Uber Driver III: I Missed the Bus

I was on my way to a friend’s birthday party when I realized that I hadn’t even thought to get her a gift. My transit app said that I had twelve minutes until the next bus, which I reckoned gave me enough time to run into the nearby Walgreens to pick up a bunch of cigarette lighters. Cigarette lighters were a crappy solution to my gift problem, but I knew she was a fan of setting marijuana on fire and I wasn’t going to come up with a better present on the fly.

I was standing in line two minutes later when I spotted the bus pulling up outside. Dropping the lighters, I broke into a sprint out the door, narrowly missing the bus as it pulled off up Hollywood Boulevard. I could have just shrugged, waited another 15 minutes and shown up late to the bar, but as someone who chooses to live without a car in LA I feel a certain pressure to be on time to everything, just to show all the haters that I’m making it work. I don’t know who these haters are or if I even have any to begin with, but I figure the best course of action is to show them I’m making it work even if they don’t exist, which is how I wound up chasing a bus down the street like Steve Martin in that scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

I ran along the Walk of Fame for three blocks, dodging and weaving past tourists, Jack Sparrow, two different Batmans and a third-rate Don King impersonator in a thoroughly unconvincing wig. I got lucky with walk signals at a couple of crosswalks and ran up to the bus at the next stop just in time for the doors to close in my face. The bus pulled off again and I took off after it again, waving my arms and cursing like Steve Martin in that other scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I no longer cared about showing up on time to my friend’s party – I just wanted to show the bus driver, who I had determined was definitely a hater, that I was making it work.

Lungs and legs burning, I gave up after another couple of blocks and stalked down the street, huffing and puffing and glaring at the bus as it shrank and disappeared into traffic. A minivan pulled up next to me and a woman in her late 30s stuck her head out.

“Hey – do you want a ride to the next stop?”

“Huh?”

“That bus driver is an asshole, I saw what he just did. I can give you a lift and help you get ahead of him to the next stop!”

The first ten or so years of my life were a veritable blur of adults and authority figures telling me to never accept a ride offered by a stranger under any circumstances, and I wondered if there was a statute of limitations on those instructions. Does “Stranger Danger” still apply at 29? She was wearing workout gear and there was a child’s carseat in the back, plus the various other detritus that accumulates in the minivans of ordinary people who aren’t serial killers. I wagered that if anybody had something to be worried about in this situation, it was her – after all, I was a strange man screaming obscenities at a bus. As I climbed into her passenger seat, I was struck by just how natural it felt getting into a stranger’s car after hundreds of Uber rides.

Her name was Annabelle. She had been a semi-professional triathlete until the birth of her first child, and was on her way back from training for her first triathlon since the baby. I was wheezing for breath and gushing sweat after running three blocks. The joke writes itself. After less than a minute’s conversation, it came up that the Target she was going to was only a block away from the bar I was going to, so she just gave me a lift there.

“I really appreciate this,” I said as we drew closer. “I probably looked like a nutjob running after that bus.”

“Don’t mention it. I’ve been in that situation a million times before – I hate when they pretend like they can’t see you.” She plucked a vape pen out of the center console cupholder and sucked on the mouthpiece. “Hey, you want any weed? Mellow you out?”

I always want weed, but I figured that accepting both a ride and drugs from a stranger on the same day would be pushing my luck a little too far, so I politely declined. She let me off in a Chipotle parking lot, and I leaned in the passenger window to say goodbye.

“Annabelle, seriously, thank you so much. You had nothing to gain from helping me out and you did it anyway, and that means a lot.”

“Hey, just pay it forward, y’know? Happy holidays!” And she drove off, another cloud of marijuana vapor drifting out her window as she turned onto Melrose.

After a few hours at the bar with my friends I called an UberPool to take me home. My driver’s name was Omar, and as I watched his car pull up I found myself wishing that my friends had watched The Wire so I could yell, “Omar comin’!” and get a big laugh.

There was another rider in the back seat, a beefy white guy in a wide brimmed baseball cap, so I took the passenger seat next to Omar. Presently we picked up another passenger, a girl named Jessica, from outside a bar, and she took a seat in the back directly behind me. No one spoke or listened to The Chainsmokers, and it was bliss.

As we worked our way from Hollywood back into the San Fernando Valley’s welcoming embrace, I heard Jessica begin to cough behind me, followed by what sounded like a glass of water getting dumped out. Omar looked over his shoulder and his eyes popped.

“Oh, man- Are you okay, Jessica?”

“Yeah,” came her sickly voice from behind me. “I’m sorry. It all went in my purse.”

There’s a lot of things in this world that I can’t handle, but vomit and vomiting are pretty close to the top of that list. Realizing that she had just puked into her handbag, and that me and her and Omar and the other guy and her puke were all trapped together in this car for the next 20 minutes, I longed for the innocent times when The Chainsmokers were the worst thing to happen to me in an Uber. Omar rolled down all the windows.

“I’ve got some water in the back. Do you want me to stop and grab you a bottle?” he asked.

“No, you don’t need to…”

“You feeling okay, though?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

We rode on in silence. It was no longer bliss.

Through it all, I felt bad for Jessica. Her plan for the evening probably didn’t involve throwing up in her purse in front of three strangers, and given how awkward this was for the bystanders I couldn’t even imagine what she must have been feeling. Remembering Annabelle’s last words to me, I turned my head slightly toward the backseat, careful to avert my eyes from Jessica’s soiled purse.

“Jessica, would you like some gum?” I asked.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Yes. That would be great. Thank you so much.”

I passed a stick of my gum back to her. “Don’t mention it.” I tried to think of something else to say, but the English language doesn’t offer up a lot of poetic turns of phrase for this sort of moment.

Presently we arrived at my apartment, and I wasted no time getting out of the car and going inside. I didn’t tell Jessica to pay it forward the way Annabelle had with me, because I figured she didn’t need another thing to worry about with the day she was having. But I did rate Omar five stars and give him a $1 tip through the app. In my book, he’d earned it.

They Live

In the movie They Live, this guy played by pro wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper finds a box full of sunglasses which reveal to the wearer that ghoulish monsters walk among us in disguise, occupying the upper echelons of society, spread throughout every corner of government, business and culture. This being a John Carpenter film, Piper’s solution is to shoot a bunch of people. As far as our thing goes, I don’t think any more shooting sprees are going to help.

I read the stories and I sit and I think really hard about the things that I said and did around women when I was between the age of 15 and 24. I remember a college video short I directed about the dangers of “bitch beer”, rape jokes, “make me a sandwich” jokes, lewd gestures and misogynistic comments that I either made myself or laughed at, and I shut my eyes and suck the air in through my teeth. The assumption I made, and that the guys around me laughing along made, was that everybody knew it was a joke. I didn’t get that they were jokes about a slow-motion eternal tragedy that affects more than half of all human beings, and that telling those jokes was like standing and roasting marshmallows while your neighbor's house burns to the ground. I tell myself I've grown up and waffle on the prospect of sending out a flurry of contrite Facebook messages. 

If this sounds a lot like a chagrined, soul-searching apology statement, it’s not intentional. I’ve just been reading a lot of them recently and it’s been affecting my work.  

I don’t remember my parents ever teaching me not to rape anybody. My dad never sat down on the edge of my bed, rested a hand on my shoulder and said, “Truman, you should never masturbate in front of a woman unless she’s explicitly asked you to.” Dropping me off for school, my mom never yelled after me, “…AND DON’T FORGET TO NOT GRAB GIRLS’ ASSES!” At home and at school I was taught to keep my hands to myself, and I’ve done a damn good job of it. The secret to my success is that it’s really fucking easy to not grope people, and until recently I didn’t realize how many people I looked up to couldn’t clear that low-ass bar.

This is why that picture of Al Franken hit me like a slap in the face. I’d heard the rumors about Louis CK, and it wasn’t an enormous paradigm shift to find out a man famous for calling himself a sex pervert was an actual real-life sex pervert. But Al Franken was someone I looked up to as a writer and as a leader, and there he is grinning like a kid at the fair while fondling a sleeping woman.

In the blog post revealing the assault, Franken’s victim Leeann Tweeden explains that while on a 2006 USO tour, Franken wrote a skit for them to perform that included a moment where he kissed her, and then used that as a pretext to force his tongue down her throat backstage in a “rehearsal,” despite her protests. She pushed him off, scolded him and spent the rest of the trip avoiding all contact with him. In response, she writes, “Franken repaid me with petty insults, including drawing devil horns on at least one of the headshots I was autographing for the troops.” On the plane ride home, after Tweeden fell asleep, Franken posed for the photo.

Franken has released an eloquent apology that’s getting some praise on Twitter – as though it’s some sort of surprise that a guy who made a living as a writer for 35 years can write a compelling statement after being caught on camera sexually assaulting a woman. He has a lot to say about the need to empower women and believe accusers, but he’s notably careful to apologize specifically for his actions in the photograph, which he passes off as a one-time moment of comic exuberance:  

“I don't know what was in my head when I took that picture, and it doesn't matter.”

Based on Tweeden’s account, I can take a guess as to what was in Franken’s head: He wanted to show dominance over a woman who had rejected him sexually, and he wanted her to know that he had done it afterwards.

I don’t know what it’s like to be sexually harassed and assaulted. I do know what it’s like to be bullied. Tweeden made it clear to Franken with words and actions that he had upset her, and instead of an apology his response was to spend the next two weeks tormenting her, capped off with that photo. Franken hasn’t apologized for his pattern of behavior – just the picture, which conveniently is the only thing that he can’t dispute.

The guys who bullied me were teenagers. Al Franken was 54 in 2006. None of my former bullies is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Even after Roddy Piper takes off the sunglasses, he still remembers who the monsters are. 

In response to the rest of her account, Franken said, “While I don't remember the rehearsal for the skit as Leeann does, I understand why we need to listen to and believe women's experiences." It sounds like Franken has his own version of this story. Take a look at the picture and tell me who you trust.

Bad Dates

My OKCupid profile is older than all of my friends’ children. It would be starting first grade this September, eagerly trundling off to school to show its friends carefully-curated pictures of me and tell them what my favorite movies and bands are. I’ve branched out to other dating apps over the years – Tinder, Hinge, CoffeeMeetsBagel, Happn – but OKCupid is always the one I come back to. The site forces users to write about themselves at length, which helps me find women with snarky, wittily written profiles that suggest they might be receptive to my brand of bullshit. The fact that I’m still doing this after six years suggests that my method isn’t working.

Trawling the site’s ocean of profiles in search of new matches, I see some of the same faces again and again. There’s apple102, a quick-witted and attractive graphic designer who has silently rejected my messages in 2012, 2014 and 2015. There’s GloryHoleGirl, whose profile includes some faceless shots of her gym-toned body and a succinct rundown of her deal: She wants men to come to her apartment and anonymously have sex with her through a glory hole she's drilled into one of the walls, but only if they can provide lab test results showing that they don’t have STDs. (OKCupid’s algorithm says we’re a 92% match.) And then there’s a girl whose screenname I don’t remember whose profile picture is just a shot of the word ‘CUNT’ shaved into the short hair on the back of her head. If we’re going to keep going with the fishing analogy, these women are the dolphins who get caught in my net when I’m looking for fish.

Gryffindor1991 was one such fish – short, snarky and extremely cute, with pictures that indicated a preference for Disneyland and visits to Israel. We arranged to meet up at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. I got there a little early, and was immediately disappointed to find out that they were apparently hosting an open mic night. Never in my life have I walked into a bar or coffee shop and thought, Oh, awesome, live music!, and tonight was no exception – particularly because the girl at the mic was warbling through some badly off-key Norah Jones covers.

“FYI,” I texted Gryffindor. “The worst singer in the world is doing a concert at this place.”

When she walked into the coffee shop a minute later, Gryffindor shared my assessment, wrinkling her nose and wincing at the sound of the singer’s voice. “Wow,” she said. “That girl is really awful.”

“I know, right?” We put in our orders for coffee and pie and tried to find a seat that was out of earshot of the stage.

“It’s like she’s strangling a cat. She’s so terrible.”

“Yeah,” I said, not wanting to belabor the point. 

“Why did she even come? Does she not know how bad she sucks?” Gryffindor’s voice was getting a little loud, and nearby a couple of people who had clearly come out to support the singer turned and gave us the side-eye. I opted to try and move her toward a more positive topic.

But as I came to find out over the next hour, Gryffindor1991 had a sullen, “been there, done that” disdain for pretty much every person, place or thing I tried to talk to her about. She hated her job, didn’t particularly like anything on TV, and had nothing to say about Israel. (“It was whatever. I only went because I got a free trip from Birthright.”)

