THE MORNING AFTER

Can you remember a time in your life when you were so blue you couldn’t pep-talk your way out of the mood, couldn’t convince yourself that everyone is fired at least once in a lifetime, couldn’t erase the image of your lover and best friend doing it doggie style when the elevator door opened, a time when the only plausible exit from your personal hell was to tie one on?

Maybe you lined up shots at a bar. Got shit-faced on medical marijuana. Dropped some X. Whatever. All you knew was that, as the evening unfolded, your life, on this planet, in this universe, began to look and feel and taste and smell and sound… fabulous. That stubble on the bartender’s chin was amazingly sexy… and her jewelry was to die for. The dealer who delivered your drugs was a mathematical genius… no one had ever explained the theory of relativity to you so clearly, and while hand- drumming the theme to Jaws on your coffee table, too. The stranger you met halfway through the night was the soul-mate you’d been searching for since middle school, with a noble brow, charmingly receding chin, and one or two cold sores that you could easily kiss around, if only you could remember where you saw them.

Finally, having accomplished your goal of forgetting your troubles, your brain synapses wasted from transmitting all those pleasure signals, your higher cognitive functions exhausted from all that suspension of disbelief, you found somebody’s bed and crashed in it.

And then. A drum roll. A cymbal clash. The next morning in present time. You wake up.

There, tangled in the sheets with you, is your Grandpa and the high school counselor who suspended you for smoking in the restroom. They are naked.

Get used to this level of oh-shit remorse. After the intoxicating confetti of the GOP convention has been brushed out of your hair and off the air waves, after the euphemisms about everyone joining hands and closing ranks and fighting the enemy have stopped echoing, after the communal tears over sad stories about POW camps and the crash of ‘29 and the Bubonic Plague caused by Bill Clinton have dried, we are going to ask questions. Like:

Huh?

What about health care, kindly white-haired gentleman?

Ma'am? You know all that oil and gas you say is in Alsaka? Didn’t we used to have oil and gas in Texas? Didn’t it eventually dry up? Yes, Ma'am. I’m sorry, I know I have a bad habit of thinking instead of praising the Lord. By the way, what’s that shade of lipstick you’re wearing? Pit Bull by Estee Lauder? Yes, Ma'am, I know I shouldn’t try to lure boys, and it’s my own fault if I get pregnant, and I will go to hell if I don’t stop using my Sonicare to masturbate. Uh, Ma'am? How did you know about that?

Kindly white-haired gentleman, do you promise on a stack of bibles that Dick Cheney will move out of his secret bunker in the White House basement after the election? Oh… as soon as his gun collection is crated up? I guess that’ll be OK, then…

And one more thing, Sir… what should I do about this pink slip I got yesterday? Move to India? Jeez, I am so dumb… if I were prouder of America, I might have thought of that myself.

Are you laughing yet? You shouldn’t be. The GOP has just side-stepped eight of the most dismal years in American history with a glib, rosy, untrue depiction of how it will change America with no plan, no hindsight, no foresight, and no insight.

How will you feel when you wake up the morning after our upcoming election?

Don’t count on undoing a polling-place mistake with a Morning-After pill.