, fifteen inches of snow on top of the house, too, which means that we probably got eighteen to twenty since it tends to compress under its own weight after a while. On the plus side, the new car appears to handle pretty damn well on ice and snow, or at least the new tires I put on it not too long ago appear to have done their job.
IN OTHER NEWS: the Lumberjack Beard is dead; long live the Lumberjack Beard. I don’t normally shed my winter beard this early in the year, winter having just barely started, but apparently the answer to this year’s beard question, i.e. “How long can I let this fucker get before it starts to drive me insane?” is about nine weeks. Granted, I brushed it backward to make it easier to shave off for that picture, but this was easily the bushiest I’d ever let my beard get, and unexpected side effects were starting to crop up– like eating getting much messier and– and this one really surprised me– all that hair on my face actually making it harder to sleep. I think if I groomed it a bit better it wouldn’t have been as much of a thing, but I’m a novice at this and wasn’t super interested in putting in the research time. I’d intended to just dial it back but ended up going completely back to the vandyke that I keep on my face for the other eight months of the year. I may grow it back right away or I may not, but I won’t be doing Full Lumberjack again anytime soon.
My phone is starting to slowly fill up with pictures like this, and I’m starting to see grid shapes with arcane symbols and glowing lines on them every time I close my eyes. My buddy