Bad Mood, Deconstructed
Foul humor in a bad restaurant.
I wake up early. I ignore everything else, whether it’s taking a shower or eating breakfast. I follow the thought and work, looking like the demented cat banging away at a keyboard in a popular GIF. Hours go by and I don’t notice.
To be this engaged in work is bliss.
Today is no such day. I am writing because it’s Wednesday and I publish essays on Wednesdays.
Please note I think it’s a fruitless exercise. Please note there is nothing I will write that will change your life or make it better or give you a different way to look at things. When you read this and feel dissatisfied, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
It’s a little existential at my house today.
I am in a bad mood (obviously) so I called Cathy.
For thirty-eight years, Cathy and I have called each other on the phone and said exactly what we think. I don’t worry she’ll accuse me of whining. I don’t have to edit myself. She and I listen to each other, no matter how awful we think we sound. That’s the deal.
It’s a good deal. Not at all sure I could survive without her, so it’s excellent news she’s the most physically fit person I know. I expect her to live long past my expiration date.
I said in one giant breath,
“There was a mass shooting last night in Fredericksburg (my hometown) and a friend of mine heard the gunshots while they were taking in their plants because it was going to be cold and I saw video of what looked like two teenagers walking with semi-automatic rifles up the street, and wondered is it real or an AI video because who knows anymore, and who the hell would be filming video during a shooting and the people who died may be kids and the shooters may be kids, and last week in the same county an eight-year-old brought a gun in his backpack to school and it went off in his backpack although I’m unclear how that happened, and I can’t think of a solution to Trump and I am so damned depressed and furious.”
Or something like that. It went on a little longer and included some deeply-felt sadness over a friend’s health. I may have mentioned something about living in—I don’t even have a word for what our nation has become.
I finished up by saying I was tired of pretending I’m alright because,
“I AM NOT ALRIGHT.”
And all I want to do is,
“TAKE A NAP AT 9:30 IN THE MORNING. I DON’T WANT TO WRITE.”
I knew I didn’t have to hold it together for her.
Cathy said,
“When Oreo died….”
Oreo, who died in January, was Cathy’s dog. He was the sweetest guy on earth and smart as hell. He did tricks, and I do love a working dog. Oreo lived to be sixteen years old because Cathy took such good care of him.
If reincarnation is real, and I sure hope it isn’t, I want to come back as one of Cathy’s dogs.
“When Oreo died I did not have the energy to edit myself, so I just said whatever I was thinking to everyone. And it was EXHILARATING. It was so great and then I thought man, how much do I edit myself all the time?”
How much indeed? How much do I edit myself with the rest of you? And why?
I sure wouldn’t mind some exhilaration right now.
Here’s the thing—I like a solution. I’ve got the kind of brain always looking for one.
I want a structure to life in which all of us get to be ourselves. The structure supports us. This structure might be called, oh, I don’t know,
Government.
I do not want teenagers shooting each other in broad daylight on residential streets. I do not want people in line at Walgreens unable to purchase their medications because their exorbitant insurance doesn’t cover them. I do not want mothers worrying about how to feed their kids and keep a roof over their heads while working full-time jobs.
I have what’s obviously a deranged notion that in a state of order, everyone benefits. I have an even wilder hair in the idea that if everyone has healthcare, food, and housing, our entire society will bloom.
I think I got this way of thinking from working in restaurants. In a restaurant, problems are solved. They have to be.
Right now, my restaurant brain is a big problem. Under this administration, there is not a single aspect of government that makes a lick of sense. Thinking is a hindrance.
If you are a solution-based person, living through Trump 2.0 is like Dante’s Inferno. And there is no way to right it, because Congress refuses to do its job and remove a president who is blatantly unfit for office.
Still, I must get up every day and function. The world may be falling apart, but I’ve got things to do.
I woke up today enraged and plummeted into despair. I don’t know what happened.
Yes I do. It was seeing those kids with semi-automatic rifles almost as long as they were. Just walking up the street with them.
Like a fool, I got hopeful after the march on Saturday.
Then I saw those kids. Three people are dead, and the lives of the teen shooters are over before they started.
At any other time in our nation’s history, we would not allow a psychopathic toddler to ruin the nation’s economy, let alone the world’s.
And yet, here we are. Washington D.C. is the workplace of lily-livered, self-obsessed sycophants and timid, unimaginative posers.
Our Congress, Senate, and Supreme Court are like parents in a restaurant who let their three-year-old twins run amuck in the place. The twins smack straight into the legs of waiters carrying hot fajitas and trays of drinks.
The parents laugh, saying things like,
“It’s just kids being kids.”
It’s just Trump being Trump, what are we so worried about? It just looks like we are going to be brained by a falling hot iron skillet, we’re not dead yet. Don’t be hysterical, everything is going to be fine.
