Well, it’s good news, here at bittersweet-comic-personal-essay-political-satire-with-a pimento-stuffed-olive-and-a-twist-of-gay-as-a-goose bootcamp.
I’m done.
Not just done.
Done, or even DONE. There’s nothing more. I am squeezed dry, like a lemon wedge squeezed repeatedly by a blue-haired lady over her Dover sole in the dining room of her cheap seaside bed and breakfast, somewhere on the south coast of England, possibly Portsmouth, where the paint is peeling off from the salt wind, the hydrangeas nod their heavy rain-laden heads and the bathroom smells of bay rum and lavender sachets …
… She eats her tea alone, spinning out her final days, fading with the twilight. The crisp yellow spritz of lemon juice, the delicate mauve taste of the sole. Soggy chips and coleslaw with salad creme … Squeeze …
I’ve finished shoe-horning in the yacht race out of Newport with the Bright Young Things; the obligatory interlude with the aliens who teleport the entire Jones clan to their spacecraft for an extended nightmare of intimate probing; a trope now so eagerly anticipated, it’s practically a family tradition—Little House on the Prairie, with sphincters;
A little musical bon-bon with the young, but still scary, Angela Lansbury that will have your grandad rubbing the stained crotch of his sweatpants against the newel posts in the seventh floor stairwell at “Sunset Lodge,” and, of course, The Scene with the Dinosaurs that finally explains, without the baggage of words, the ultimate meaning of our existence.
SPOILER:
This involves a Club Pack of ground beef that was left out in the sun too long, made the leap into consciousness and in a surprise coup assumes the office of President of the United States. Giant Patty for Prez! is all the slogan s/he needs to win hearts and minds with shock and awe, but Patty’s Presidency’s a polarizing one, and soon there’s just two camps: The Pity People, who want to tax the middle class until they’re poor, fuck the poor, then give it all to the forty-seven old white guys; and their sworn, mortal enemies, the Patty People, who want to do all of that exactly the same, but with tear gas.
Who will save the free world from Giant Patty’s reign of hamburger horror?
“I will save you!” We hear the voice before we see the speaker, but wait—is that—Persistent, Urine-y Old-Guy Smell…?
Yes, Bernie Sanders has arrived to spoil everything! He’s formed the Purity Party, and really, the choice is simple: vote for a billionaire racist misogynist who hires his relatives, sucks Russia’s cock, runs his campaign with money laundered through his charity, and flouts the rule of law; vote for Bernie, who wants full frontal social democracy in a country where the idea of health care has NRA members marching in formation and screaming “communism”—or a woman.
Sorry, BITCH.
Obviously it’s the billionaire racist, hands down, and there’s hardly a millennial who’s figured out how to open the front door and wait for someone to drive them to the polls who doesn’t throw up their hands, slam that door shut again and wail, “If I can’t have you, I don’t want nobody, baby!
Bernie’s thrown a spanner in the works. Bernie’s shown them how important he is. Bernie’s The Man. Bernie Bernie Bernie! At least he saw to it that The Bitch didn’t win. At least there’s that. And to a man with Persistent, Urine-y Old Guy Smell, that feels an awful lot like a lose made of win.
So once again it falls to our redoubtable Marines, half of them in clingy cotton floral-printed sundresses and the other half grabbing the butts of the first half without consent, to deploy their secret weapon: A firehose with the diameter of the Lincoln tunnel that originates in a genderless washroom in Texas, snakes its way across the half-submerged south eastern states and floods Giant Patty, Washington, D.C., and most of Park Slope, Brooklyn, with chunky tsunamis of Kraft Sandwich Spread; reminding us once more that none of us ever really enjoyed having the word “chunky” associated with food.
Not. At. ALL!!
In the thrilling dénouement, Hillary, in full Carmen Miranda kit, lobs a giant pineapple at “that leetle Corteth beetch”, knocking the upstart Socialista for a loop, but finally gets her corporatista comeuppance when Robert Mueller, lumpy as a sack of potatoes in a pair of blue tights which I’m not even sure belong to him, catches up to Hillsy as she shakes her maracas on top of Mount Rushmore and smacks her in the cha-cha-cha with a salt-packed anchovy fillet. Hillsy then falls to her death, which renders her temporarily speechless.
Epilogue: Just as the credits are about to roll, Bernie Sanders wanders in looking angry and confused and spoils everything.
I know, I know.
It’s been done.
On the other hand: Buy my book. It contains absolutely nothing I’ve mentioned here.
This link will land you smack dab on the e-book page.
Prices are $4.99 CAD for the e-book—that’s Canadian dollars, so, like, our version of free—and 30% off the trade paperback and the gloriously linen’d hardcover for the HOLIDAYS. Get that? THE HOLIDAYS.
War on Christmas? Oh, baby—!
Hand me my Kalashnikov, strap on my fuck-me pumps and point me to that manger.
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And never worry, if you don’t get the jokes I will explain them to you, which is probably why, around 1995, everyone stopped accepting my dinner invitations and started humoring me instead. So to all of you who responded with:
(Feminist in this context fulfills the same function as Nazi does elsewhere, describing as it does not an actual specimen of the genre but a scarecrow, only dressed up in dungarees and a tool belt instead of black leather and jackboots; and instead of translating as “someone I disapprove of on principle”, it reads, “women I’m extra scared of”.)
