Staying out of the Comment Section

Why I’m researching Squirrel Daddy’s bulge this morning

2016

The warehouse smells like dirt. The tents, coolers, tables and cutting boards are on rows of shelves in my concrete and fluorescent box before they are dispatched to every corner of California. I’m almost always alone in the space, repairing equipment, pretending I know how to use a power tool, ordering new regulators for propane stoves. I manage the camping gear for an outdoor education company that services the most elite schools in the state. I make sure kids get hot eggs in national parks.

The first thing I do after the steel door slams shut is go to the stereo and plug in my iphone. I put on Jenny Lewis’s, “Bad Man’s World.”

We thought we were going to watch the first female get elected to the presidency last night. My boyfriend is smart. He never talks about Hillary Clinton being shrill. When it became clear that we weren’t going to celebrate her victory, I started to resent him. I just wanted him to take his testosterone home, so me and my ovaries could wallow alone. It feels like someone died, or at least my approximation of what it would feel like for someone to die. I don’t know real grief yet.

I spend the next four years in my phone, watching for every tweet that Donald Trump puts out. Hanging on his every word, ready to be incensed. It’s exhausting, but I don’t really have to explain it. You were there.

2024

On election day, I read this New York Times article about how an Instagram-famous squirrel named P’Nut was removed from the home because squirrels are not allowed to live like domestic pets. During the removal, it bit someone and then had to be euthanized to test for rabies. P’Nut is now being used as a republican party token victim for what government overreach looks like. The thing that struck me most was what Mark Longo, the squirrel‘s human keeper, said about Donald Trump standing up for his right to have a squirrel. He said he’s not political at all, doesn’t have an opinion on politics and is just glad someone is standing up for P’Nut.

I imagine the freedom of not being political at all, just taking care of squirrels and raccoons like a modern day Cinderella, telling the New York Times you basically don’t even know who Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are. What freedom, but also you can pretend the government doesn’t exist right up until the day they come in and remove a family member, furry or otherwise.

Mark Longo has an Onlyfans account where he shares porn, but I try to find it and the first thing that comes up is this other guy’s Reddit post stating his disappointment that he paid to see Squirrel Daddy’s Onlyfans account, and then found out Squirrel Daddy wasn’t gay and that while he had a nice bulge, he only put it in women and didn’t bottom.

I didn’t pay much attention in this election cycle. There was a brief period of excitement when it was announced that Kamala would replace Biden as the democratic candidate. But when I finally saw a clip of her response to questions about Palestine, and she repeated the tired line about Israel’s “right to defend itself,” all the hope I had vanished. It feels like neither party is interested in putting a halt to the genocide, so it goes.

This is what I want to do when I hear the rallying cries of people who are gearing up for the next iteration of what America is about to be. Speaking of who we are going to fight and what are the next steps and for most of us. It amounts to reading words and watching videos on a screen and raising our cortisol levels for what? We stared at our phones for years and nothing changed or everything changed. I don’t know. I just know that it was dramatic when I wore black from head to toe and played Jenny Lewis because I thought ‘we are all going to be in Handmaid’s Tale.’

I suggest to my daughter that we just become MAGA, so that we can celebrate the win today. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point on the way to this moment, I stopped being incensed at “the other side.” It wasn’t because I became educated about their reasons or started having conversations seeking common ground. It’s because I didn’t have the bandwidth to be mad at everything that could piss me off. I just want to live my life and not think about any of the bullshit in D.C., and maybe that means they’ll come in and kill my family, but I don’t care. There’s something distasteful about the way that even people I agree with talk about political opponents. Everyone reduces the other to the enemy. We are the good guys. They are the bad guys. Tale as old as time.

As she walks by, I tell Karli, “I support President Trump,” and we both laugh.

Writers are supposed to have something to say, or are they? Perhaps I should have given myself a break and written nothing this week. Sometimes it feels like we are the most pretentious group of people on the planet. Pretending anything that we say will make a difference. I feel like this post is going to cause a lot of people to unsubscribe, and if it’s not the words I’ve written, it’s the terrible drawing of P’Nut down there. Anyways, It’s just another day, and there will be many days that follow it and some people will die and some people will live. People will talk about leaving the country. People will talk about buying guns. People will take guns to schools and other public places and shoot other people. Azula the cat will play with her possum friends in the backyard, but there will be no video of that because I don’t know if it’s legal for cats and possums to be friends.