“Many of us have messy, dysfunctional, chaotic lives outside of the kitchen, but inside the kitchen we have the only order, the only structure in our lives.” --Anthony Bourdain.
Humans are a messy bunch. It’s one of my favorite things about us.
We do not need a messy political system. We need politics which help us survive our messy, disordered lives.
I want our political system to run like Anthony Bourdain’s kitchen.
I want a chef in the Oval Office who has seen the world. I want a chef who can handle chaos. I want someone who understands that man’s worst instincts are not something to be cheered or celebrated. I want someone who is not only intelligent, but smart, and has the humility to listen to others.
I want someone who looks for solutions and deals with problems in a practical way.
And it might help if Chef were hot.
Chef pulls up a piece of flounder to sauté and his expert nose catches a whiff of…bad.
The fish is bad. He doesn’t pretend it’s good.
It may not be convenient for the fish to go bad. In fact, it might be 7 pm on a Friday night when the fish goes, and the first thing Chef might do is cuss his supplier. He might bang the sauté pan in a forgivable, momentary fit.
But Chef does not put a bad piece of flounder onto the pan and douse it with enough lemon sauce and capers to cover the smell. He knows he could make someone sick, and he doesn’t want to poison someone. He’s not a psychopath.
And not for nothing, serving bad fish might ruin his reputation, which he cares about. He doesn’t want to ruin his restaurant’s reputation.
So he tells the waitress to buy the table a round of drinks and to offer them another choice. The tuna looks beautiful.
Then Chef sends the busboy into the fridge to toss out the entire lot of flounder first into an industrial strength plastic bag, then to the dumpster. The dishwasher scrubs the Cambro holding the fish in blisteringly hot water, so its bacteria taints nothing else.
Everyone in the restaurant takes responsibility for the bad fish.
That’s what I want in government. If we replaced Trump’s cabinet with line cooks, dishwashers, and busboys, America would be a much safer place.
Instead, Donald Trump is drowning in capers and lemon sauce. Nobody in their right mind would let that plate go out of the kitchen.
A solution is keeping my eye on the prize. If there is a way out of hell and I know it, I like to tell everyone.
Come on, we can stop suffering, I think. Come along, we don’t have to do it this way anymore.
But what is the solution to Trump?
There is only one solution to Trump. No Trump.
As long as he’s in office, we’ll watch everything we have slide away. It runs off the great cesspool of his mind.
There is no question he is ruining the economy. He is ruining the First Amendment. He is ruining the rule of law. He is ruining higher education, the environment, and do not even get me started about his rampage against diversity, equity and inclusion.
There is no bright side to the tariff insanity. I promise he is not even an evil genius at work. He’s got nothing.
Jamelle Bouie wrote the best piece I’ve read about Trump’s tariffs today, but of course it’s not just about tariffs, it’s about everything. The punchline: Trump is never satisfied and must dominate, so as long as he’s in office, this insanity will continue.
His latest lunacy is threatening to place tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
I know people facing medication shortages right now. And the president doesn’t seem to grasp a simple concept: infrastructure, bank loans, all sorts of things must be in place to start manufacturing. Manufacturing goods in America can also double the cost.
It’s a fact, not a supposition. This is going to affect our very health, because factories to make medication do not appear overnight.
While listening to NPR last week, I learned most Band-Aids are made in China, not here. It might take five years to get a Band-Aid factory up and running, in case anyone wanted to bother with their own Band-Aid factory.
And what do we do when the nation that makes the Band-Aids has a Trump tariff levied against them to the tune of 125%?
Get used to wrapping your fingers in paper towels, people. Be safe with knives.
Now he’s paused the tariffs.
Do not be suckered. They’ll be back this week, or next month, or in an hour. He likes to mess with us.
We’ve got to be the dishwashers and line cooks and prep guys and grill people and waitresses and busboys.
We’ve got to do the work, whether we feel like it or not. And trust me, I don’t feel like it.
A General Strike is inconvenient. But it may be the only way to demand his removal from office.
Now, human nature being what it is, and white American entitlement being what it is, we won’t go on a General Strike until it’s too late. We won’t want to be inconvenienced. We worry we’ll lose our jobs and homes and money.
What if I were to tell you, we’re going to lose our jobs and homes and money anyway? Would you strike then?
Maybe strike now. While we can. He’s gotta go. We won’t survive till the 2026 midterms at this rate.
I can’t take mass shootings and bad presidents and existential dread all on the same day. Enough already.
He’s fucking with us. That’s the story.
All I can do is shake my head and say fuck all the time.
That was absolutely Brilliant ! I’d be happy to join the restaurant and wash dishes and dirty pots !!🤗👍