Grasping at straws, I finally said, “So, what neighborhood are you in? Do you like your place?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask me that.”

“What?”

“That’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to ask on a first date.”

I threw up my hands. “Okay. What do you want me to talk to you about?”

She shrugged listlessly. “I don’t know. Stuff that helps you learn what kind of person I am.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

“You’re just asking me about, like, my job and what you saw on my profile.”

“But… I… Okay, what kind of person are you?”

Another eyeroll. “Can’t you guess?”

And somehow, we sat there for another 45 minutes. She took some pleasure in asking me questions so she could put me down based on my answers (“What do you think of that painting? Oh? So I guess you could do a better one, huh? Probably draw a bunch of beautiful stick figures, right?”) and I took some pleasure in sitting there and gamely going along with it. Because by then I knew what sort of person she was: a really insecure one who substitutes sarcasm and “I’m only kidding”-style taunts for a personality. I was bored, and more than anything I wanted to go home, smoke a bunch of weed, and play Fallout 4. But if I just abruptly left in the middle of this, she’d take it as a badge of honor to be bragged about to all of her friends. “I totally offended this creepy guy from OKCupid the other night. He literally walked out on me! I guess his precious little feelings couldn’t take my sense of humor. His loss, right?” “Yass, Gryffindor1991, you are so bad!” So I rode it out, laughing at her as necessary.

When we finally left I walked her to her car, because even though I despised this woman and everything she represented about my generation, I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her on the mean streets of the North Hollywood Arts District. Naturally, she’d forgotten where she parked, and the next ten minutes consisted of the Gryffindor1991 Roadshow, featuring disdainful commentary on passing cars, graffiti and nearby homeless peoples’ fashion sense.

“Oh, I think that’s it.” She finally said, pointing to a car on the other side of an apartment-lined sidestreet.

“Great!” I said, swiftly side-hugging her. “Well, it was cool meeting you…” I waited for her to walk over to her car, but she didn’t. She just stood there looking up at me, without anything to say for once.

I waited for two long seconds. She pursed her lips.

“Okay, have a good one!” I said, turning and setting off up the street at a brisk pace.

“Uh- Oh- Yeah, bye…” I heard her stammering.

I turned the corner and headed for the subway. It occurred to me that she’d wanted me to kiss her then. After everything, she was just a 26-year-old girl on the playground, kicking the boys she liked in the shins, and I had passed her test by not kicking back or running off.

I got a text from her:

“Hahaha yeah oops turns out this isnt my car”

She wasn’t more than a block away – I could be back there in less than a minute. I pocketed my phone without responding and jogged across the street, down into the subway station.

The biggest thing standing between me and the carnal glories of Hookup Culture is that I dislike spending time around irritating people more than I like sex. A one-night stand sounds nice when you’re thinking about the main event, but as the name suggests, you’ve usually got to spend a whole night with somebody just to get to it. It might make me an oddity among men, but I’m not willing to invest that kind of time to go to bed with a woman who's unbearable – especially one with such a proclivity for criticism. (“Oh, missionary? Wow, you’re just so creative, aren’t you?”)

Maybe this is the scene in the romantic comedy where I realize that GloryHoleGirl was the one I wanted all along – a 92% match who doesn’t even want me in the same room as her. I picture myself running to her apartment in the rain, arriving breathless at her doorstop, pushing the results of a blood test under the door and awaiting her approval.   

Uber Driver II

On a Friday night I called an UberPool to take me over the hill to West Hollywood. As I stood outside my apartment waiting for the car to arrive, I pulled up the profile image for Tommy, the driver Uber had dispatched to pick me up. The picture showed a muscular, thick-necked man in his mid-40s, wearing a tight T-shirt, a backwards baseball cap, and a manic grin that said, “I want to tell you all about my softball team.” My thumb was hovering over the “CANCEL RIDE” button when Tommy’s black Prius came to a stop beside me.

“Hey Truman, welcome to the party!” Tommy brayed as I clambered into the backseat, immediately confirming all my worst fears about what this ride would be like. He indicated the other passenger in the back seat – a beautiful black woman, done up for a night out, staring pointedly at her phone. “This is Monica. Monica, this is Truman.”

“Hey,” she muttered without looking at me.

“Hey,” I muttered without looking at her.

“Alright, here we go!” Tommy said, hitting the gas. “You guys got any radio recommendations for me?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“Aw, come on! Seriously, what’s your favorite station?”

As a person who doesn’t listen to commercial radio, my favorite radio station is whichever one is not currently playing the song “Closer” by The Chainsmokers. I was subjected to the sonic chlamydia that is “Closer” on probably two thirds of the Uber rides I took in 2016. I don’t even want to think about how many cumulative hours of my life I’ve spent as a captive audience to that human rights abuse of a song about tattooed douchebags fucking in Land Rovers. If you gave me a choice between listening to “Closer” or an audio recording of Sean Hannity describing his latest colonoscopy in detail, it wouldn’t even be a choice.

Eventually Tommy tuned the radio to a Top 40 station Monica suggested, which was playing a heavily produced remix of “Closer” by The Chainsmokers. We rode in silence for a moment or two.

“Dang!” Tommy exclaimed, in reference to the radio. “The DJ sure is kickin’ on this one, huh?”  

I tried to picture Tommy puttering around his house alone on a lazy Sunday: “Alright, Fruit Loops, get into that bowl! Here comes some milk; hope you’re ready for that, ha ha ha! What up, eyeballs? Yeah, just focus on the TV for awhile while I watch these three back-to-back episodes of Ballers!”

Monica’s phone rang and she answered it, rescuing me from any further conversation with Tommy.

“Hey,” she said. “No, I’m in the Uber now.” Pause. “We’re on Mulholland.” Another pause. She snorted, evidently unhappy with what she was hearing, and the conversation took a pretty sharp turn. “Okay, wow, you’re really gonna be a dick about this? I told you what time I was leaving. I just wanted to have a nice time tonight – I didn’t want to fight. Maybe if you came and picked me up like a real man, it wouldn’t be taking me this long!”

I accidentally made eye contact with Tommy in the rear view mirror. “Uh oh,” he said. “Sounds like somebody’s in trouble.”

Monica raised her voice, really laying into her beau on the phone over the course of about five minutes. “No, no. Don’t even start. Don’t. You know what? Forget about it – just go to the concert and have a great time there alone. I don’t need this. No. You blew it, okay? I’m just going home.” She hung up with a flourish and groaned loudly.

“Woah,” Tommy said. “Change of plans, I guess, huh?”

“He’s just such a baby. We’ve hung out a couple times and he seemed cool, but I don’t need to be with anybody who’s going to go off the handle just because it takes a long time to get across town. Forget him.”

“Hell yeah, girl!” Tommy chortled, thrusting a palm into the backseat for a high five.

I was beginning to believe that Tommy had been conceived in a government lab where idiots were paired with other idiots in hopes of breeding a new generation of mutant super-idiots.

“You can just drop me off at the bottom of the hill,” Monica said, weakly returning his high five. “I’ll get another Uber back to my place.”

“Aw, it’s Friday – you don’t have to call it a night just yet! Hey, I’m dropping Truman off in West Hollywood. Maybe you two can do something together, huh?”

I said nothing. Monica snorted incredulously. “No thank you…” she said under her breath, in a totally unprovoked diss on the only person in the car who hadn’t been wiping his ass with the social contract for the past 20 minutes.

Not long after, we approached the bar I was heading to, which lay on the opposite side of the street. Tommy slowed down, gauging oncoming traffic to try and make a U-turn – which, on a Friday night, would take awhile.

“You can drop me off here,” I said, pointing to the nearest street corner.  

“Aw, it’s no thing – I need to turn around anyway-”

He was coming to a rolling stop. I opened the door and jumped out of the car like it was on fire and plunging off a cliff. “Thankshaveagoodnight!” I called back to Tommy and Monica, meaning exactly none of it.

I’ve never read anything by Jean-Paul Sartre, but I have read the Wikipedia article about a play of his called No Exit, which apparently includes the quote, “Hell is other people.” If I was the sort of person who was into body art, I’d get that quote as a tattoo – maybe a tattoo my shoulder, just like the horny club rat protagonist has in “Closer” by The Chainsmokers.

Despite Losses, Republicans Still Favor Electoral College

Even after winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College twice in the past sixteen years, a recent survey shows that an overwhelming majority of Republican voters still favor the antiquated system by which the United States elects its president. 

“It’s certainly frustrating,” said 59-year-old unemployed Ohio pipefitter James McKinney, reflecting on an election in which Donald Trump received 2.7 million more votes than his opponent but still lost to Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. “I felt like Donald Trump was the last, best hope for people like me – and it looks like a clear majority of folks who voted agreed. But, y’know, the Electoral College is there to protect the rights of the minority, so I guess it’s good to know it’s doing its job.” 

For many Trump supporters, this election was a painful reminder of the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore squeaked out a five-point Electoral College victory over the popular vote winner, George W. Bush. However, in spite of the plainly undemocratic nature of the system that has twice robbed their party of the presidency, Republican voters appear unwavering in their support for the Founding Fathers’ creation. 

“The Framers, in their wisdom, created the Electoral College to safeguard minority rights,” said Chuck Gersh, 47, who maintains the website www.lockherup.com and has spent much of the past six years personally investigating allegations that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster. “Do I like that a vile, corrupt, murdering Illuminati bitch is about to enslave our country? No. Do I wish things had gone another way? Well, obviously. But this is how the system works, and you can’t go trying to change it just because you don’t like the outcome or because there’s clear evidence that the system is broken.”

Indeed, although many Republicans are still grappling with the terms of Trump’s loss in their own ways, they appear united in their reverence for the Electoral College’s intended purpose of safeguarding against “the tyranny of the majority.” 

“Look, I won’t mince words: America is doomed, and Hillary Clinton is going to turn us all into a bunch of sniveling little cucks,” said 29-year-old vending machine repairman Gabe Garrett, who is currently on probation for emailing rape threats to several female video game journalists who gave negative reviews to Battlefield 1. “But as much as I’m scared for the future of the Republic, that’s no reason to get rid of a system that does such a good job looking out for minority rights. Seriously – as a Republican, there’s nothing more important to me than ensuring that minority rights are protected. I think the Republican Party makes it clear through its rhetoric, policy and actions that minority rights are its first and foremost concern. We shouldn’t turn away from that.” 

The Republican candidate himself seemed to echo these sentiments in a statement posted to Twitter at 3:17 in the morning: 

“Won pop vote by 2.7 mil, lost election. Sad! But system works- minority rights very important! Congrats to Madam Pres #makeamericagreatagain” 

Red Election

What it’s like for me right now is, I feel like I’m back in high school and I just found out that the kid who calls me a fag every day in the locker room is the new principal. And he’s picked the kid who carves swastikas into the desks to be his assistant principal. And all of the adults facilitating this process are saying, Geez, this sure is a bad idea, letting this kid run the school. I mean, this thing we’re doing right now is such a bad idea that there is literally no historical precedent for what’s going to happen next. This thing that is happening is so objectively not right that nobody has tried it before us right now. And even as they’re saying that big long thing, they’re still giving this locker room jerk the keys to the principal’s office and the teachers’ lounge and whatever room they keep the nuclear missiles in.   

And I’m just standing there nodding, saying, Yeah, I get it, this is the system working as intended. Freedom, right? 

Nearly two weeks after the fact, I’m still not completely convinced that this happened. Maybe everything since November 8th been like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard lives an entire lifetime in a dream after getting knocked out by an alien robot. At any given moment I’m certain I'll wake up in the voting booth on Election Day, where I make an impassioned speech to the assembled voters about the dark future I’ve witnessed. Everybody cries, blue team wins, roll credits, “All Star” by Smashmouth plays. 

I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. But I was really sure Hillary Clinton was going to be president, so I don’t know what to expect anymore. 

I refuse to feel stupid for not seeing this coming. The United States presidential election is the most heavily polled thing on the planet, and that data, aggregated by people who have staked their entire fortunes on accurately predicting elections, said that he would either lose or lose badly. Yeah, there were a couple of polls that said he was beating her, but what were we supposed to do – just ignore everything but the outliers because it was a weird election? 

Every four years the person who’s losing invents reasons why the polls are skewed against them. That’s the whole reason Mitt Romney didn’t even have a concession speech ready in 2012 – he thought all the polls were wrong. As it turned out, he was wrong, and all those data nerds were right, and we all had a laugh and enjoyed all the nice complete sentences our president was capable of forming. 

Right now, at this moment, I would shoot a dog on national television if it meant we got to have Mitt Romney as our president for the next four years. I’d run an ultramarathon for Marco Rubio to take the oath of office in January. I’d go to a Sublime concert every night for a month if it meant that when the Secretary of Defense calls the White House at 3:00 AM, Jeb! Bush would pick up the phone.

