Serenity now
Bugged by Trump stuff? Serenity now, serenity now.
Jeffrey Denny
A slick-haired driver in a $93,000 Land Rover SUV cuts you off on the highway, forcing you in your 1997 Toyota Prius with 137,000 miles worth $27 on trade-in to apply your sudden European road-rally driving skills to avoid scratching his expensive car, killing other drivers, and causing an epic traffic tie-up. Then he flips you off.
Serenity now.
The sole checkout clerk at the CVS ignores the customer line snaking around the block and up the street forever because he needs to restock the chewing gum selections since the Dentyne Ice Arctic Chill is running low.
But you really, really, really need the diarrhea medicine you came in for and are hiding the cheap CVS brand you selected so others in line can’t see. Even though everyone else in a drugstore line probably has problems down there or in other unmentionable places sometimes or all the time.
Serenity now.
A colleague or client ignores your time-sensitive email requests for immediate action on an urgent deadline project you’re extremely on the hook for immediately and you’re stressing even more because the company is “right-sizing” and “pursuing optimal efficiencies”.
After a few days, he sends back a non-responsive response at 2 am on a Sunday morning, timed to appear that he is diligently responsive even on nights and weekends. His email starts with, “Sorry, I have three little kids and think I’m coming down with something[smiley].”
Serenity now.
A highly recommended, specialized and costly contractor installs your new, high-tech, environmentally-respectful tank-less heating and hot water system that’s never ever worked (i.e., the house, water and partner are always cold).
When you call 37 times over several weeks for help you hear nothing. Then you lose toes from frostbite. Eventually you learn the installing contractor went out of business for failure to know anything about the equipment it sold you and installed.
Other contractors who come in for more money and make you take two days off work to wait for them while you send non-responsive emails to colleagues don’t understand the system or what the installer did.
“It’s gonna be around fifteen hundred,” the repairman says. Whatever the problem is — home, health, dental work, car, a year of unemployment checks — it’s always “around fifteen hundred”.
Serenity now.
AOL, to which you’ve remained inexplicably loyal for 20 years ever since you almost peed yourself with thrill to get that 3.5” floppy disk in the mail promising to connect you to the global interweb, even though oh so avant-gardiste and ultramoderne Gmail users pity-snort at you for still using, suddenly and inexplicably goes down indefinitely for no reason or explanation, cutting off access to urgent work email and annoying spam email that reflects recent online searches.
Even though AOL, now owned by Verizon as is Yahoo, has more money than, um, [insert hilariously trenchant and knowing reference to someone like Elon Musk in the news who has many monies].
Serenity now.
The farm-fresh, organic, free-range, sensitively-raised chicken breast from Kroger’s, Publix, Costco, Walmart or wherever exactly the same cold dead chicken parts are sold under different names and claims for freshness smells and tastes hauntingly like the dumpster behind a CVS Minute Clinic that specializes in walk-in colonoscopy and other gastroenterology services. Which makes the chicken seem inedible unless you enjoy dysentery and standing in a long line at the CVS for its cheaper knock-off Imodium.
Serenity now.
The weather, whenever, whatever, ruins everything you want to do.
Serenity now.
#AlwaysTrump defends Trump always, no matter what, and parrots what Fox and other alt-right “expert commentators” give #AlwaysTrump to parrot.
Many apologies to parrots, which are pretty smart but ultimately just innocent birds with bird brains. But the #AlwaysTrump crowd declaims with high dudgeon, the passion of the uninformed, and received expertise and wisdom on policy and legal issues, including immigration, as if they are Constitutional scholars or other legal experts.
The Trumpsters declare on legal immigration issues even if they have never studied law, passed a bar exam, or even understand that due process, what makes America great, means not calling people “criminals” when we’re all innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. All to defend ripping kids from parents.
Serenity now.
But as Seinfeld Season 9, Episode 3 warned, perhaps insanity later?
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer
