subtitled The character “Buggin Out” from Do the Right Thing said it best.

Spike and Joie Lee with Giancarlo Esposito, 1989.

While standing in the pharmacy line at the grocery this morning, I noticed one of those “inspirational” books in the round rack called Conquer Your Negative Thoughts. I felt that the book was aiming right at me! Since November of 2024, I have had an almost impossible time doing just that. In fact, I am normally a cheerful person who loves to laugh and have fun as often as possible. Yet, my soul has been mired and sunken for about 65% of my waking hours since that dreadful dark morning of Nov. 6.

Slightly Vulgar but True

In Do the Right Thing, one of my favorite films, Mookie asks Buggin Out how he is doing, and the latter immediately responds with “Just trying to keep my d–k hard in a white man’s world.” It stuck with me because I’m just trying to keep at least a modicum of a smile in our current dystopia. If you knew me, you would know that I usually don’t talk like that, but it just seems apt in this situation.

On a News Diet

It’s the trainwreck I can’t seem to look away from, and the street fight I don’t walk away from. I stopped watching almost all corporate network news, and I try to curb my YouTube channel watching of the shows that all sob, yell, and propose the same things, namely: he’s an asshole, they are all assholes, we are fucked, Dems need to do something (hard to see that happening in most ways), all Republicans are zombie clones, etcetera…etcetera…etcetera. Of course, I watch the Bulwark, I’ve Had it, MeidasTouch, Pod Save America…and all of them. I allow myself about one hour per day currently. Frankly though, I am only waiting and listening for ONE NEWS ITEM, and it never arrives. That item is that THEY/HE are/is gone. GONE. We are free, free at last. The wicked witch is dead.

My brother and three of my cousins are now alienated from my life pretty much due to politics, and most of my friends have put into place a censorship system wherein we can only discuss politics for maybe three minutes, and that is it. Especially at dinner. It’s a good policy and a better way to live, for sure. But my feeling of misery and unsafe-ness permeates through a good percentage of my days. When I look up and still see MAGA bumper stickers or flags, I try to avert my eyes and pretend like I never saw them. They feel like darts thrown into my eyes.

The idiotic twit in the white house wants to be the bride at every wedding (and what a pretty one!) and the corpse at every funeral. How is it that his hideous, sub-human face is plastered over every fricking place one looks?? I admit that I am one of the many who has been sucked into his trap–I fell for it. I actually am still paying some degree of attention, much to the chagrin of my doctors who have warned against it.

You Are Now Getting Very Sleepy…..

I asked a friend to recommend a hypnotist so that I can maybe get “cured” of my obsessive ruminations. I want to be in the dark; I don’t want to see nor hear him any more. That voice alone is enough to induce at least an ulcer or worse. I don’t know if hypnosis works….we shall see.

Until then, and sort of like Mr. Buggin, I’m trying to keep my smile on in a trump-filled world.