I’m not a fan of those guys’ policies, but I am a fan of the fact that they have policies. I love the way they took the time to learn what the president's responsibilities are, so as to more efficiently implement their crappy, backwards agendas if elected. And man oh man, do I ever miss their eloquent, carefully worded dogwhistle racism compared to this extra-strength stuff the people running every branch of our government are using now. 

My Uber drivers are far less talkative recently. This would be a blessing if not for the fact that my white guilt is in such a state of overdrive these days that I’m actually desperate for a chance to show drivers with names like José or Mohammad that I’m on their team. 

Last Sunday, a driver named Faisal was taking me to a bar when we stopped to pick up another passenger – who, the notification on my app informed me, was named Jeffrey. Faisal and I had been riding in silence as I entertained fantasies about us having a heartfelt conversation in which I expressed my solidarity with him and he tearfully thanked me for it. Once Jeffrey, who turned out to be a sassy, argumentative and flamboyantly gay black man of about my age, got into the car, there was no more silence. 

“I’m done with this country. I’m just like, Hell no! I’m selling a bunch of sports memorabilia and moving to Costa Rica. For real! Four years, baby!” Jeffrey exclaimed at one point in his ten-minute monologue, apropos of nothing in particular. He held up a picture on his phone and insisted that Faisal take his eyes off the road to look at it. “Look at this. This boxing glove belonged to Ali. I’m selling it.” 

After we dropped Jeffrey off, Faisal made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. 

“Sorry,” he said. 

“Not your fault.” I replied, eager at the chance to show that I viewed him with empathy and respect. I went in for the kill: “What really pissed me off is that he’s leaving the country because of the election. We have to stay and fight. We all have to stick together.” Already I could feel myself joining the pantheon of great civil rights heroes. 

“Eh,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “He was a gay. You hear the way he talks? Is disgusting. I don’t want that in my car.” 

“Ah, shit.” I said. 

In these dark times, I’ve found hope in the form of a four-hour BBC documentary from the early 90s about the Watergate scandal. The impression I get of Richard Nixon is that he was a mentally unstable asshole with an axe to grind against virtually everyone. Still, he was really smart, he had extensive experience working in government, and when he got reelected in 1972 he won 49 states and 60% of the popular vote. 

This was a president who knew what he was doing – a career politician and a Machiavellian schemer with overwhelming support from the American people – and less than two years later he had to resign to avoid impeachment. I’m not rooting for anybody to fail here, but it’s worth noting that the new guy hasn’t got those advantages – and he’s definitely no Richard Nixon. 

While we run out the clock on this one, I’m going to be trying to pull back from that feedback loop of Politico, The Washington Post and Facebook that dominated much of the last two years for me. I’m not completely disengaging from the process – I’m just going to be taking some of the energy I’ve been spending obsessing over events I can’t control in a city thousands of miles away and redirecting it to my writing, my career and doing enough volunteering in my own community to feel like I’m fighting back. 

If I can offer any advice to the rest of you – with what little credibility I, who loudly and repeatedly predicted a Clinton victory, have left – it’s to do the same. I said a lot of pithy things and shared a lot of thought provoking articles on Facebook and it didn’t stop my country from electing a right-wing nationalist. For the next four years, I’m going to try getting involved at a local level and see where that gets us. 

It might all amount to nothing, but in the future – if we have one of those – when people ask me what it was like to be alive during this time, I at least want to be able to tell them that I did something when the house caught fire. 

Revenge of the Nerd

I’ve never been able to get into The West Wing because I feel like every episode is just a collection of monologues about why liberals are awesome and right about everything. I don’t necessarily disagree; I just get sick of being very enthusiastically told exactly what I want to hear. Fans of the show tell me, Well, duh – it’s liberal porn. 

And that’s great! Porn is delightful. But if you expect actual sex in the real world to be anything like porn, you’re going to be very disappointed. And by that same logic, if you expect the United States government and the people who work in it to be anything like The West Wing, you’re going to be very disappointed. Trust me – I’m speaking from experience, here. 

This is why I don’t expect my politicians to be brilliant orators. This is why I don’t expect my politicians to have sterling ethical records. This is why I don’t expect my politicians to keep billionaires and lobbyists at arm’s length. This is why I don’t expect my politicians to inspire me – because that’s not their fucking job. 

A politician’s job is to run the government. When I’m choosing who to vote for, I pick the politician who, based on available evidence and my wide variety of opinions about how the government ought to be run, will be best at the job. Qualities like natural charisma or being the sort of person I’d like to hang out with are great and all, but they don’t really have much bearing on one’s ability to maintain the world’s largest and most powerful institution. 

That was my reasoning last December, when I reluctantly became a Hillary Clinton supporter. Trust me – she’s not my first choice, I would say to people at the time, by way of an excuse. I don’t like her, but she’ll be good at running the government. 

But that line fell apart sometime in April or May, when I made a shocking discovery: I actually did like Hillary Clinton. As the summer went by, I found myself liking her more and more. And now, with weeks until Election Day, I can safely say that I admire Hillary Clinton. I think she’s a good person, I think she’s trustworthy, and I think she’ll make a great president. 

There’s a good chance you think I’m an idiot, or a dupe, or a paid stooge of the Clinton campaign. And while you’re wrong, I would just like to take a second to applaud your newfound ability to doubt something you read on the Internet – because you sure didn’t apply that degree of scrutiny to the various blogs and image macros where you learned that Hillary Clinton rigged the Democratic primary, paid off the Justice Department, or murdered more people than Ted Bundy.

Earlier this year, I watched all six seasons of Game of Thrones over the course of two epic, gory and sexy months. I was so late to the party because I’m generally not that into fantasy stories. I could never get into Lord of the Rings because I couldn’t relate to a story of pure good versus absolute evil, or characters who, similar to The West Wing, were all so gallant and righteous and upstanding all the time. Game of Thrones hooked me instantly because it wasn’t about a bunch of plucky, noble heroes trying to vanquish something terrible – it was about a bunch of fucked up, damaged people confronted with a variety of terrible problems, trying at great personal cost to find the least shitty solution. 

I think Game of Thrones is a better politics show than The West Wing because that’s what I believe politics is: Messed up people trying to find the least shitty solutions to huge problems. And I like Hillary Clinton because she reminds me of Tyrion Lannister. 

If you don’t watch the show, Tyrion is a dwarf, the youngest son of an extremely wealthy and powerful family, and is widely hated throughout the land. Much of the hatred is unfounded – because he’s a dwarf, he’s widely mocked and subject to a variety of rumors that he’s a pervert, a weasel, a coward, and a monster. 

And some of the hatred is because Tyrion kind of is a monster – he drinks constantly, fucks anything that moves, and is a colossal asshole to the people around him. (He’s also murdered a couple of people – which kind of undercuts my whole metaphor here, if we’re being honest – but in all fairness Tyrion operates in a far more murdery political climate than Hillary does.) 

That being said, Tyrion is exceptionally intelligent, resourceful and just, and the reason for all his scheming and plotting to attain power is because he genuinely wants to make the world a fairer, kinder, better place. He’s far from a perfect person, but in a broken world filled with flawed and imperfect people, he’s best qualified to try to fix it – one shitty decision at a time. 

I’ve been trying to write this post for several months now, and every time I start I get bogged down trying to address every single controversy floating around Hillary’s candidacy – scandals, emails, speeches, leaks, Iraq, Bill, the Foundation… The result is something very long that isn’t especially fun to read, and at the end of the day it won’t do dick to change anybody’s mind. 

My assessment is that about two thirds of the controversy surrounding Hillary is hot air, whipped up by Republicans and widely accepted because people don’t trust her. I think people don’t trust Hillary because all her time in the spotlight has led her to be extremely private and averse to transparency, which directly spawns the one third of her controversies that are legitimate: Ham-fisted attempts at secrecy, clumsy coverups of unflattering stories and an unwillingness to answer for them directly. 

Make no mistake: Those are character flaws. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why she didn’t just apologize for her email server in the first place, or how somebody who got her start in politics working on the Watergate Committee didn’t seem to learn any lessons about the danger of political coverups. I don't think Hillary has done anything outright illegal - she's spent most of her career being aggressively investigated by powerful people who don't like her and would jump at the chance to prosecute her if they actually had anything resembling a legal case - but she definitely operates in a legal grey area more often than I’d like. 

And at the end of the day I’m okay with that, because in my view you have to accumulate a certain baseline of corruption to be successful in our political culture. Competition to run the free world is fierce and it’s impossible to go it alone, which is why even people with good intentions have to get cozy with some bad hombres if they want to have a chance to make some real changes. 

Overall Hillary Clinton is as honest, if not slightly more so, than other high-profile Democrats. Reporters who have closely covered Clinton for years readily acknowledge that she is one of the more truthful and well-intentioned people working in D.C. Even her leaked Wall Street speeches show that she believes it’s in everybody’s best interests to reduce inequality and reign in corporate excesses. She’s running on an avalanche of detail-oriented progressive policies that she has no good reason not to fight for once she’s elected. 

I think the reason more people don’t buy that – the reason I didn’t buy that as recently as this time last year – is because Hillary Clinton simply isn’t charismatic enough to sell it. 

Hillary is scripted, awkward and unrelatable on the campaign trail – which is precisely what I find relatable about her. When I watch her delivering a halting speech, or giving an excruciatingly rehearsed answer to a question, or awkwardly attempting to appeal to Millennials, I don’t see some robotic Manchurian Candidate trying to appear human. I just see an introvert trying to win at a game designed by extroverts, and I think, “I have more in common with this person than with any president in my lifetime.” 

Awhile ago I was at a dark, noisy, crowded bar – which already is far from my optimal environment. Before long, the group of friends I was with all jumped up and hit the dancefloor, their feet flying, hands raised, eyes closed, moving effortlessly with the beat. I, on the other hand, stayed seated – because while sitting alone in a booth watching my friends dance was painfully awkward, I knew that the alternative would be even more painful. There are a number of things that I’m good at, and dancing is just not one of them. 

Before long, though, they were pulling me out onto the dancefloor with them, and because I wanted to be a good sport I tried as best I could to dance – which, for me, consists of planting my feet, swaying awkwardly and even more awkwardly moving my arms back and forth. And before long, my dancing and the very badness of it had become the center of the group’s attention, which is the exact reason I don’t dance. 

Fortunately for me, you don’t have to dance like an idiot in order to become a screenwriter, because dancing ability has no bearing whatsoever on writing ability. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, you do have to dance like an idiot to become president of the United States – both literally, during the obligatory Ellen appearance, and figuratively, whether it’s grinning and eating a pork chop at some godforsaken swing state county fair, delivering the same generic pep rally speech three times a day for a couple years, or pretending to be happy in an unending parade of selfies with tens of thousands of complete strangers. 

The important day-to-day work of the presidency is less oriented toward selfies and aw-shucks charisma and more towards administrative ability, critical thinking and relationship building. Hillary Clinton’s resume and record show that she’s great at all that stuff – but in order to get this job that she’s so well qualified for, she has to spend a couple of years getting roundly mocked because she’s not good at a skillset that has nothing to do with running the government. 

Probably my least favorite thing about democracy is that presidential elections are basically the same as high school class elections. Sure, candidates talk about policy, but in the age of mass media what really motivates people to vote isn’t what you say but how you say it – which is why only cool people get to run the free world. Sure, nerds get to be aides and advisers and spin doctors, but the person in the big chair is the good looking one who everybody wants to be friends with. 

That’s what gives me hope about this election: Donald Trump is such a historically unprecedented trainwreck that America has no choice but to put a boring, introverted, policy-obsessed nerd in charge of the country. People aren’t voting for Hillary because her speeches make them feel squishy inside or because she seems like the sort of person they could share an order of hot wings with at Applebee’s. She’s going to get the job based on qualifications alone – and it doesn’t matter that for a lot of voters her only qualification is that she’s not Donald Trump, because the votes count either way.  

The dream I have is that Trump will lose by a historic margin – enough to give Democrats control of Congress for a couple of years, long enough for Hillary to notch some big wins on popular shit like infrastructure and campaign finance. Historically, people like her a lot better when she’s doing a job than they do when she’s asking for the job – which is why, in the dream I have, Hillary’s approval rating is like 58 percent, and people constantly stop me in the street and say, “Hey – you were right about Hillary Clinton all along. I should have listened to you from the start, and will henceforth defer to your opinion in all political matters and Westworld fan theories.” 

