It looked like a battlefield for horses he said
Not me but you
People of New York please plan to come to my reading in January. It’s in the Rare Book room at The Strand Book Store in New York and that is a pretty big deal to me and maybe to you and I will have two lovely people David Roth and Ashley Feinberg there with me to talk about what is wrong with our brains.
This is a preview of a paid only post if you’d like to read the entire thing and everything I’ve ever written here please subscribe then go here.
They impeached the president for the third time in history and I looked up from my phone and happened to glance at the television the exact moment the threshold was crossed and I thought to myself well I’m still fat and drunk so who cares and I scraped a dry piece of garlic bread across a puddle of cold salad dressing and poured myself another drink and went outside to smoke because I don’t feel alive unless I’m consuming something at all times even if it’s poison and I read a tweet where a guy said he had been paying $550 a month for health insurance and then he had an emergency and needed an ambulance and he got a bill for $1,340 none of which was covered by his insurance because he hadn’t yet come close to his $5,000 deductible. Inside again on the television I saw on CNN that they had Rick Santorum lying to Anderson Cooper and I thought to myself Anderson Cooper surely has enough influence at the network by now to say he doesn’t want a guy like that lying on his show all the time if he wants to so I guess the answer is that he doesn’t mind the lying all that much. I thought that maybe I should try to take it easy on mother-fucking everyone in media all the time but then I had another drink and pushed that thought aside and realized that no I am in the right here and it is everyone else who is wrong. I read a story about a cop in Honolulu admitting that he forced a homeless man to lick a urinal if he wanted to avoid getting arrested. The man is an addict who has been in and out of jail for years his family told the news and he was in a documentary one time where he was checking himself into rehab saying he was going to turn things around this time and things like that the things you say and you hope are true when you say them but I guess it didn’t work out. The news said he would go to that particular bathroom a lot to clean up and that a person who had the keys to it would let him in to do so perhaps wanting to provide him with some measure of dignity. I thought for some reason for a minute that it was weird that the cops in Hawaii do the same shit they do everywhere else and that is obviously naive because cops are the same everywhere. I don’t know anything at all about Hawaii to be honest I’ve never seen it and I probably never will.
I thought about the impeachment speeches they were giving on the floor of the House from earlier in the day and I thought I hope that these wet-eyed optometrists and plantation-wedding dads-of-daughters invoking Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and and the crucifixion at Golgotha are just doing it as cynical political calculus because they hate their fucking idiot constituents and not because they believe the shit they are saying although I’m not sure which option makes them worse people.
Around the moment he was officially impeached Trump was yelling at a crowd in Battle Creek, Michigan about the degradation over time of the water pressure of toilets and various other appliances. Sinks, right. Showers he yelled. And what goes with a sink and a shower he asked and the crowd mumbled back to him in unison they said toilets! like you would do if you were in a lively crowd at a hacky stand up comedian’s show. How old is he you’d go.
Ten times, right? Ten times Trump said mimicking the flushing of a toilet. Not me of course, not me, but you he said. You he said meaning it’s not him clogging toilets everywhere it’s you. Not me but you is so perfect in apposition to not me, us my friend Greg said in a group chat and I thought that was pretty astute.
I’ve never seen a dead horse and I probably never will if the circumstances of my life remain such as they are. I saw a story from Kentucky where someone went and slaughtered fifteen horses with a gun for no reason I guess there were a couple dozen horses that would roam around this particular area running around and fucking and having babies and doing other horse type shit and sometimes people would go out and feed them in the winter when finding food to eat was difficult for the horses. It looked like a battlefield for horses the local sheriff said and a woman who lives nearby and works in animal rescue said that although she’s been around and seen some terrible things in her career this was different she said it was an act of evil for lack of a better term and she also said that the horses were very friendly and you could walk right up to them sometimes and touch them. Everyone is very sad about the horse assassinations and rightfully so but I guess that’s what we do to millions of other types of animals every day so I don’t know why we register one differently than the next it seems sort of arbitrary. Because horses are prettier than cows I guess. Cows haven’t traditionally made anyone horny. You maybe. Not me but you.
I saw a lot of people who make a lot more money than I do and have much more stable and prestigious media careers than I do say surely this day will go down in history and the Republicans lashing themselves to the mast of Trump’s storm-broken vessel are writing their own epitaphs and shit like that not exactly like that but you know what I mean and a lot of people were pointing out McConnell’s hypocrisy noting things he said during the last impeachment that don’t square with the things he’s saying now and none of that is true there will likely be no consequences for him and what’s more the hypocrisy isn’t a mistake it’s an act of aggression because nothing makes a person feel more powerful than to be able to look someone in the eye and blatantly lie to them knowing there is nothing the other person can ever do about it. People like people who can do that without remorse as long as they are doing it to the people they think deserve it.
No one will remember any of this or anything really and it is very easy to forget the bad things people have done unless you were one of the people they did them to.
I guess JK Rowling is a TERF and people are fired up about that today and I am just glad I never wasted a second of my life…
Read the rest here.