I have clematis! Behind me, I mean.

The Iowa speech we're all going to miss:

"I don't understand farm subsidies but I'm going to pretend I do blah blah blah my inauguration crowds were bigger than the entire population of the United States blah blah blah no president in the history of the galaxy has been treated worse than I have blah blah blah beautiful babies and chocolate cake blah blah blah I just got back from Europe where I counted all the way to G7 blah blah blah next question, as long as it's about MEEEEEEEEE. Oh, and blah blah blah."

If. Only.

Just this month, Franklin Graham in a fiery keynote speech at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians -- yes, apparently that's a thing now -- declared without citing figures or sources beyond his own made-upness that "I am sure the number of Christians who are in prison or martyred each year would stagger our mind if we really knew what the total number really was."

Oh, the heartbreak of "if only." And I'm sure the collective singular "our mind" was just a typo in the transcript. Because surely these hapless persecution victims have more than one mind between them.

#TheCognitiveDissonance

Oh, Scott. Scott, Scott, Scott. Bless your heart. I'll try to keep this short so you can get back to showing off your import:

1. The fact that you feel obligated to state that you're not afraid is tacit acknowledgement that we're well past the tipping point where most of your swamp friends are afraid to admit they support Melania's Profound Regret and all thinking people are afraid for reasons that are apparently beyond your understanding.
2. Speaking of understanding, "tacit" means "understood or implied without being stated."
3. Really. One little sticker is more than enough to proclaim to the world your catastrophic lack of judgment. But five little stickers AND an entire bottle of rub-on shoe polish? That just exponentiates your bad judgment about your bad judgment.
4. "Exponentiates" means "raises one quantity to the power of another."
5. Don't worry. Betsy DeVos took that last one off the test. Math is apparently too Satany.
6. Your car photo doesn't show your license plate so I can't discern what state you live in -- gratuitous "of denial" and "of delusion" jokes notwithstanding -- but a perfunctory google search just showed me that obstructing your rear window outside of a varying allowance of a few square inches in each corner is considered dangerous and illegal in all of the state traffic codes I read.
7. STATES' RIGHTS! YEAH!
8. "Perfunctory" means "carried out with a minimum of effort."
9. I apologize. I know I promised to keep this short. But there are so many things profoundly wrong with you.
10. Mazda is a Japanese multinational automaker based in Fuchū, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan. Four of the five little stickers on your Japan-is-not-America Mazda clearly -- CLEARLY! -- state "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" In all caps! With exclamation points! One has to wonder the level of cognitive dissonance required to put multiple pro-America stickers on an imported car and declare a "love" of "showing off" that car in presumably pro-American "support" of a by clear implication pro-American "president."
11. "Cognitive dissonance" means ... oh, never mind. Betsy won't allow it on the test either. Enjoy your metaphorical obstructed-view drive.
12. "Metaphor" means ... oy ... let's just say it's one fewer than metaphive so you won't have to count so high.

Chesting

Why is it that there are only two people in this gym and we're both using the same equipment to work the same body part? I want to use MY equipment in MY order or I'm going to whine and post gym selfies on my blog.

Oh, wait. I was gonna do that anyway.

Is our president this transparently desperate and petulantly dumb

or is our president this transparently desperate and petulantly dumb?

Zut alors!

If he's importing cars from France, then his rallying cry of American JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! must be a bunch of merde.

Signs of the apocalypse

1. Bitch Kitty does something cute, like pose with her paws out like she's a superhero.
2. Bitch Kitty lets me get close enough to take her picture without hissing and running away.
3. Bitch Kitty even cooperatively looks up at the camera and gives a wan smile for her picture.
4. Melania makes a public appearance in a $51,500 Dolce & Gabbana jacket while her husband can't find money in the national budget for Meals on Wheels.
5. Pickles.

Some assembly required

Call the legitimate press that does legitimate reporting on your legitimate words and actions "fake news" long enough and fake thinkers will treat that dismissive characterization as fact.

Note the pro-Trump signs in the background of this photo. Note the almost daily screams of "fake news" on Trump's Twitter account alone regarding the legitimate media's reporting on Trump's words and actions. Note that the American population of racists, KKK members, and people who explicitly or tacitly endorse lynching and other forms of shut-up murder are measurably all in what's left of Trump's base.