Of course, that won't happen. Whatever Republicans are left in Congress on November 9th will be united only by their hatred for the new president, which means that Hillary is going to have to fight tooth and nail every day to accomplish even half of the things that she wants to. Fortunately, fighting tooth and nail for incremental progress - unlike dancing or public speaking or persuading people to like her - is one thing that does seem to come naturally to Hillary Clinton, which is why I'm with her. 

Oh, You're A Writer?

That’s so cool – I’m a writer too! Well, I mean, I’m mainly an actor – I played a guy at a party on my friend’s webseries and I did an audition for a vacuum cleaner commercial two years ago, although these days I’m pretty busy managing a Pep Boys franchise out in Northridge, just to make ends meet until I get discovered, y’know? But I’ve got loads of ideas for scripts and stories and stuff just rolling around in my head, y’know? I mean, I haven’t outlined them or workshopped them or even really tried to write them down, but I definitely think about them a lot. 

Anyway, it’s just so cool to meet somebody who’s also a writer, like I am! What did you say your name was? 

Oh, like The Truman Show? That’s a really cool movie. Y’know, I’ve got this amazing idea for a screenplay that’s actually a lot like The Truman Show. Here, let me explain it to you in great detail, since despite the signals you’re sending with your body language and general demeanor I can tell you’re actually dying to know what it’s about: 

So it’s a story about this normal, everyday guy. And the movie starts and you see him, like, waking up and eating breakfast and being normal, and everything seems normal but then as he’s going to work all these little things seem weird, and you’re like, “Woah, why are all these little things so weird?”, y’know, and then he gets to work and he sees all the containers of windshield wiper fluid are like flickering and stuff – he works at a Pep Boys, y’know – and then what you realize is that actually this guy’s life is in a virtual reality simulation – or is it? So for the rest of the movie, it’s like, he’s going, “Is this real? Am I real? Is my reality the simulation, or is the simulation reality?” Like a total head trip, y’know? It’s like Inception meets Donnie Darko meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, because the guy also knows kung fu. 

So what do you think? 

Hey, awesome, I think it sounds promising too! This is a total passion project for me. I mean, I’ve been working on it for three years now. I’ve written, like, four pages and I have a whole bunch of notes and ideas that I wrote on the back of a shipping receipt from Pep Boys – so you can tell that I’m quite serious about this project, as well as the craft of writing, since I’m a writer, just like you. 

Hey! We should collaborate on something! I know we just met two minutes ago, and I know I haven’t made any effort to find out where your interests lie as a writer, and I know that writing a screenplay with another person is a major time commitment requiring a degree of familiarity, trust and shared understanding that the two of us will never have, but c’mon – this feels like fate. I mean, how often do two writers meet each other? And in Los Angeles, of all places? 

And like I was saying, I’ve got tons of script ideas. I’m sure you do too. So you can just put your ideas on hold and help me out with mine, because we’re both writers and you’ve known me for nearly as long as it would take to listen to the song “All About That Bass” in its entirety, so I really can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want to spend your time and energy helping to make my dreams come true at the expense of your own goals. 

Do you like sitcoms? I have this great idea for a sitcom pilot based on my family. Because my family is so crazy. I know, I know – everybody says their family could be a sitcom, and they’re always wrong because people are generally bad at identifying things that are objectively interesting and entertaining. But my family is nuts – I go home sometimes and it’s like, Am I at my parents’ place, or a nuthouse, y’know? Like, get this: We’re a bunch of Jewish people from Long Island, my grandma is racist, and my dad has been divorced twice. TWICE! How crazy is that!? Best part is, I could play myself! 

What do you think? It’s basically like Seinfeld meets Home Improvement, except way funnier. I’ve been kicking it around for a few years and that’s about as far as I’ve got – so I figure you could just develop the characters, outline it, and then write multiple drafts until I feel like it’s good, and then if it ever sells you can get half credit! 

Wouldn’t that be great? It’d definitely be great for me, so I’m just going to assume you’re on board with this. 

Oh, and you have to hear my webseries idea! It’s all based on me and my best friend and the wacky stuff we get up to. Like, this one night, we were out at this bar and we started yelling “DICKS OUT FOR HARAMBE!”, y’know, like just on a goof – well also we were pretty drunk, and what’s weird is it was only like 7:30 – but then we just kept yelling it, and then these two other extremely drunk guys we didn’t even know started yelling it, and then the bartender asked us to leave! It was hilarious. So, y’know, the webseries would be lots of stuff like that. 

What do you think? It’s kind of like season 3 of Workaholics meets season 5 of Workaholics. With that one I could basically just tell you all the stories about stuff my buddy and I did, and then you could just make scripts out of that and I could play myself and be, like, the head writer! 

Hey, where are you going? The bus isn’t here yet! You’re just going to walk? 

Well, hey, man, before you go let me get your information. That way I can send you all my ideas and then repeatedly email you to ask if you’ve looked at them yet. I’d love to hear your opinions, and then have you do all the work of turning my ideas into tangible creative products. 

Because while I am totally a writer, just like you, I’m not super great at those little details – stuff like pacing and structure, dialog, character development, themes, subtext, originality, making time to write, motivating myself to write during that time, maintaining focus on an idea long enough to see it through to completion… Y’know, the hard parts, basically. I think my real strength as a writer is coming up with ideas that are heavily derivative of popular movies and TV shows – so I’m pretty much just looking for a collaborator to handle every aspect of the creative process that I don’t find enjoyable.    

Well, hey, great talking to you, man! Keep in touch! We writers have to look out for each other! Because that’s what we are, you and I – writers. Both of us. We do the exact same thing.

Uber Driver

Olenka, who drove me to Van Nuys in a Prius, was one of the few female Uber drivers I’ve had so far - a middle-aged woman whose name and accent suggested that she’d spent her formative years someplace in Eastern Europe. Our conversation, like 99.9% of conversations with Uber drivers, eventually turned to the subject of driving for Uber. 

“So, did you just clock in?” I asked from the backseat as we waited in the milelong line to get on the 405. The sun was setting, so I added, “Going to work the bar crowds?” 

“No, no!” She rapidly shook her head. “Never. I do it one time, when I first start driving.” She held up a single finger, making eye contact with me in the rear view mirror to make sure I didn’t have any misconceptions about the number of times she’d driven at night. “One time. Never again.” 

“What happened?” 

“Ugh!” She shook her head. “People, when they are drunk, they are so crazy! I had four men – all of them 40, 50 – get in my car outside a bar. And the three in back, they are drunk, they are on drugs, they are wrestling, they are hanging out the windows- When I am on freeway!” 

“That’s awful.” 

“And am I asking the one next to me, Do something! Make them stop! But he is just laughing. And I try to stop car, to kick them out, but they yell at me and say they not leave until I take them where they want to go! So what can I do? They are four and I am just one person.” 

“Wow. I’m so sorry.” I said. And I really did feel bad! The more we talked, the more I found myself getting really cheesed off at these four guys on her behalf. She’s just trying to make an extra buck, but these clowns had to go and make this nice lady miserable instead of just enjoying their cheap, convenient ride in peace. “That’s no way for an adult to behave. What a bunch of jerks.” 

She nodded emphatically, then turned to me and pointed to the skin on her forearm. 

“They were black.” She said, pointedly, and gave me a look that was the physical manifestation of the words, So, y’know. 

“Mmm.” I said, my sympathies shifting at the speed of light. “Mmmhmm.” 

Kev was a 26-year-old white guy who drove me to Hollywood in a little black sports coupe. He was not wearing a shark tooth necklace, but everything about him – from the way he dressed to the way he spoke to the way he drove – gave me the impression that he had at least three of them on top of his dresser, ready at a moment’s notice. That evening he had only one thing on his mind. 

“So, where you going, Truman? You going out? Maybe meeting a lady?” 

“Oh, gosh, no. I’m just meeting some friends. Tacos are involved. You get the picture.” 

“Okay, alright, guys’ night, that’s cool. I need a guys’ night, man. My girlfriend, she’s been driving me up the wall.” 

“Uh oh.” 

“She’s a psycho. I mean, she’s Mexican. So, y’know.” 

“Mmm.” I said. “Mmmhmm.” 

He took an off-ramp that dropped us from the freeway down onto the surface streets around Hollywood Boulevard, where we promptly got stuck at a crosswalk full of tourists, club rats and homeless people. 

“I’m into Mexicans, though, so I guess I must like it. But man, we fight all the time. She’s always screaming at me about something, always wants to see my phone, Who’re you texting? Who’re you texting, you know.” 

“Sounds like a drag.” 

“I mean, I did cheat on her. But that’s in the past, you know? And it was just once! We were fighting, and she won’t admit it, but I'm sure she cheated on me…” 

“Yeah, uh huh, okay.” I said, trying to thread the needle between affirming that I was still listening without giving the impression that I agreed with anything he was saying. 

“And it’s like, at this point, I don’t know, man. I feel like we’re both just kind of together until we find something better, y’know? I mean, I guarantee you, if she’s out and she meets some guy who’s hitting on her and she likes him, she’s gonna be like, ‘Kev who?’, y’know?” 

“What about you? If you meet somebody better, what would you do?” 

The crosswalk finally cleared and he gunned the engine. “I dunno. I mean, I get cute girls as passengers all the time. If we hit it off, it seems like she’s into it, maybe I give her my number. I’ve done it a few times. I went out with this one girl the other day. Nothing happened, I mean, I just bought her a coffee…”

“Well, good on you for being a gentleman.” 

“Oh, buddy, I always pay on the first date. It’s just one of those things, y’know? I feel bad if I don’t pay. Like, morally, I mean.” 

Rory was a Latino guy in an Altima who drove me to a Dave and Buster’s in Culver City. After talking about his day job working with developmentally disabled adults, our conversation turned to real estate. 

“Like, ten years ago? Before the housing bubble thing happened? My parents sold their house in Lynnwood, right on the border with Compton, in the hood, for half a million dollars.” 

“Woah. They sold at the right time, huh?” 

“Uh huh. And then they took that money and bought a house up in Oregon for, like, $290,000. So then they just had all that other money left over!” 

“I’m from Oregon.” I said. “Where in Oregon did they buy?” 

“Salem.” He said. 

“Get out!” I exclaimed, just like Elaine on Seinfeld. “I’m from Salem! I grew up there! I lived there for ten years! Where do your parents live?” 

“Oh, no way! They live down off of State Street, like a couple blocks from that gold statue on top of the building-” 

“The state capitol!” 

“Yeah! They’re right down there by the Sonic, there’s a bar on the corner called The Pink Elephant… I tell you, my wife and I, every time we go there, we drive to those outlet stores outside town-“ 

“The Woodburn Outlet Mall! I remember when they built that, it was nuts!”

“The discounts are so good there! And then, with the no sales tax, it’s like, the best deals ever!”  

“And how about people pumping your gas for you, huh?” 

“I love that! Makes me feel like a king.” 

And we both laughed, reveling in the shock that out of all the drivers and riders in LA that night, Uber’s algorithm had inadvertently paired up the two who both had a connection to the same sleepy town in the Willamette Valley. 

“Man, that’s crazy you're from there. I tell you what, the first time I went up to Salem to see my folks, I was tripping. It was like I was in a movie!” 

“Really? You mean, like, a really boring movie? Like a Bergman film about people whose only fine dining options are Applebee’s and Olive Garden?” 

“Nah, man! I just couldn’t believe how peaceful it is up there! Everything’s green, fresh air, everybody obeys the traffic laws… And the people are so nice! Everybody down here, it’s like, go, go, go. Folks are chill up in Salem. It’s a nice spot.” 

“Huh,” I said. “You know, I never really thought about it that way. I’m always really down on Salem, since I’m from there, but you’re right – Salem really can be a beautiful place. All that peacefulness just made it kind of rough growing up there, y’know?” 

“Yeah,” he said. “It was kind of rough growing up in Compton, too.” 

“Mmm.” I said, and felt stupid. “Mmmhmm.” 

Car Math

Recently I’ve discovered that every month for the past few months I’ve been spending a couple hundred dollars more than I’m earning. After extensive consultations with a crack team of financial planners and economists, it turns out that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. And let me tell you, it’s a real gut punch to find out you’re living beyond your means when you own two pairs of shoes and eat most of your meals out of a 9-year-old rice cooker. 

Every week I work 32 extremely flexible hours from home. I can’t add any more hours to my schedule – it’s a part time job, and the whole reason I quit my full-time job was so I could have more time for my screenplays. So I had to cut costs – but I’d already cut a lot of them, including my entire “Fuck It, I’m Going To Get A Takeout Burrito” budget. I don’t shop, I don’t go to concerts and I barely travel. The only fat left in my budget was my subscriptions to Netflix and The New Yorker, but if I got rid of those I’d be compromising my very identity as a white person just to knock $15 or so off my $300 monthly deficit. 

