I’m 51 years old, which basically means that I live in a permanent state of whose dumb ass idea was being awake. I am tired when I wake up, I am tired when I sit down, I am tired when I stand up, my entire existence is one long slow fuck you to consciousness. But the most exhausted I have ever been, the most bone buzzing, brain sloshing, borderline medical event level of tired, hit me in community college after a night so stupid it should have been classified as a public health violation. I sat in the cafeteria the next morning staring at a hot pretzel like it was Moses dropping off tablets carved specifically for my dumb ass. The night before I had been at Wetlands with my girlfriends, and I don’t even know why I call it the night before, because it was not really a night before at all. It was one long unbroken stretch of chaos where I never bothered to end the night or start the day. I simply mutated from night into day in the same clothes, same underwear, same socks, unshowered, unbrushed, uncombed, the flannel tied around my waist still a little damp from God knows what. The Wetlands was basically a two floor terrarium for drug and alcohol induced hallucination near the Holland Tunnel, a humid little ecosystem where sweat and smoke and patchouli and beer and catastrophic choices fused into one communal cloud of questionable chemistry. Marlboro Lights and sugary cherry liquor clung to your clothes for days. I was always wearing two flannels, my bangs shellacked into 90s geometry, my penny colored lipstick migrating around my mouth like metallic weather, and my Doc Martens catching on the floor like the building wanted custody. I could not tell you a single thing about the bands. I was nineteen and focused entirely on getting the bartender to accept my laminated DMV duplicate of my sister’s license so I could order something neon and guaranteed to erase brain cells. Smoke, shouting, bass that vibrated your ancestors, rooms breathing, bathrooms listening, and in the middle of it all a fully painted psychedelic van sitting right there inside the building like a spirit guide for bad decisions. The whole place existed to get everyone as fucked up as possible. And when I think back, it feels less like I left than that the building got bored and politely spat me onto the street.
So I dragged myself to campus, sat through class like a medieval plague victim briefly reanimated for roll call, and afterward realized I was in genuine danger of entering REM sleep standing up. I hauled myself to my car in the student lot, climbed into the back seat like a retired stripper hiding from an all you can eat brunch buffet shift she was never scheduled for, and passed out for hours. Because even at nineteen, with half a brain cell functioning and the other floating in Midori, I knew I had no business participating in society in that condition. Which brings me to yesterday. Because yesterday, the President of the United States, a man allegedly in charge of a nuclear arsenal and not the early bird special at Golden Corral, held a fully televised Cabinet meeting after staying up all night shitposting like a sleep paralyzed warlock fighting imaginary goblins on Truth Social until dawn. He could have rescheduled. He could have swapped things on his calendar. He could have taken a nap or drunk a Pedialyte or eaten a cracker or simply not invited a camera crew to watch him drift into unconsciousness in real time like a barnacle coated sea mammal nodding off on a warm rock. But Donnie sat his saggy ass in his big gold toddler throne anyway, determined to be worshiped. And worshiped he was. Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat beside him, gazing at his slumped leathery idol. He announced to the entire world that only Donald Trump, the unconscious garden gnome beside him, was strong enough to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump was asleep. Fully asleep. Full REM cycle snore farting asleep. The NodFather. Don Snoreleone. The human sleep mode. The seventy nine year old toddler dreaming his presidential fantasies behind eyelids that looked like two slices of warm bologna stapled to a dying flashlight.  This man was not resting his eyes. He was not thinking deeply. He was gone. Astral projecting into whatever rotting carnival of imagery his mind cooks up when left unattended. Probably something involving whales going loco, the most beautiful toilet water ever seen by man, big strong men crying sir sir how do you get such wet water sir, and of course his adult daughter’s fake tits, the ones he told her to get. And his Cabinet, a room full of grown adults allegedly holding the reins of government, just kept talking. Just kept praising. Kept fellating his ego with the commitment of people trying to win Employee of the Month at a haunted sex doll factory. Hours of it. A fully televised national circle jerk. And then, like a drunk uncle in a La-Z-Boy on Thanksgiving jolting awake and immediately accusing everyone of stealing his bourbon, he snapped back into consciousness and launched into a saliva sprayed rant about Somalis in Minnesota. The kind of bile that smells like it fermented in his subconscious under a heat lamp. And that was when it happened. The Cabinet, those spiritually neutered, career wilted relics of whatever they once were, went full Lord of the Flies. Pounding on the table. Chanting. Cheer thrusting. Begging for more. It was a frenzy so deranged it looked like a deep fried everything tent at a county fair overtaken by sex starved poltergeists, a cult mixer where desperation is the dress code, a religious revival held in a porta potty during a heat wave. And this is why we laugh. Not politely. Not nervously. Not that embarrassed little exhale people use when a boss makes a bad joke. We laugh with our whole corrupted souls. We laugh the way you laugh when the universe drops its pants and shows you the cosmic taint. We laugh because the President of the United States fell asleep during his own worship service while adults lavished him with the kind of frantic devotion normally reserved for blow up dolls at a clearance bin orgy. We laugh because when he woke up, his first instinct was to unleash a racist eruption he had been slow cooking in the crockpot of his subconscious. We have to fucking laugh at this, because the whole scene was a circle jerk séance, a mass emotional ejaculation, a synchronized humiliation ritual for a man who cannot even stay vertical at two in the afternoon. And the cultish devotion in that room could have powered a small resentful town. We have to laugh at this government by ritual, because this so-called Cabinet would praise him even if he keeled over mid-grunt. They’d call it “tactical tranquility” and start pounding the table harder, locked in a trance like cultists trying to crack open a portal with pure desperation. We have to laugh, because what we witnessed wasn’t governance. It was paranormal porn shot on a possessed camcorder, starring a half-lucid crypt creature and a loyalty cult drowning themselves in devotion like self-baptizing zealots in a septic tank. We have to laugh, because the writers of this fucked-up timeline clearly staggered out of Wetlands at six in the morning, sweat-soaked and neon-stained, hallucinating exit signs that weren’t there, still arguing with the walls, and wandering straight into history like whatever was clinging to the inside of their eyeballs should count as reality. We have to laugh, because this is the President. Not a parody. Not an actor. This is a grown-ass man with nuclear codes who loses fistfights with consciousness in broad daylight. We have to laugh, because he chose this. The cameras. The reality game show. The spectacle. The big boy go night night highchair. All of it. He orchestrated it all, and then he promptly slept through his own praise-soaked self-fellation symposium. We have to laugh, because if we don’t, this whole concussed circus of clown-car calamity will eat us alive. |