Javier Valdez, a reporter covering government corruption and the illegal drug trade, two weeks ago became the fifth such journalist to be murdered execution-style in Mexico in two months.

There are lots of similar legitimate journalists in America infuriating the "fake news" population. There is lots of open enthusiasm from that population over Montana Republican House candidate Greg Gianforte body-slamming a reporter who asked him a question about the Republican healthcare bill just this week. There is overwhelmingly lots of influence -- legally, Constitutionally and culturally -- over this population by the disproportionately powerful American gun lobby.

And these people have access to lots of both literal and metaphorical rope.

Ugh

The physical headache that kept me in bed all day is mostly better. The man-boy headache proudly endures, though. I'm gonna bet he didn't know what NATO stands for or who's in the G7 -- or more importantly, why they are -- until last Monday.

Fun facts about my nephew

1. I've changed his diaper exactly once because for some reason when he was a baby and he needed changing, my mom was all "He POOPED! That's so ADORABLE! Let me change his diaper for him!" and she hogged all the fun.

2. He had a belly laugh that would put a mall full of Santas to shame, and it didn't take much to fire up his hearty laugh machine: tossing him in the air, making a funny face, poking him in the tummy and -- for some reason once he was old enough to talk -- just saying the word "envelope."
3. His head was so round and so bald for so long that I'm pretty sure when he was about five my sister traded him in for a kid with cheekbones and a tube of Rogaine because I totally don't recognize my nephew of today in the pictures of my nephew as a baby.
4. Once he could walk, I bought him some rain boots with feet decorated to look like duck bills and ankles decorated with duck eyes that he wore every chance he got until well after he outgrew them and his toes stuck out of the cracked rubber and the smell coming from them sometimes made him difficult to hug but for some reason I was proud to the point of tears that he loved them because *I* bought them for him.
5. He more than once wore those duck boots with a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles and went into a DEEPLY focused zone as he pretended to edge the lawn with his toy weed whacker. We adults kinda saw this as alarming but mostly saw it as a profoundly funny way to keep him quiet for remarkable lengths of time.
6. He loved fire trucks. FIRE TRUCKS! I bought him a fireman suit with his name on the chest one year for Christmas and I thought we'd have to throw buckets of water on him to calm him down after he opened it.
7. I'm a gay man and I have no innate knowledge about how to raise children -- not that those two are mutually exclusive -- but I had no idea how to incorporate the gay part of my life into his understanding of who I am as he grew up in a world of naturally heterocentrist assumptions. And whether he figured it out gradually or all at once, one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me was totally not caring one way or the other. And one of the second greatest gifts he ever gave me was his enthusiasm about making totally tasteless gay jokes with me as he got older.
8. I'd kinda hoped that as he grew up he'd see me as the cool best-friend/trusted-confidant uncle in whom he could confide the vicissitudes of his teenage angst or from whom he could get private, non-judgmental answers to his questions about girls (or boys, but it ended up being girls), but all I really ended up getting was the friend part. Which I'm totally cool with.
9. Every kid's age is the best age, but I'm firmly in the camp that right now is the BEST best age because it comes with thoughtful conversations and informed opinions about current events and inside jokes that are a few steps above using the word "underpants" and -- and this is my favorite part for some reason -- the exchange of texts filled with inappropriate humor and exponentially inappropriate memes that show I have successfully completed my avuncular mission to thoroughly corrupt the boy.
10. After a whirlwind few months of senior awards ceremonies and final choir concerts and poorly-attended-by-me baseball games -- which cap off a whirlwind 18 years of time-has-flown-by-way-too-fast-for-me-to-savor-each-moment -- my nephew graduates from high school tonight. And I know it's just a milestone in a family of lives filled with milestones, but this milestone carries the weight of signifying the end of his childhood, of his belly laughs, of his duck boots, of his fire trucks, of his joy over eating Mickey Mouse waffles when he visited me in Chicago, of his need for me to pick him up from school, of his influence on me to make sure I live my life in a way that he grows up with a good example to emulate and a proud memory to eventually look back on. We're certainly not done raising him -- and I still have a niece I need to finish corrupting before she graduates -- but right now I'm overflowing with joy and sadness and worry and calm and immeasurable pride that I got to play a part in raising such a kind, intelligent, clever, responsible, conscientious, loving, eminently outstanding young man.