In going over my bills, I did notice that I was spending an awful lot of money on public transit. I’m a big fan of LA’s subway system, largely because I’m also a big fan of being slightly too inebriated to drive. It’s a convenient, relatively clean and traffic-immune way to get to and from Hollywood and downtown, which was why I was spending upwards of $50 a month on fares. 

And looking at this, I thought, Well, come on, man. You’re already spending hundreds of dollars a month to have a car. You ought to drive it more often and quit wasting money on the subway.

And then I thought, Wait. 

I lease a little grey Prius, and I really like it a lot. I don’t love and cherish it the way I did my previous car, The Mystery Wagon, and I’m fine with that. Like a toaster oven or a high-class prostitute, I appreciate the work my car does without feeling any sentimental attachment to it. Only after going through my finances and doing painstaking amounts of math did I realize that this reliable little compact car costs me between $450 and $500 a month.

So far this year, between the payments, the insurance, gas, parking, registration and the occasional wash, I spend $14.50 every single day to have this car in my life. Since I work from home, I only really use my car two or three times a week – but it still costs me $14.50 all seven days, no matter what I do. 

I like my car. I like the mileage and the turning radius and the way Electric Light Orchestra’s “10538 Overture” sounds on the stereo. But do get $14.50 worth of enjoyment out of those things every day? 

The truth is, there’s only one thing in this world that I care about enough to spend $14.50 on it every day, and that’s lunch. What’s more, my favorite burrito in town only costs $7.50, and I’d long since cut that out of my budget. When I found out that I was sacrificing nearly two Taco Love burritos per day for the privilege of being able to drive to Trader Joe’s once and awhile, I started to question why I even had a car in the first place.  

My car insurance company has a GPS unit in my Prius which tracks where I drive so they can bill me by the mile. It’s the sort of invasion of privacy that would give Rand Paul the vapors, but it means I spend less money, so I’m okay with it. And in this case, it gave me a chance to see on a map everywhere I’ve taken my car over the past nine months, and then run those destinations through an Uber price estimator to see how much it would’ve cost to get everywhere without a car.

When the dust had settled, the pungent stench of math still hanging heavy in the air, I had my answer: Using the subway and Uber’s low-cost UberPool option to get around would cost 44% of what I’m currently spending to lease a car. By only paying for transportation when I need it, I can keep more than half of the money I’ve been spending to have personal transportation ready 24 hours a day. 

So, I’ve talked to the dealership and I'm returning my car at the end of the month.

At least a couple of my friends think I’m crazy. The main argument they make is one about freedom. They can’t believe that I’m giving up the ability to pick up and go whenever I want to, wherever I want to, just me and the open road. 

Here’s the thing, though: I hate driving more than you can possibly imagine. It’s one of my least favorite things that I have to do on a regular basis, right up there with cleaning my shower and pretending I don’t think Burning Man is a crock. I don’t enjoy or cherish the responsibility of being in control of a two-ton piece of heavy machinery that kills around 32,000 Americans every year. When I’m behind the wheel I’m tenser, angrier and racister than at any other point in my day. 

When I decided to get rid of my car, it occurred to me that I ought to at least try UberPool before I fully committed to this thing. UberPool offers supercheap rates by having drivers pick up two different passengers who the app has determined are going in the same direction. The idea sounded great on paper, but if it meant I’d spend every trip with some Del Griffith type talking my ear off it might be worth reconsidering, since I hate talking to strangers even more than driving. 

So that evening, I called an UberPool to take me to meet some friends at a bar. The app told me the trip across town, at peak hours, would cost me $5.15. This was even cheaper than expected, and things only got better when my car arrived and I got a look at who I’d be sharing the backseat with.

The other passenger was a gorgeous blonde woman, probably no older than 23, dressed to the nines and wearing perfume. Her eyes briefly flicked up from her phone when I opened the door, and we both muttered “Hey” in unison as I had a seat. 

Holy shit. Today’s my lucky day, I thought as the driver pulled away and headed for the freeway. There’s no way she’s going to try and talk to me! 

And she didn’t! It was a wonderful, quiet, relaxing trip that took maybe five minutes longer than if I had driven myself, but without my shoulders and back getting all knotted up from the stress. I did some reading on my phone, jotted down some notes for a script, and then eventually just rolled down the window to people-watch and feel the wind in my face. 

I couldn’t have done any of that if I was driving. And that, to me, is what freedom really is. 

Emergency Brexit

I think the best thing we can say about Britain leaving the European Union is that it just might be the event that finally kills that idiotic saying, “If voting actually changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” When I read that sentence, I always hear it in my head in a clownish, goofy voice, because it’s a clownish and goofy opinion to have. Evidently more than a few English voters had that opinion too, which is why they treated their vote like a comment card at a TGI Friday’s.    

Imagine if you had bad service at TGI Friday’s – that’s a big leap to make, I know – and left a scathing tirade on one of those “How Can We Improve?” cards that they leave you with your check. Let’s say you were so pissed off at the state of the mozzarella sticks that you wrote, This whole restaurant ought to be burned to the ground! And then imagine if the next day you came back, because you weren’t really that mad and because you’re the sort of person who eats at TGI Friday’s on multiple consecutive days, only to find the staff dousing the building in gasoline and the manager chucking a Molotov cocktail in the window. “Wait – what!? No, don’t do that! Jesus, I didn’t know you guys took these things so seriously!” 

But it’s too late – now you have no choice but to eat at Applebee’s, which is just slightly worse than what’s going to happen to the United Kingdom in the next few years. The people who gained the most from membership in the EU were the ones who voted overwhelmingly to leave it, due in part to being deliberately misled or not even knowing what the EU was in the first place. Now the value of their currency is plummeting, their economy is shrinking and their prime minister is resigning. Turns out democracy isn’t just some puppet show put on by the elites to pacify the masses – live and learn, right? Better luck next generation! 

Still, I think David Cameron comes out ahead in all this. Now he’ll go down in history as the prime minister who accidentally steered the UK into a multi-decade economic decline, instead of the prime minister who allegedly stuck his fully erect penis into a dead pig’s mouth. 

Boris Johnson was the mayor of London when I was studying abroad there in college, and I actually saw him up close when my group sat in on a London City Council meeting. Based on that experience, I can completely understand why his presence in the ‘Leave’ campaign put them over the top. During the meeting, Johnson, a member of David Cameron’s Conservative Party, presided over a squabbling panel of 14 councilors with the showmanship of a talk show host and the verbal acuity of an insult comic. 

As a general rule, British politics is far more yelly than it is here in the States, and everybody on the council seemed to genuinely and openly hate one another. If a London City Council meeting were happening in the apartment next door to mine, I’d probably call the cops. But Boris Johnson was sort of above it all, laughing off his detractors, mocking their policy proposals, and treating all their petulant, impassioned shouting like it was one big joke. 

Johnson’s performance reached its zenith during debate over an expensive but environmentally-friendly sewage treatment plant, when he made what is without question the classiest joke about pooping I’ve ever heard in my life. I can’t remember the exact wording, but when one of his opponents on the council made some snarky comment to the tune of, “If the sitting mayor won’t move on this waste treatment proposal, I should hope he wouldn’t stand for reelection!” To which Boris Johnson, mayor of one of the world’s largest and most historically important cities, said, “Well, I move quite a lot of waste when I’m sitting – and some of it when I’m standing, too!” 

His supporters on the council, not to mention most of the spectators, broke out laughing. Johnson just stood there with a big ‘ol grin on his face as the council’s parliamentarian pleaded futilely with everyone to quit talking about shitting and pissing so they could get back to trying to run London. 

Think about it – if you were an older, underemployed person living in the hinterlands of England, struggling to make ends meet, feeling shafted by political elites, wouldn’t you love a politician who delights in making an ass out of those elites? And if all those politicians told you leaving the EU would be a disaster, and Boris told you they were lying as usual, who would you trust? 

Conventional wisdom was that Boris Johnson would be the next prime minister – after all, he’s one of Britain's most popular politicians, and the Brexit went a long way to raise his public profile. But three hours before he was due to announce his candidacy, his would-be campaign manager – a hilariously awkward fop named Michael Gove – put out a statement saying Johnson wasn’t up to the task and that he would be running for prime minister instead. 

Now Boris Johnson, thoroughly Red Wedding’d, has withdrawn from the running. Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, sort of a British Bernie Sanders, is so phenomenally unpopular in his own party that he has little chance of being the next PM. Nigel Farage, the Ted Cruzesque leader of the UK Independent Party who pushed for the Brexit in the first place, has also stepped down. And Michael Gove, fresh from betraying one of his closest allies at the 11th hour, is curiously having a somewhat hard time finding allies to support his bid for prime minister. 

Usually it takes a terrorist attack or an assassination campaign to wipe out this many members of a country’s government. It’s really a testament to democracy that the people of England were able to completely RF so many wealthy and powerful people without having to break out the guillotines. 

If voting didn’t matter and a cabal of shadowy billionaires were pulling all the strings of our society, stuff like this wouldn’t happen. Sure, moneyed interests have corrupted the democratic process in this country and virtually every other one – but your vote is still a loaded gun. That’s why wealthy and powerful people spend so much time and money trying to tell you who to shoot with it. 

On this side of the Atlantic, we get closer to November, let’s all just try not to shoot ourselves in the foot, okay? 

Four and a Half Months

I hit a pretty deep low point in my life on April 30th. It was around 11:30 PM and I was sitting in my car at the In-N-Out Burger drive thru, waiting to order. Usually, the In-N-Out drive thru is a place that fills me with tranquility and joy, in anticipation of soon being filled with meat and cheese. But that night was different. That night, as I waited for the friendly guy in the paper hat to walk up to my car and take my order, I found myself wondering quite seriously if I even wanted to be a writer anymore. 

If you read my blog at all last year you may remember that I spent a fair amount of time nattering on about the Nicholl Fellowship – the hoity-toity screenplay competition run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that I entered one of my scripts into. My script, as I wrote breathlessly at the time, made it as far as the quarterfinal round before getting axed in August because one of the competition readers was a humorless, fun-hating sourpuss who gave it a low score. 

For some time after getting the email that I was out of the running, I didn’t really do anything. I didn’t do any more work on my newly-rejected script and I didn’t start writing anything new, either. It’s not that I was depressed – I was just exhausted. I’d spent the first four months of 2015 locked in my room working around the clock to get the script finished in time for the fellowship’s May 1st deadline. The next four months were spent wringing my hands and perusing the Nicholl Fellowship’s Facebook page in search of secret hints that my script was making a splash. (Although it’s our policy not to comment on individual scripts before all the scores are in, we will admit that one of this year’s submissions is so incredibly good that it cured a reader's glaucoma…)

Having already spent two-thirds of my year on the Nicholl Fellowship, I felt like I’d earned the right to coast through the rest of 2015. I knew that I wanted to enter the competition again in 2016 – I even had an idea for a script. But at that point, May was a long way off, Donald Trump had just started tearing up the GOP debates, and Fallout 4 was nearly out. These felt like signs that the universe didn’t want me to be too productive. 

In November a friend of mine got my Nicholl script in front of a manager at a literary agency, who read it and loved it. One meeting later, I was her newest client. This was a Joe Biden-style Big Deal for me, because getting professional representation had been my goal for so long that it was my New Year’s resolution in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Before, I’d finish a screenplay, look at it, and think, Who do I have to fuck to get somebody important to read this? My manager helps me get important people to read my script without me having to fuck anybody. 

A couple days after Thanksgiving, my manager called to tell me that she’d given my script to the VP of production at her company, and that he loved it and wanted to produce it. In mid December the three of us had a meeting, where the producer told me how much he’d liked my script and gave me a bunch of notes for how he thought it could improve. I agreed with just about all of them. 

“So,” he said. “When do you think you can have a new draft ready?” 

“January 15th?” I heard someone saying. No, I thought. That’s a very silly timeframe in which to write a new draft of a screenplay. Whoever said that doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Then I realized it was me who’d said it. 

“Great!” The producer said. “Let’s talk in January.” 

For the first half of my drive home, I felt giddy. I've been living in LA for longer than I was in college. My whole plan when I moved down here was to just try and write eye-catching scripts until one of them found its way to some influential Hollywood type who wanted to take a chance on me. There were plenty of times in the past four years that that plan felt, for lack of a better word, coo-coo bananas. But now, I had both a manager and a producer knocking on my door within the space of a month. For once, one of my harebrained schemes was actually working! 

But as the drive continued, it occurred to me that I had just agreed to re-write my Old Script in the same timeframe that I had planned to write my New Script for the upcoming Nicholl Fellowship. Writing a script takes a long-ass time. Writing a good script takes more time. Writing two good scripts in the four and a half months between mid-December and May 1st felt about as feasible as Yoko Ono being crowned the heavyweight champion of the world.

