TomFlannery.com

I don’t do hallucinogenic drugs so there’s no way I can watch any more of this impeachment stuff. At least if you’re buzzing, Trump’s lawyers might look like Gila Monsters or the Manson Girls or some such, and it might spur on some phantasmagorical trip that kick-starts the search for the elusive “middle”. But straight? Just more dumb white guys who somehow passed the bar and aren’t gonna get paid. It’s distressing and I want all of this to be over so we can get back to shoveling snow and taking bets on how long the Trump/Pence 2020 signs are gonna stay up.

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To be 100% honest I lost my glasses yesterday…..which is pretty hard to do when you haven’t left the house. But I managed. Tore the house apart. Blamed the dog and the cat. Unmade the bed 3 times, and pulled the cushions off the couch twice. I even emptied the garbage. By hand. They are nowhere. They sleep with the fishes. Passed on. They have ceased to be. Bereft of life. Rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Poof. Gone. I can read and write just fine without ’em, but other things like reading the clock on the wall, or even recognizing which kid is in what picture, elude me. Driving is out of the question, as is watching TV unless I’m standing with my nose pressed to it. I’m that guy who sits in the eye doctor’s office, and when told to read the smallest line on it, reply “what eye chart?” Always gets a laugh.

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We’ve been shut in for so long. Just the simple act of navigating your cart through a grocery store can kick-start a moribund day, even if I have to squint. You notice everything. Things you never would have noticed in pre-Covid days. Noses and mouths especially. It’s become second nature to give wide berth to the ones who still haven’t grasped the masking concept. But all in all folks seem a tad more cheerful than they were back in the spring when this thing took hold. Somebody without a mask now is likely to get the same amount of eye-rolls as a shirtless guy wearing a viking helmet. And, you know, pandemically speaking at least, that’s progress. Sometimes it’s the little things, Bubba.

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In cancel culture news, that country guy who was screaming the n-word outside his house last week has seen his sales sky-rocket, which is kinda awkward to the entire genre….but whatever. I mean….whadda you do if more and more of the nation not only accept things like fascism and racism, but seem to actively embrace them? And that sorta-wacky Trump cultist actress from the “Mandalorian” was dropped from the show (and her talent agency) after a tweet comparing being a Republican today to being Jewish during the holocaust. She’s made other dumbass posts as well, denigrating mask-wearing and pushing Dear Leader’s “big lie”, (although these are nothing more than middle of the road Republican dogma these days, why single her out?) but this one and its snowballing consequences makes me feel a little queasy….because while nobody who wasn’t a fucking gargantuan idiot would compare herself to Anne Frank, in her small mind I don’t think she was being anti-Semitic. She’s just wallowing in the same victim porn circle-jerk that conservatives have been hosting for years. Sometimes people are just assholes, and if we start cancelling for that the world is gonna be filled with even more out of work actors. And then it becomes more us vs them and you have a couple of super-jizzed rent-a-cops spying Bruce Springsteen accepting a shot of Tequila from fans as he drove past on his motorcycle, and the story being framed like he’s drunken David Hasselhoff crawling on the ground trying to eat a cheeseburger.

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One thing 2020 did was erase the feeling that we feel younger than our age. I always felt like a bit of a cheeky kid. But now our age washes over us like a tsunami. We’re slower. More cautious. Both bedtimes and the mornings after come sooner than they used to. Things hurt that didn’t use to hurt. And the things we used to be able to overlook, we don’t/can’t overlook anymore. There’s no such things are youthful indiscretions anymore. It forced a reckoning. A growing up. For better. And for worse.

In a bit..

–tf