Dare to have dreams. And strive to achieve them.

The dawn of a golden age of atheism

Ah, America's modern-day Kennedys: dynamic thinkers and style icons brimming with youthful idealism and the courtly-but-joyful appearance of domestic marital bliss. Melania keeps the world fashion dialogue in a perpetual state of abuzzment with her signature freshness and coy irony; she wears Armani to a soup kitchen and then the Old Navy Dowager CollectionTM to the Vatican. I think I could totally date her stylist. Ivanka gets points for versatility; her outfit goes effortlessly from afternoon beatings at her Amish sweatshop to a hamster funeral to the Vatican to her nut job (oops -- NIGHT job) as a chimney sweep, and then that corpse sneeze of a veil doubles smartly as a hairnet for her morning shift at the cafeteria in one of Jared's tenements. Donald -- impish, spirited Donald -- would show up to his own funeral (wouldn't THAT be fun?) looking this rakish and disheveled in a tie as crooked as his integrity, a (Saudi? the picture is too small to see for sure) flag pin, workingman's hands bruised from tireless hours perfecting his stroke (and not, as those poorly shot videos seem to imply, from being playfully swatted away by his third (and counting!) wife's bediamonded hands), and a grin as out of place as a shipment of pro-American-jobs hats made in China. We are truly in a golden age that spans the continents from the hotel rooms of Russia to the gilded towers of New York, and this royal family brings a level personal, human connection to everyone rich or poor or especially poorer like no one has ever seen.

So come on in

Among other characters, I play a bartender named Gregor in the Revival Theatre Company's Victor/Victoria. This my little gay wicker bar covered with most of my barwear, which I pretend to fill and serve and retrieve and wash and re-serve to pretty much half of the cast before the opening number is over. Don't tell my parents, but I'm pretty sure I do more dishes in one song in the show than I do in a whole month at home.

There is nothing sacred about you

You say stuff just to say stuff, don't you? You make meaningless, grandiloquent statements that you hope sound presidential and that you also hope nobody notices belie the lies and impulsivities of your actions. You are an inconsequential accident of evolution and education who by the nonsensical vicissitudes of sociopolitics have risen to a level of prominence and power that is thankfully tempered by your gross ineptitude at life. You are an embarrassment and a horror to all that is decent and educated and true in the collected populations of the planet you'd willingly destroy for your own gain if you could only summon the coherency to figure out how. And you blithely insist on proving it day after day, lie after lie, tweet after tweet.

Keeping up the scent of appearances

Happiness is discovering that the person before you in the gym shower left a bottle of body wash there and you borrow some and instead of the usual Uninterrupted Stream scent of your own soap you get to spend the day smelling like Hyacinth Bouquet. Or something.

The sun's out. The skies look to be clear. It might as well not be winter anymore.

Survey says ...

A Hughe compliment

So tonight after my nephew's concert, one of the cool kids -- who ended up being the son of one of my high-school friends -- ran up to me and called me Wolverine. Which is better than running up to me to call me a hearse, I guess. I used to get called Wolverine a lot, and though I still don't see it, I will never turn down a date with Hugh Jackman. I mean a comparison to him. I will never turn down A COMPARISON TO Hugh Jackman. (Call me!)

Oh, Alma Mater Washington ...

For over 50 years -- which, according to some sources, is longer than I've been alive -- the choirs of the Washington High School vocal department have assembled for a combined final concert each May that celebrates the year in music, highlights the best of the school-year repertoire and sends the departing seniors out into the world with one triumphant final evening of singing. Literally. At the end of the concert, the alumni join the existing choirs for the time-honored "Warrior Chant" and then the concert closes with the gorgeous "Alma Mater" where -- after the lyric "our classmates will be gone" -- the seniors depart from the choir on the third verse, walk down the aisle AND LITERALLY LEAVE US. It was cool and exciting when I was a senior. But tonight my nephew will be doing it and it's not funny anymore.

It. Will. Be. Heart-wrenching.

I don't cry much. As in ever. I don't cry ever. But I am right now. And the concert hasn't even started.

This is gonna be rough.