When I got home, I made peace with the idea that I wasn’t going to update my blog again until the spring. Then, I unplugged my Playstation 4 and went to work. 

I rewrote the Old Script all through the holidays, Christmas Day included. I spent evenings and late nights trying to outline the New Script's story. After New Year’s, I started each morning by writing the number of days left until May 1st in the top corner of one of my white boards – 120, 119, 118, 117 – until giving up when I realized I could get a much more accurate and less labor-intensive countdown on my computer. 

Over the course of the next few months I wrote three new drafts of the Old Script and had three more meetings with the producer, collecting new notes from him every time. Meanwhile, I also painstakingly cranked out three drafts of the New Script, desperately trying to transform loose ideas and concepts into characters and story beats people could conceivably care about. It wasn't going well, and by early April my story still didn’t have an ending – which is the sort of thing that professional screenplay competition judges tend to notice. 

I began ducking even more social obligations than I usually do. Every spare second that I wasn’t doing my day job was spent struggling to get the New Script into working order. In the last two weeks of April I took time off work so I could try to iron out plot holes and figure out an ending that worked. By the last week before the deadline, the feeling of panic in the pit of my stomach would wake me up around 6 or 7 AM every day, at which point I’d go to work fiddling with plot details, pacing and dialog until the wee hours of the morning. 

I finished the last draft of the New Script on the 30th, at around 11:00 PM, and although I was pretty dead inside at that point I still had enough of my wits about me to know that I had earned a burger. 

So I finally left my apartment and drove to the In-N-Out in my neighborhood. As I sat numbly in the drive-thru line, watching one of the employees go car-to-car taking peoples’ orders and radioing them back to the kitchen, it occurred to me that telling this guy what kind of burger I wanted would be the first face-to-face human interaction I’d had in three or four days. 

And for the first time since I moved to LA – for the first time since I decided at 13 that this was what I wanted to spend my life doing – I found myself wondering if I really wanted to be a Hollywood screenwriter badly enough to put myself through all this shit over and over again.  
 
My friends in Portland right now are getting promotions at work, buying houses, getting married. I took a pay cut so I could work at a part-time job where I’d have lots of time to write. I may never own property because I moved to one of America’s most out of control housing markets in order to be a writer. I gave up on dating because I considered it an expensive waste of time that I could spend writing instead.

For years I’ve been papering over the shortcomings in my life by telling myself That’s fine, that’s okay – your writing is all that matters! There in the drive-thru, a few days removed from my last shower and with my brain feeling like a moldy, wrung out sponge, I found myself wondering, Do I even like writing? Or do I just like using it as an excuse to avoid growing up? 

(I ordered a #1 combo Animal Style with a Diet Coke, if anybody was curious about that part of the story.)

I entered the New Script into the Nicholl Fellowship on May 1st. I’ll find out if I’m a quarterfinalist sometime in July. I’d be pretty surprised if I am, though, because the New Script isn’t all that good. You can’t write two good scripts in four and a half months – but if you try really hard and make a lot of sacrifices when it comes to sanity and hygiene and relationships with your friends, you can write one good script and another mediocre one. 

The producer, my manager and I are still chewing over revisions on the Old Script – which I still like quite a lot, and which has improved considerably with his notes. That said, the notes keep coming, and even after five months we’re so early in this process that there’s no telling whether anything will ever come of it. 

After taking a month to think about it, I’ve decided that I do like being a writer – but only when I’m working on something I like. Deep down I knew that I honestly didn’t like the New Script, but I was so hell-bent on entering the competition that I never considered just giving up and writing something that actually inspired me. So instead, I spent four and a half months writing a script that was about as engaging and rewarding a process as writing a 104-page term paper about the mating habits of tapeworms. 

I’m working on another script now, one that I like, and already this process feels healthier. I'm taking my time. I'm not staying up all night to write. And this one isn’t for next year’s Nicholl – this one’s just for me. 

Or at least it is until somebody wants to buy it, in which case it’ll be 100% for them. But that's the life I've chosen, and I'm okay with that. 

“Hillary Clinton is a Flip-Flopper,” Says Voter Who Has Changed Opinion on Superdelegates Three Times in Six Months

At a press conference Tuesday morning, 24-year-old part-time social media advisor Chad Gerber -- who called Democratic Party superdelegates “gladhanding neo-corporatist stooges” in November, “the last, best hope for our democracy” in April, and “anti-democracy shock troops of the Clinton Industrial Complex” two weeks ago – announced that he can never support Hillary Clinton because of her inconsistent stances on the issues. 

“I don’t even know what she stands for – probably because she doesn’t stand for anything. If she gets to the White House, all she’s going to do is cut deals with the Republicans,” said Gerber, who spent much of 2010 through 2015 penning angry Twitter and Facebook screeds about Congressional Republicans’ refusal to find common ground with the Obama administration. “That’s not someone we can trust.” 

In his statement, he also took issue with Secretary Clinton’s recent statements on the campaign trail suggesting that she’s clinched the Democratic nomination. “I think it says a lot about her character that she’s parading around acting like she’s won the nomination when California hasn’t even voted yet. Bernie’s only down by 302 delegates – he’s still very much in this game.” 

When questioned on how Senator Sanders could pull ahead in California – a state where he is currently running behind by seven to eight points in most polls, has laid off staff, isn’t running television ads, trails Clinton with Latinos and female voters by double digit margins, and would need to win by 15 points or more in order to erase her lead – Mr. Gerber explained that all polls are biased against Sanders and thus cannot be trusted. To prove his point, he then provided reporters with a bombshell report from ProgressiveSocialistGreenNews.info that predicted a surprise landslide victory for Senator Sanders in California and New Jersey, as well as in several other states that have already voted for Clinton.  

At press time, the author of the report, Jane Sanders, could not be reached for comment. 

“The fact is, Bernie Sanders is the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in November. Don’t take my word for it – just look at the polls! Shillary Clinton can say what she wants about the ‘three million more votes’ that she supposedly has over Bernie, but the hard truth is that if the Democratic Party doesn’t want Trump to pick the next Supreme Court justice, they’ll nominate Bernie instead of her.” 

In February, during the week following Justice Scalia’s death and the GOP-led Senate’s announcement that they would not consider a replacement during President Obama’s term, Gerber shared and retweeted no fewer than 14 videos and memes making the case that senators were obligated to follow the will of the millions of people who voted the president into office in 2008 and 2012.

Striking a defiant tone as he concluded his press conference, Gerber stated, “Mark my words: This fight is far from over. We have the votes, and we’re going to win.” 

Though he may not have realized it at the time, Gerber was echoing the words of Ted Cruz during the government shutdown in October 2013, which he spearheaded in a quixotic attempt to force President Obama and Democrats in Congress to overturn the Affordable Care Act. 

At the time, Gerber tweeted at Cruz, “u have NO CHANCE. ITS SIMPLE MATH U DUMBASS.” 

"Hillary and Trump Are One and the Same," Says Local White Heterosexual Male

DENVER, CO – 27-year-old social media consultant and white man Robby Stockton announced early Tuesday that he would be reluctant to support Hillary Clinton in the general election if she beats Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. “Hillary against Trump? I mean, what’s the difference at that point? They’re both rich, corrupt liars who only care about helping other millionaires and billionaires,” Stockton said, secure in the knowledge that he will never need to get an abortion.

“Just look at Hillary’s record. All those big speeches she gave at Wall Street banks, the FBI investigation, that thing she said about “superpredators” in the 1990s... She’s just as bad as he is,” Stockton explained, using the same strident tones Donald Trump once used in a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black teenagers wrongfully accused of rape. “Maybe even worse.”

Stockton went on to cast doubt on Hillary’s progressive credentials. “She doesn’t want Medicare for all, she doesn’t want to make state college free, she supported Barry Goldwater in high school, and she was against gay marriage up until a couple years ago! Michelle and I don’t even think she’s a real liberal,” he said, referring to his wife, Michelle Peterson, whose union with him will not be threatened by Mr. Trump’s plan to appoint a conservative Supreme Court justice to overturn the ruling that legalized gay marriage.

“Say what you will about Trump, but at least he’d shake things up. This system is broken and everybody knows it, but nothing gets fixed because we keep electing establishment shills like Hillary.” Stockton paused to check a text message he’d just gotten from his uncle, Carl Stockon – who is not one of the 1.6 billion Muslims Mr. Trump has pledged to place on watch lists or ban from entering the country. “I’m sick of voting for the lesser of two evils and watching them just uphold the status quo.”

Ultimately, when pressed to choose between Trump – who, if elected, plans to violate the Geneva Convention by ordering the military to intentionally target women and children related to terrorists – and Hillary, Mr. Stockton was noncommittal. “If Hillary winds up stealing the nomination from Bernie, I probably won’t even vote in November. If she wins, it won’t be with my help – and if Trump wins, well, at least something will change, right?”

With this, Mr. Stockton concluded the interview and left to return to his apartment – which, thanks to its location, is not directly threatened by the rising sea levels that Donald Trump does not believe in. 

Berned Out

On two separate occasions in the past six months I’ve sat down to write a succinct, snappy blog post in which I explain why Bernie Sanders isn’t going to win the Democratic nomination, and why that’s a good thing. And both times, I’ve spent a few days molding the massive jumble of opinions I have about the subject into something resembling a blog post, only to give up when I realize that I’ve written three or four thousand words and I’m only half done.

Because, really, who gives a shit what I think? More specifically, who gives eight thousand words worth of a shit what I think? I’ve got my polls and my links and my fancy charts of swing state voting districts to make my case for why Bernie isn’t going to be the guy, but at the end of the day my whole argument boils down to one very deeply held opinion:

Americans won’t elect a 74-year-old socialist as their president.

Yes, I’ve seen your polls, and your links, and your fancy charts of swing state voting districts to make your case for why Bernie is the guy. I love Bernie. I love his policies, I love his lifetime of activism for progressive causes, and I love what he stands for. The movement he’s started is extremely exciting to me.

But he’s not going to win the Democratic nomination. And that’s good, because he definitely wouldn’t win a general election.

Briefly:

1)   Yes, polls now show Bernie doing better against Trump in a general election than Hillary. But general election polls conducted this long before Election Day aren’t worth dick. A few months ago, general election polls had Ben Carson beating Hillary by 10 points. Still think that's going to happen? 

2)   Yes, Americans do already love socialist programs like Social Security, Medicare and the Interstate. The problem is that many of them don’t consider these programs to be socialism, because generations that grew up during the Cold War largely equate socialism with fascism, concentration camps, and – scariest of all – significantly higher tax rates. There’s a lot of Americans who are way more scared of Bernie’s socialism than Trump’s racism, and no amount of earnest college kids with handlebar mustaches and #feelthebern T-shirts can convince them otherwise.

3)   Yes, Sanders has either beaten or effectively tied Clinton in every state. That’s an incredible streak for a socialist candidate raising money from small donors. But the streak is about to end – not because of superdelegates or establishment trickery, but because the next slew of Democratic primaries are in Southern states, where most Democrats are black and most black people prefer Clinton.

Hillary is a weaker candidate than I thought she’d be. Fortunately, she is still the strongest candidate running for president in either party right now, which is really the most important thing. Yes, she’s in bed with Wall Street. Yes, she voted for the Iraq War. Yes, she's under investigation by the FBI. Yes, the Clinton White House was a source of all kinds of legislative and ethical jiggery-pokery.

And yet –

Hillary is a poised, articulate debater. Unlike Bernie, she can offer realistic, detailed policy proposals that could plausibly become law in a divided Congress. She’s a woman, which will motivate huge numbers of women to get out and vote. She doesn’t want to deport 11 million people, which, along with the hunky HUD secretary she’s almost certainly going to pick as her running mate, will motivate huge numbers of Latinos to get out and vote. She doesn’t identify as a socialist, which will motivate just about every centrist disgusted or frightened by Trump to get out and vote. 

Hillary is the strongest candidate running because, for all her scandals and legal trouble and likeability issues, she still has the appearance of being the one adult in the room. On Election Day, when forced to choose between an eminently qualified politician with ethical issues and a racist real estate developer with more experience in pro wrestling than politics, it's my sincerest belief that the American people will hold their collective nose and choose the dirty politician to lead the free world. 

Making a statement like that in liberal circles these days is a faux pas on the order of eating a Baconator in a mosque. I’ve seen plenty of earnestly written articles on Salon and CommonDreams and DailyKos and The Huffington Post swearing up and down that I’m wrong about this.

