Bright sunshine, just a whisper of a breeze and warming-quickly-up temperatures this late-morning Friday here in Californai’s Central Valley — lately, we’ve gone from a ‘heat dome’ hot to the now-normal ‘summer sizzle’ for the region as triple-digit numbers continue to make outdoors near unbearable.
However, I think we have a while to go before we’re in an unlivable zone. People/places/things can generaly tolerate some terrible shit before fleeing. Not that long, though, sorry to say.

Hence again, another fairly-long stretch in posting here after getting smelted with shit news seemingly by the hour, not only from the horror of the T-Rump/MAGA agenda intended to end America as we’ve known it the past couple hundred years and counting, but from just daily activities, like Bob Newhart passing — I know he was old (94) and had been a staple of my life for a generation and funny as nice-guy shit, but hurtful in a seemingly long-term, heartfelt way to hear of his death. Especially coming close in the wake of Shelley Duvall dying (Duvall is another longtime/lifetime crush, along with Diane Keaton and Stevie Nicks, though, both are still living). Further horrid-creating, odd-ball, shit-death news, for instance, is of the river-tubing accident this week of acclaimed chef Naomi Pomeroy — shitty news being dark and gut-crunching shitty. Still, WTF?

Yet the weight of the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly news cycles — celebrity deaths and wars aside — is highly influenced by the continuing unbridled fright from the T-Rump and the deep, ominous hole for America if the Orange Turd is re-elected and swirls full-loaded with Project 2025 into the White House a second time — this round with no adults in the room.
Since the assassination attempt on the T-Rump last Saturday — now nearly a week ago, albeit it feels like a hundred years — the reports on the election have been shitty dark — the RNC in Milwaukee this week has been a depressing and frightful glance into the emptiness that’s become the Republican Party — the GOP of the nowadays is not anything like the Barry Goldwater/even John McCain group from long ago and not-so-long ago. It’s a shameful cult of the T-Rump. And the RNC sucks real-big time.

Andrew O’Hehir at Salon yesterday afternoon and T-Rump’s owning the GOP: ‘The Republican Party under Trump — and someday soon under Vance or some other heir or usurper — isn’t really a party and has no guiding ideology or sense of its own history. My colleague Amanda Marcotte observed this week that the conventional wisdom describing the new GOP as a cult of personality slightly misses the point. She meant that Donald Trump is the funnel through which MAGA energy flows and the wizard who conjured it forth, but he has never truly controlled it.‘

Anyway, on top of that T-Rump asshole shit, is the Joe Biden get-the-fuck-out-of-town bullshit. People high and low screaming for Biden to vacant the premises and move ahead from there — what a crock of shit. The most effective president in half a century maybe, and a full-on hard worker, empathetic, compassionate human being, and the calls for his surrender have been widespread and shitty to the extreme. Yesterday I figured he was going to drop out, according to some news reports, but then today, maybe not. What the shit, folks?

And Joe’s apparently staying true: ‘President Biden is “absolutely” staying in the presidential race, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, calling him the “best person to take on Donald Trump.”‘

Democrats! Get the fuck together!

How Biden needs to be at the Democratic National Convention 2024 this year ??? pic.twitter.com/AVBPpSFnTn

— Walter A Clyburn Reed (@deerretlaw) July 18, 2024

Anyway again, the news cycle over the last few days has drained my ability to compose anything. Life looks shitty from several views and if the tide twists this November, we’re in for some shit storms of high velocity.
However, always thought I’d feel better at least one more time again:

Been walking my mind to an easy time
My back turned towards the sun
Lord knows, when the cold wind blows
It’ll turn your head around
Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground

Despair upon hopelessness, or not, yet here we are once again…

(Illustration out front: New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan, found here.)