Republican August

Now that August exists, I’m deep into August.

August doesn’t look back, it’s filled with new babies and war veterans who have lost their women and women who are in love with their boyfriends. Drug addicts and storm warnings. Yellow tennis balls retrieved by well-trained dogs. Driverless cars with headless drivers. The librarian in Gillette, Wyoming is fired by the school board who’ve listened too often to a barrage of Conway Twitty witticisms.

So we all go to sleep in a banana peel, together. Everyone is laughing. I can feel myself already dropping out, having seen Beckett’s great play ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ starring the great John Hurt at the Gate Theatre in Dublin the night before flying off into September 11.

My breathing once again is an on-going series of starting-overs. I kneel at the first sign of acceptance. I try to explain what I’m thinking to anyone who will listen—who are my friends, what are their names—but it’s really only my feeling about what I’m thinking: I can’t explain it, I only know that two of them are my friends and that they’re both dead. My friends are all those I’ve lost”, I say. Am I actually supposed to look deeply into yet another anchorperson’s eyes and hear the names Joe Biden and Donald Trump?

Just yesterday I had so much energy! Where did my energy come from, where did it go? Diffuse and restive, I paraphrase Descartes: I think, therefore I pee. Bureaucracy is our greatest creation, but to sublimate an honest political feeling is the essential tragedy. I’m covered in small warts and minor complaints; anger, as in ‘don’t ask me one more question!, compiles, leading to a kind of boiling point as my cellphone rings once again. Off guar and exasperated, I think of the mundane Biden and the bloviating Trump, one a mediocrity and the other tin-horned blow-dried liar who’s sired a bunch of kids by different mothers and is adored by practicing Evaneglicals.

I’d like to make a painting, and actually have an idea. The idea is 20” x 20”, perfectly square, but I can’t make it until I’m calm, only when calm approaches can I begin the painting. I can’t hurry along as if I have a broom! I decide the collect the lint in the lint-trap of the washing machine, and go from there, spreading the lint liberally over the canvas and then choosing which colors of paint I should administer to the surface.

August exists and proves to be a very profitable way to start the day: to collect lint while pretending to stand beside Mitch McConnell who has Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming who stands just behind Mitch with a squadron of other worsted-suited Republican power brokers. Really! Where do they find these people? Lummis the other senator from Wyoming, and the cowgirl Hageman, a congresswoman? One can’t be indifferent, though indifference may be the only actual moral solution when the political farce has been automatically downgraded to what amounts to a kind of made-for-tv freak show played for ratings.

Reading Robert Musil, ‘The Man Without Qualities’ v. 1, yet again, the elegance of analysis, both lyrical and practical, an examination of actual geo-political and domestic dynamics played out on the world stage in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, a delightfully funny, serious consideration of the human condition not served with farfarelle, Top Ramen, or chicken tenders, I become calm once again, seeking my own moral compass.

So, I ask, should I seek a real church with pews and a non-denominational minister? Is Unitarianism the answer? Or meditation, knowing the calvary is coming? Perhaps A.I. is the answer! Or A.A!

Fall is coming, I can feel it, a kind of absolutist white space not unlike a gentle mist or a light fog where I’ll understand dahlias and thermodynamics and the month of August into which I was once born.