But you know what? To hell with your goddamn articles. I’ve read them, and I don’t buy what they’re selling – the arguments they make are based on wildly optimistic readings of inconclusive data. Articles with titles like “5 Reasons Why Bernie Sanders Will Win The Presidency In A Landslide” aren’t journalism, they’re clickbait sales pitches. If you think I'm full of shit, go get your own journalism degree and we can have a spirited debate about this in four years or so. 

I’ve been following the state of our democracy with all the tiresome intensity and passion of a San Francisco Giants fan for the better part of five years now. (Not out of any sense of civic duty; I just love watching wealthy egomaniacs publicly humiliate each other.) I’ve stayed up past midnight for live results from a Mississippi Republican Senate primary, I have an app that buzzes my phone every time the House of Representatives holds a vote (it’s not often), and unlike a lot of Bernie Sanders’ die-hard supporters, I was actually familiar with the man before he ran for president.

I’ve been paying really close attention to this process for awhile, and in that time I’ve learned one thing: The most important quality for a candidate isn’t likeability, or an ambitious vision, or a sterling ethical record, or ideological purity.

It’s electability.

In 2012, the Tea Party – a grassroots, populist rebellion against Wall Street and corrupt party elites – staged their own political revolution in Missouri and Indiana. In both states’ GOP Senate primaries, the Tea Party organized and successfully nominated two ideologically pure candidates who were considerably more conservative and outspoken than the establishment candidates.

Those candidates were Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and both of them lost. Their views were too far outside the mainstream for general election voters, which is why two Midwestern red states now have Democratic senators.

You can be the most principled, honest, likeable and forward-thinking candidate in the race, but if you can’t get more than half of the country to vote for you, you’re just another Average Joe with some really cool ideas. When the Eastern Seaboard floods because President Trump doesn’t believe in global warming, you have to stand in line for the FEMA evacuation bus just like everybody else.  

Bernie Sanders has already won. A 74-year-old socialist without a SuperPAC fought Hillary fucking Clinton to a standstill. Nobody saw it coming – I sure as hell didn’t – and his campaign has sent a powerful message to Wall Street, Washington D.C., and the Democratic Party: People are sick of your shit, and if we don’t get a bigger piece of the pie we can organize effectively enough to threaten even your biggest and best-financed Chosen One.

The Party is well aware that socialism is a cause that motivates millions of potential voters – that’s why Hillary keeps moving to the left to try and poach Sanders’ support. In the next few election cycles, we’re going to see a proliferation of Democratic candidates at the state and Congressional level who take on causes like Medicare for all or free state college, because now it’s known that there’s significant support for those proposals in the Democratic base.

What I’m crossing my fingers for is that in ten years or so we’ll get some sort of socialist equivalent of Rand Paul – a young, charismatic democratic socialist who runs for president. (Preferably this candidate would be a woman or a non-white person or, ideally, both.) I feel like under those circumstances, when there’s fewer people who equate socialism with Nazism in the voting pool, America most certainly could elect a socialist president.

Bernie has shown that socialism isn’t a third rail issue in America anymore. That’s an incredible achievement, and like Bernie says, it signals the start of a political revolution. It’s just that this revolution is going to take a lot longer than one presidential election cycle. This is a huge country, and over 320 million people live here – change is a slow and incremental process, because the people who created this country wanted it that way.

So if you’re Feeling The Bern, here’s my challenge to you: Keep feeling it. Maintain this level of engagement and investment in our political process even after you vote for Hillary Clinton and she wins the election. Feel The Bern in the 2018 midterm elections. Feel The Bern in 2020, and 2022. Feel The Bern in your state and local elections and party primaries. 

That’s what a political revolution looks like. 

Patriot's Shopping List

HELLO FELLOW PATRIOT’S! I’m sending you this urgent message from what is quite possibly the last bastion of true freedom and Constitutionality in these “United” “States”: The offices of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, currently being occupied by a RIGHTEOUS, HEROIC ARMY of between 12 and 150 Constitutionalist’s. For too long, this nations’ oppressed middle class white people have suffered in silence, but today we say NO MORE! We are TAKING OUR COUNTRY BACK, starting with these three empty buildings 30 miles outside of a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Every last one of the hundreds or dozen of us here are prepared to LAY DOWN OUR LIVES to protect American’s from the horrific tyranny of cumbersome land use planning and regulations. We’ve made it clear to the authorities and the media that we’re prepared to stay here FOR YEARS until this public land can be given BACK TO THE PEOPLE. This is where we show Barack HUSSEIN Obama the power of RUGGED CONSTITUTIONAL AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM.

YOU’RE HELP IS NEEDED to continue this PATRIOTIC CONSTITUTIONAL BATTLE against tyranny and unconstitutionalism. Our supplies have begun to run low, so we’re calling on true patriot’s everywhere to send us the following item’s:

Funyun’s

Fresh vegetable’s are nice but Funyun’s can last for years and years, which is good because we plan to continue this occupation at least until Barack HUSSEIN Obama is no longer president, and we want to be prepared to last for another 8 years if the American sheeple elect Hillary HUSSEIN Clinton in November.

Red Bull

Defending the Constitution is hard work, and there’s so much Constitution to defend that you can never take a break. With enough Red Bull we’ll have the energy to defend the Constitution literally 24/7.

A New Modem/Router

The tyrannical anti-Constitutional oppressor’s who worked in this building before we got here put in a really, really slow Internet connection. I mean it’s seriously bad, only one person can be on Facebook at a time and we’re trying to watch Making A Murderer but it keeps buffering every two minute’s.

Nutella

Have you heard of this stuff? We found half a jar in the visitor’s center breakroom and let’s just say it was gone in an hour. ;-P

American Sniper on Blu-Ray

We already have three, but it doesn’t hurt to have as many copy’s as possible just in case. To be honest ANY AND ALL Chris Kyle merchandise would be greatly appreciated as this LAWFUL CONSTITUTIONAL OCCUPATION could last for years and we’ve only got six Chris Kyle T-shirts, two Chris Kyle sleeping bags and eleven Chris Kyle commemorative Burger King cups.

An iPhone 5 Charger

Leonard forgot his.

Book’s

We’re snowed in here, the NONCONSTITUTIONAL FEDERAL GOVERNMENT cut off our power, and it’s going to be below 15 degrees for the next month. So WE NEED LOT’S OF BOOK’S that we can set on fire to stay warm – we already burned all the SOCIALIST BIRDWATCHING BOOKS in the building. We need as much kindling as possible – please send Harry Potter, issues of The New Yorker, or anything written by Rachel HUSSEIN Maddow.

Patriot’s, NOW IS OUR TIME TO RISE UP! Please send all provisions to 36391 Sodhouse Lane, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Oregon. Without your support, the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT will continue to encroach on our lives until everyone is completely dependent on there SOCIALIST INSTITUTIONS.

(FYI: They have these great flat rate boxes at the Post Office – just buy one, fill it up with supply’s, drop it in the mail, and they do the rest. It’s amazing!)  

Wacky Delly

In the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has suggested that as president he’d close down mosques and create a national database to track Muslims. He’s doubled and tripled down on a blatantly false story about Muslims in New Jersey celebrating on 9/11. He retweeted false, racist crime statistics originally published by neo-Nazis, cracked jokes about a black protestor beaten by attendees at one of his rallies, and mocked a reporter’s physical disability in front of a crowd of people. Pundits and politicians are saying that Trump is sounding more and more like a legitimate fascist. When I look at what Trump’s been up to lately, though, I don’t think about fascism – I think about an episode of Rokko’s Modern Life.

Most episodes of Rokko’s Modern Life focused on Rokko, a well-meaning Australian wallaby, and the trouble his numbskull friends Heifer and Filbert get him into. But in the episode I’m thinking of, Rokko and his friends take a backseat to the story of Ralph Bighead, the adult son of Rokko’s neighbor and lifelong nemesis, Ed Bighead.

Unlike his father, who works at a huge evil corporation and spends most of his time trying to think of ways to kill Rokko, Ralph is a sensitive artistic type who has created an extremely popular animated TV series called The Fatheads. After making over eight hundred lowbrow episodes, Ralph is ready to quit so he can fulfill his lifelong dream of creating real, meaningful art: A gigantic sculpture of fruit, carved into the side of a mountain.

Unfortunately for Ralph, he’s locked into a contract at the studio that requires him to create a new pilot. In a ploy to get out of his contract, Ralph puts Rokko, Heifer, and Filbert in charge of concepting, writing, and directing his new show, certain that these three idiots will make something so unwatchable that he’ll be fired and set free to pursue his passion.  

As expected, Rokko, Heifer, and Filbert screw up at every turn, producing an incomprehensible sitcom about lunchmeat called Wacky Delly. Ralph is certain he’ll be given his walking papers – but the studio heads inexplicably love the pilot and put his show into full production, helmed by Rokko and his friends. Despite being crass, ugly, and almost painful to watch, Wacky Delly somehow becomes the most popular show in America overnight. People go crazy for every new episode, each one dumber, louder, and cruder than the last.

This is bad news for Ralph. The more popular the show gets, the longer he has to keep doing something he hates. He’s created a monster, and to try and kill it he starts taking a more active role in the show’s production, making the worst possible suggestions in hopes of tanking it.

He barges into the editing room and insists that an episode consist entirely of a static shot of a jar of mayonnaise, accompanied by a loud dial tone – but the episode winds up being a critically-acclaimed smash hit. He purposefully overexposes an episode’s film and orders Rokko and the gang to broadcast it anyway – audiences go nuts for the completely dark, featureless episode. Mobs of adoring fans begin to surround the studio.

Every time he tries to destroy his creation by taking it too far or making it so unappealing that no rational person could like it, it only makes his fans love the show more fervently. He’s trapped – a prisoner of his innate ability to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Donald Trump isn’t stupid. That’s why I’m fairly certain he has no interest in being president. Running for president suits him well, because it affords him a gigantic audience and considerable legitimacy to talk about how awesome he is. Being president means he’ll have to find a way to explain to his supporters why he can’t do all the impossible, unconstitutional things he’s promised to do. Then his credibility will be shot with the only people on Earth who still find him credible.

I think that The Donald, as much as anybody else, was sure that his presidential run would fizzle out after a few months once he’d had his fun, allowing him to go back to being a billionaire C-list celebrity with a newly broadened and energized fanbase. As summer turned into fall and his campaign showed remarkable staying power, he was delighted that he’d been able to prove so much of the Washington chattering class wrong. But with the field narrowing and his numbers remaining steady, Serious People are starting to warn that Trump is a legitimate threat for the Republican nomination.

Trump sees that too, and I’d wager that deep down it scares the shit out of him. So he’s trying to pump the brakes on his popularity by flirting with ideas that he figures should be repulsive to any rational person. It’s one thing to slander illegal immigrants – politicians have been doing that for centuries with great results. But promising to close down mosques, create a registry of Muslims, and then shrugging off the suggestion that you’re aping Adolf Hitler is something I feel like Trump thought would scare away even the die hard supporters who stuck around through all the previous racism, misogyny and other trash.

But Trump has underestimated the monster he’s created. His unwavering support at the polls is a sign that his adherents are so committed that they’ll line up behind just about anything he says, so long as it’s littered with four-letter words and hostility toward Washington. Now he can’t stop what he’s started – short of quitting the race while he’s the frontrunner, which his ego will never allow. At this point he’s essentially a hostage of his fanbase.

Look, I could be full of shit about this. Maybe Donald Trump really is just a proud, wealthy fascist speaking from the heart. But it’s worth remembering that he wasn’t always this way. 

To be sure, Donald Trump has been a first rate piece of shit his entire life, but his politics didn't get this extreme until recently. In 2012 he criticized Mitt Romney for alienating Latinos by taking a hardline stance against illegal immigrants. In 2000 he was pro-choice and supported a Bernie Sanders-style universal healthcare plan. In 2009 he repeatedly praised the newly-inaugurated president on his blog, saying “The world is excited about Barack Obama and the new United States. Let’s keep it that way!”

So maybe he’s experienced a seismic change of heart on every issue at the center of the GOP psyche in the past couple of years. Or maybe he’s a bored rich jackass whose attention-getting ploy spiraled out of control. Your guess is as good as mine.

Eventually, Ralph Bighead accepts that he can’t kill Wacky Delly, and instead resolves to channel his creative energies into making this show the piece of great art he’s always wanted to create. He pours his heart and soul into making an episode of Wacky Delly he’s actually proud of, which proves to be so unpopular the show is cancelled in ten seconds.

If Trump really wants out of the race, all he has to do is run his campaign based on the things he believed as recently as the third season of Mad Men. Once his fans hear him praising the Wall Street bailout, he’ll be out of Iowa and back to hosting WWF events in no time. 

