The New York Weekend That Never Stopped Giving Us Noogies

Posted on September 16th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

So did I ever tell you guys about the great four days in New York I had, a bunch of years back?

We were headed in for a convention, one we only planned to attend on Saturday. The rest was being designated for family and friends.

We landed at LaGuardia and took a cab into Manhattan. On our way in our cab is slammed by a truck. Nobody’s hurt, but the cab is dented badly, and so there’s an interval during which cabbie and truck driver are out in the street sharing information and yelling at one another. Half an hour of that.

From our room, actually a fourth floor walk-up apartment, we make plans to meet a friend at someplace Judi’s never been, the Museum of Natural History. We take the subway. The car stops in the tunnel. Turns out that there’s a fire up ahead. After about twenty minutes of not moving the announcement comes on, that we are reversing course and being let out at a prior station. So we get up to the street and take a cab.

Later that evening, after a brilliant Broadway show, THE PILLOWMAN by Martin McDonough, we emerge from the theatre to find torrential rain. Not just rain, torrential rain. We are two blocks away, a distance too short to cab. By the time we get to the walk-up, we are drenched, positively drenched; our shoes are squishing, our clothing is clinging to our skins like moistened Saran-Wrap. We trudge up four stories and find that the apartment is frigid; we have not turned on the heat. It takes another twenty minutes of teeth-chattering misery before we are comfortable.

Next morning. Friday. Our single night’s stay is over and we have to wrestle our luggage down the narrow flight of stairs. I precede Judi, and lose my balance at the top of one flight, tumbling down, rebounding from one wall to the other as I go head over heels down the narrow steps. At the bottom, I slam face-first into the glass door to the street. I fortunately do not break the glass. I just smash my face against it. Miraculously, I am unhurt. Alas, the brand new rolling luggage that went with me is damaged beyond repair.

We visit my sister in Pound Ridge. At the time, she has miniature horses. We go outside and feed them baby carrots. One of them mistakes Judi’s finger for one of those carrots, and bites down hard, drawing blood. It is a pain that lingers the rest of the day.

Skipping Saturday, we move on to Sunday, when we are scheduled to fly back first thing in the morning. We call a cab, which drops an axle just as it is heading into LaGuardia. Another cab has to be called to take us the last few hundred yards.

Reaching the terminal just in time for what is supposed to be our flight, we find out the airline has delayed our flight home for, twelve hours. Twelve hours. And, just to spread the joy, just to spread the joy, the air conditioning in the terminal is broken. We spend those twelve hours in stifling heat, waiting for our plane, and do not get back home until well, well after midnight. Judi’s plan to be well rested when she goes to work the next morning is well and truly stymied.

What a weekend.

Oh, yes, that’s right. I skipped Saturday. What happened on Saturday?

Saturday is the day we got stuck in a crowded elevator with Harlan Ellison.

Tags: True Stories | Category True Stories

Another Way of Measuring Donald Trump’s Butthole Quotient

Posted on September 14th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

In life, if people criticize you, you are allowed to respond, sometimes acerbically.

If in those responses you consistently seek to completely marginalize the source, always, then you are a total asshole.

I’m not saying that you can never say, “so-and-so is always full of shit,” because sometimes it’s true.

I’m saying that this is your go-to-response whenever anybody has anything bad to say about you, always, the problem is you.

As it happens, this is Donald Trump’s go-to behavior.

Let us say that a given comedian makes a Donald Trump crack. Trump’s response is consistently that the comedian is not funny, has never been funny, that everybody knows he’s not funny, that his career is on the rocks, and that he’s a total loser.

Let us say that a given newspaper has something bad to say about him. Donald Trump’s response is that the newspaper is the worst newspaper in the history of journalism, that it’ll be out of business in a year, and that everybody involved with reporting for it is a total loser.

He often follows the rule of three in these pronouncements; i.e., the source of the complaint needs to be dismissed in three ways, as when Garry Trudeau was making fun of him and Trump declared that Doonesbury wasn’t funny, that he never understood what Garry Trudeau was going on about, and that only phonies pretended otherwise. Three things.

Sometimes the third thing is tangential. If some woman has something bad to say about Trump, Trump must say that she’s crazy, that she’s a loser, and third that she’s fat. Put the sexism aside, and note that while being crazy and being a loser are things that impact your plausibility as a pundit, at least if you’re not a Republican, being fat does not.

Another thing Trump always says is, “Everybody knows it,” after making such pronouncements with premises that originated with him. To wit: let us say that THE WASHINGTON POST fact-checks him. Trump will bloviate that THE WASHINGTON POST is a paper that hasn’t gotten the facts right in fifty years, that it does nothing but lie, and “everybody knows it.” He is fond of saying this about expert testimony. The drought in California is just the fiction of alarmists seeking to destroy the state out of sheer meanness, and “everybody knows it.” No, it’s shit you just made up off the top of your knob, just now.