Wasteland Dispatches

Fallout 4’s character creation process is extremely powerful, allowing you to sculpt every aspect of the face of the character who you’ll inhabit for hundreds of hours of postapocalyptic exploration. And I fiddled with some of the options for awhile, but ultimately the only substantial changes I made to the default generic white guy I was presented with was to turn him into a generic white guy with slightly browner hair. The choices were overwhelming and I was in a hurry to get into the game – plus, I didn’t feel like the dimensions of my character’s cheekbones would have a huge impact on gameplay.

After about 30 hours in the game world, though, I’ve started to resent the blandness of my character every time I see his face in a dialog cutscene or dramatic slow motion critical hit montage. Here’s this expansive virtual sandbox, where I can do as I please with no real world consequences, and right out of the gate I made pretty much the safest, blandest choice possible. I could’ve experienced the apocalypse as The Dude, or Omar from The Wire, or as a five-foot tall Asian woman, but instead it’s just a halfassed facsimile of me, wearing metal armor and sunglasses because they inexplicably make me better at shooting people.

After stumbling out of the bomb shelter where my character had been cryogenically frozen for a couple centuries following a nuclear war, one of the first things I found was his old neighborhood, now destroyed. It’s some lovely real estate even in spite of the global thermonuclear holocaust: A dozen or so tidy homes around a cul-de-sac on a small island in the middle of a river, connected to the rest of the wasteland by a single rickety bridge.

I went across the bridge and spent a few hours exploring the island’s immediate surroundings, during which time I watched my unremarkable avatar get brutally murdered by mutant rats, mutant dogs, mutant mosquitoes, river-dwelling crab monsters, sadistic tweaker bandits, and packs of psychotic, radiation crazed zombies. With virtual night beginning to fall, I returned to my island in hopes of not getting killed by anything for awhile.

One of Fallout 4’s new features is a Minecraft-style construction system, where you find junk in the world and break it down into its component parts, which can then be reassembled as various structures. Having had a taste of what the outside world was like, I spent the night breaking down every rusting car, fallen tree, and destroyed home on the island. As the virtual sun rose, I used the harvested supplies to build a wall around my island that would make Donald Trump blush.

With my island completely sealed off behind walls and automatic sentry guns that my character somehow built out of tin cans and old circuit boards, I set to sprucing up the place. I built new houses and ran power lines to generators so they could all have lights. I started planting crops on the dead lawns, dug wells for water pumps… Before long, I’d turned my island fortress into such a little paradise that people were coming out of the wasteland to live there, harvest my fields, and man my guard towers. 

God damn it, I though to myself as I stood on my roof and surveyed my domain. I’m going to make the apocalypse come to me.

Eventually, so many people were showing up to live in my settlement that I had to start building new houses on vacant lots for them to live in. While my residents spent their days working in the fields, I spent my days building and placing furniture, artwork, and appliances in their houses like some kind of dystopian Martha Stewart. To my knowledge, these details didn’t affect gameplay, but if I was rebuilding the world I was determined to do it the right way, without any of the old world’s unfair class structures and inequality.

There was a whole game waiting for me beyond my barbed wire fences – miles upon miles of map to explore, hundreds of characters to meet, quests to finish, loot to find, enemies to vanquish. Those were the reasons I’d waited in line outside of a Best Buy to get the game. But over 30 hours in, the call of adventure was taking a backseat to the Jonestown-style socialist agrarian collective I’d built, where peasant farmers lived in mansions filled with free goodies. 

I more or less lived in Fallout 4 for a straight week, spending every spare waking minute scrapping, scavenging, and building to create my little utopia. As the week went on, my room began to look more and more apocalyptic – the floor strewn with empty water bottles, clean and dirty laundry spread across every flat surface, unopened mail stacked on my desk.

It occurred to me that I had become a milquetoast version of my character in Fallout 4: A generic white guy with brown hair, badly in need of a shower, slowly but surely blocking out the world by surrounding himself with garbage.

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life? All I knew was that my character in the game was doing a lot better than I was. Sure, everyone he'd ever known was dead and he was living in the shattered remains of a once-great civilization – but at least he was outside, getting exercise and making friends.

Sack Up, America

If you, like around 30 governors and every Republican running for president, think the United States shouldn’t take in Syrian refugees in the wake of the tragedy in Paris, I’ve got a recommendation for you: Get up and go to your closet. Rummage through it until you find your Big Boy Pants (or Big Girl Pants). Then, put your Big Boy/Girl Pants on, one leg at a time, and ask yourself again whether you’re so scared of ISIS that you think we shouldn’t even try to find 10,000 innocent people who want to escape from hell on Earth.

You remember that huge national security apparatus we set up after 9/11 to prevent future terrorist attacks? That’s still there. We’re still paying for it. It still spies on us. So, I mean, we might as well use it, right? We already decided we were willing to sacrifice civil liberties for more safety – so why can’t we feel safe accepting a small number of people who just want to come here to share our reduced civil liberties in peace?

The vast, vast majority of Syrian refugees are innocent people who would just prefer not to live in a warzone or refugee camp. Lots of them still get filtered out by the United States’ extremely thorough security screening, which can take two years or more. ISIS is going to try and sneak people in, if they haven’t already, and one of several well-funded federal agencies tasked with preventing terrorist attacks will screen them out. 

And yeah, there’s a small chance that one or two will slip through and hurt people. That’s a calculated risk we’re taking. It’s the same calculated risk we took with the 85,000 Iraqi refugees we’ve resettled here since 2007 – none of whom have attacked us. It's a calculated risk we took with the million or so Indochinese refugees we accepted after the Vietnam War, none of whom have attacked us. 

Right now a lot of presidential candidates talking up their macho, decisive leadership abilities and Christian bona fides want the world's richest and most powerful nation to turn its back on thousands of people who are clearly innocent because a couple of them could hypothetically be terrorist agents. I just wish the GOP had been this cautious and risk-averse in the early 2000s, back when it was repealing Wall Street regulations and charging off into the Middle Eastern war that started all this.

Despite what Marco Rubio might tell you, ISIS and Western Civilization aren’t locked in some sort of epic battle. Western Civilization already won long ago. Beheadings and terrorist attacks are awful and frightening, but by and large they’re not making people in the US and Europe think twice about the legitimacy of democracy, technology, or women’s rights. The people who do wind up leaving Western Civilization to live in a medieval terrorist dystopia aren’t our best and brightest.

That’s not to say ISIS isn’t dangerous, because they obviously are. But the simple fact is that as soon as a major power actually sends a full professional army to fight ISIS on the ground, ISIS is toast. The main reason that hasn’t happened yet is because invading and occupying territory really sucks and nobody wants to do it. Sooner or later, though, enough terrorist attacks will make it politically expedient for some regional coalition to go in and clean this mess up. It’s just a matter of time.

Western Civilization is going to outlive ISIS. I’d wager that The Simpsons is going to outlive ISIS, too. The scary thing is that millions and millions of people have been displaced trying to get away from ISIS, and it’s not going to be safe for them to go home anytime soon. They’ve got no work, no money, they’re living on the streets or in camps, their kids are traumatized and not getting an education. If the US and Europe turn their back on millions of displaced people who need help, those people will:

A) Stay displaced, and

B) Probably bear a grudge for our refusal to help, which will make them a lot more likely to

C) Join whatever new and infinitely scarier terrorist group the survivors of ISIS start in the future.

So if doing the right thing isn't a good enough reason to help Syrian refugees, can't we at least help them because it's the smart, proactive thing to do? 

It’s easy to forget that before 2011, Syria was a stable, urbanized, cultured, relatively normal country. Sure, the president was an awful dictator who threw dissenters in jail and tortured them, but people who kept their heads down in many cases lived lives pretty similar to our own: They went to college, lived in apartments, worked in offices, watched TV, hung out with friends, and took shitty phone videos at Gorillaz concerts:

That video was taken in Damascus in 2010. This is Damascus earlier this year:

Think about your past five years. Think about what it would’ve been like if in that time your home had been destroyed, your friends and family injured and killed, if you’d had to put all of your plans and ambitions on hold to flee for your life. Wouldn’t you want someone to step up to the plate and offer you a safe place to flee to? 

I would. But since I'm fortunate enough to not be in that position, I just want my country to do something I can really be proud of for once. 

Let The Mystery Be

I’ve found that when it comes to HBO’s The Leftovers, there’s really no middle ground. When I talk to somebody who’s seen the show, bringing it up always generates one of two passionate responses: That show is brilliant – why don’t more people watch it!? or That show is a dump truck full of anteater shit – why does anybody watch it!? I’m firmly in the “it’s brilliant” camp, but I can see how people could hate the show. It’s extremely depressing, even by HBO standards, the first season had some weaknesses, and it can be hard to put your finger on who or what exactly the show is about from one week to the next. But if that doesn’t bother you, The Leftovers is easily one of the best things on TV right now – but to appreciate it, you have to make peace with the fact that this show is going to ask more questions than it answers.

The Leftovers is set three years after 140 million people – two percent of the world’s population – inexplicably vanish without a trace, never to be seen again, in an event that comes to be known as the Sudden Departure. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to who disappears and who’s left behind. Men, women, and children of all religious faiths from all over the world are among the departed. So are the Pope, Condoleezza Rice, Anthony Bourdain, and the entire cast of the ‘80s sitcom Perfect Strangers (sans Mark Linn-Baker, who has only faked his disappearance in order to start a new life in Mexico.)

If you need to know why these people disappeared and where they went, The Leftovers is going to piss you off. This isn’t one of those mystery-type shows where the protagonists walk around in dark rooms with flashlights discovering clues and learning about ancient prophecies until they dramatically uncover The Truth. On The Leftovers, all the main characters have long since given up on trying to figure out what happened. There’s hints in the background that some people are still on the case – researchers, the government, assorted cults and nutjobs – but none of them seem to be making any breakthroughs, and even if they were, that’s not the story this show is interested in telling.  

Instead of chasing answers, the characters we follow on The Leftovers spend their time engaging in a variety of really unhealthy coping mechanisms to try and process the fact that they’ve been left out what appears to be a bonafide act of God. Suburban police chief Kevin Garvey sleepwalks and shoots feral dogs late at night with a stranger who may or may not be a hallucination. His wife has left him to join a cult of mute, chainsmoking nihilists dressed in white, whose only purpose seems to be sabotaging the community’s attempts at healing and closure. Over the course of the first season, Garvey grows close to Nora Durst, a widow who still buys breakfast cereal for her departed husband and children and occasionally hires prostitutes to come over and shoot her while she wears a Kevlar vest.

For my money, this freakshow of human emotion is a lot more interesting than the mystery that touched it all off. Besides, it’s not like we’re lacking for shows where mysteries get solved over time – for that you’ve got The Blacklist, or Scandal, or Homeland. The Leftovers is about grieving people spinning out of control, and while it’s not necessarily lighthearted entertainment, it makes for gripping and relatable drama.

The worst moments of the first season were when The Leftovers flirted with telling a big story that answered questions. The first half of season 1 was dragged down by a tired plotline about Garvey’s estranged son and a charismatic cult leader he’d fallen in with, all of it heavy on prophecy, faith, and Lost-type bullshit. The best episodes were the ones that sidelined the principal cast and dug deep into the lives and struggles of other townsfolk who until that point had looked like bit players – particularly the local reverend, who in the course of one brilliant episode goes from a wild-eyed Bible-thumping dickhead to one of the show’s most tragic figures. Episodes like that one kept me onboard with the show when it was getting insufferable. To showrunner Damon Lindeloff’s credit, he appears to have realized that The Leftovers is at its best when it’s gradually fleshing out its eccentric, wounded characters and the connections between them, like A Prairie Home Companion but with more abject despair. 

The second season of The Leftovers has done an admirable job of correcting for the unevenness of the first. The show’s strongest and most compelling characters have picked up and moved from upstate New York to the small town of Jarden, Texas, which has become something of a metaphysical tourist attraction by virtue of being the only town on Earth where not a single resident vanished in the Departure. There’s new mysteries in Jarden, a more focused story, and also black people, who were largely absent from the first season. (The opening credits are better now, too.)

As I write this we’re halfway through the second season, and every episode has been firing on all cylinders. If you gave up on The Leftovers last year, now would be a good time to try and get back on board, because I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it’s on track to become one of those shows that everybody talks about. Give it a second chance and you can expect to see several Emmy-worthy performances, atmospheric directing, and some excellent writing that finds a lot of room for idiosyncratic humor between all the depressing stuff (a landlord, on why people can’t stay the night in one of his commercial properties: “The bathrooms, they’re set up to handle day poops. Not night poops.”)

About the only thing you shouldn’t expect from this season of The Leftovers are answers. But that’s okay. The Leftovers is a show about questions – answering them would be like Walter White going back to teaching chemistry.