I have a friend, a well-known writer, and you can probably guess who, who is known for his cantankerous behavior and sometimes fiery temper. You know what he said when a certain other well-known writer declared that she didn’t like him, citing his manner? He acknowledged that his manner is what it is, regretted that such a talented person was not going to be his friend, and shrugged. “Not everybody’s going to like me.” Were he like Trump, he would have said, “She’s a terrible writer anyway. Everybody hates her books. Her career’s in ruins, and everybody knows it. Besides, she’s fat.” This would, however, be a totally clueless and classless thing to do, as well as megalomaniacal, and he is none of the above, not at least in that particular way. Trump, however, has this thing going on where anybody who has anything bad to say about him must be a “total loser” on the brink of total ruin, and that “everybody knows it.”

It’s as if he cannot get through his day without forging a fresh reality for every slight.

And seriously, that is the act of a loser.

As I still firmly believe we’re going to see confirmed.

Tags: Assholes, Donald Trump, Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau, Republicans | Category Commentary, Politics

A Wobbly Hillary is Better than Trump On the Super-Soldier Serum

Posted on September 12th, 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro

So Hillary Clinton suffered a bout of pneumonia on the campaign trail.

This happens.

As has been pointed out, Jimmy Carter got so sick during his own run for the Presidency, during a schedule of almost non-stop handshaking, hustling to keep schedules, long speeches, airplane travel, and kissing those virus incubators known as babies, that at one point he had to clear the books and take a few days off. It is indeed a wonder that more Presidential candidates are not nonstop nose-dropping bronchially-hacking red-eyed portraits of misery, non-stop.

But let us assume for the sake that the a-ha conspiracy theories of Donald Trump’s apologists are correct, and that Hillary Clinton is showing her age, a little bit; that she has some medical woes that she is not telling us.

Let me tell you what I think about that.

According to some medical experts, Abraham Lincoln was, literally, a dying man. We know for a fact that he was a depressive, that he suffered migraines that laid him up for days at a time. If what some suspect about his medical condition is true, then John Wilkes Booth merely accelerated the inevitable. He might have been dead in a couple of years at most.

And yet, was he, or was he not, the man we needed, at that particular historical moment?

John F. Kennedy was ill from a chronic and degenerative condition, Addison’s disease. The reason he didn’t duck when Oswald’s first bullet struck him, was that he was rigidly upright thanks to a back brace. You could actually argue, because of that, that his condition was a contributing factor in his death.

Richard M. Nixon suffered a number of serious health scares in his time in the White House and, though I don’t approve of what he actually did with his power, even his harshest critics would have trouble claiming that his physical problems prevented from being a policy wonk, a driven detail man.

Franklin Roosevelt was, literally, an invalid.

When you vote for the President of the United States, you are not buying an athlete. You don’t want him, or her, to be able to get in the ring with Vladimir Putin and, literally, beat him up, like some kind of gladiator. You want him, or her, to show his strength while sitting down, to show his, or her, iron will with the stroke of a pen, to demonstrate vitality with ideas, not sinews.

And so we arrive at this.

Let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that between now and election day, two things happened.

Let us pretend that, first, Hillary Clinton broke a hip. Let us pretend that for medical-doubletalk reasons it could not be healed or replaced, and that as a result she would have to spend her still-hypothetical Presidency in a wheelchair. Let us further pretend that at the same time Donald Trump finagled himself a dose of the super-soldier syndrome that in Marvel Comics lore turned scrawny but scrappy Steve Rogers into that paragon of physical excellence Captain America, and that his rallies from this point to election day included demonstrations of his ability to better all Olympic records while fighting crime. Let us assume that he could jump straight up and enter buildings from their third-floor windows, and that at one point he defeated a heavily-armed North Korean assassination squad of twenty men by beating the living crap out of them. Okay? Let us assume that. Make him a goddamned superhero, okay?

In such an event, Hillary Clinton would still be more fit for the Presidency than this jackass who doesn’t read books, who thinks he knows more than the Generals, whose business model is not paying his bills, who has defrauded many thousands with enterprises like his bullshit University, who is currently being investigated for bribery and rape and a host of other crimes, and whose strategy is stone ignorance.

I will take a wobbly Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump after a bite from a radioactive spider.

Period.

In all important ways, Trump is as infirm as a paper cup in a gale.

Tags: Captain America, comic books, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, John F. Kennedy, Politics, Republicans, Richard M. Nixon | Category Politics