No matter how many times I attempt to bend my brain around it, I cannot for the life of me comprehend why those of us on the left feel compelled to vehemently attack each other over which candidate is the most perfect ever when what we’re fighting is a steaming pile of kleptocratic dog shit hellbent on deconstructing democracy.

Can dog shit deconstruct democracy?

Clearly, yes.

We are fighting against the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States but sure, let’s definitely bring up that one thing Dem candidate #267 (that’s how many there are, correct?) did in 1974 that was super un-woke and really pissed you off.

I don’t mean balanced analysis. I love that shit. I’m talking about the diehard shit-slinging based on…what? Something. Personal preference. Every one of our candidates is flawed, and every one is better than Trump.

Every single fucking one of them is better than that guy, so yay us we don’t have to hate anybody for liking a candidate we don’t like. We don’t have to freak out and attack each other.

This should be the most chill primary season ever.

We should just hang out and vote for whichever live body presents itself as the Dem candidate in the general. In the primaries, VOTE FOR WHOEVER THE FUCK YOU FUCKING WANT.

There is nowhere to go but up.

We are at the bottom. So, what are we fighting about again?

Here are my questions for a Dem candidate:

• Do they refer to NBC, CNN, The New York Times and all other media that dares critique the GOP as “the enemy of the people?”
• How do they feel about random pussy-grabbing?
• Speaking of which, do they believe it’s a “very dangerous time to be a man?”
• If they want to critique a political adversary, do they deconstruct that person’s ideas or make up catchy, often racist nicknames like “Crazy Bernie,” “Pocahontas,” “Lyin’ James?”
• Do they view people with opposing views as “adversaries,” or do they see conflict and debate as a cornerstone of a healthy democracy?
• If somebody suggested the government rip babies from their families, cage them, then traffic them into evangelical orphanages somehow connected to Betsy Devos, would they agree or disagree with this plan?
• Do they believe bears wandering onto campuses is a critical problem among schoolchildren or are they more concerned about, say, kids getting murdered in their classrooms?
• By “tax break for the middle class,” do they mean corporations will continue to pay zero taxes, the 1% will pay less, and the middle class will pay more?
• Who does this candidate rely on for intelligence: Rush Limbaugh or, um, United States intelligence agencies?
• In general are they cool with the rule of law?
• On the ever-pressing issue of healthcare, does this candidate believe people should have it or like nah just the rich people?
• Should students spend their entire lives paying off student loans at 7% interest because America can’t afford to provide free education but also Amazon can make $11 billion in profit and pay no taxes?
• HOW DO THEY FEEL ABOUT ALL CAPS TWEETS and the use of stunningly Random Capitalization?
• Authoritarian leaders around the world – e.g. Putin, Jong-Un, Orban – tyrants or mentors?
• Does this candidate refer to Mexican immigrants as “vermin?”
• How about inventing fake national crises?
• If pressed, can the candidate speak in full, coherent sentences?

Do I really need to go on? I feel like I don’t.

Why the fuck are we sitting here shredding people into oblivion for supporting Harris or Sanders or Booker or the goddamn fucking fire hydrant across the street?

The fire hydrant doesn’t grab pussies. It can’t even attempt to sell nuclear arms to Saudis.

Is it cool that my main question for a candidate is: “Are you an entirely trash human?”

Is it cool that the bar has been lowered so far that I’d settle for partially trash human?

No, of course it isn’t cool. Of course we should be enjoying some bullshit rhetoric from multiple candidates on both sides, weighing their arguments and forming decisions while watching staged inflammatory debates of nonsense.

But no, we’ve been robbed of that circus. Instead we are staring down the barrel of four more years with Racist Trash Clown and his Band of Criminals.

So again, I ask you: Who fucking cares.

Let’s be friends. And get the hell outta here together.

NOWHERE. TO. GO. BUT. UP.

****

In my book I am less political but probably equally “offensive.” High five.

Attention every parent with a kid 18 and older: You have a job and if you fuck it up we will further descend into the desolate wasteland we are currently inhabiting. If you love decency, life, freedom, or puppies, you must harangue, bribe, harass and manipulate your offspring into voting on Tuesday.

This is your one job. Other than voting yourself. This is your second job.

I’m assuming your kid is already registered. Obviously.

This isn’t the time for grand principles of “letting kids be themselves” or “learn their own lessons” or “enjoy their youth.” FUCK ALL THAT. This is the time for gathering up the barely grown and bullying them into the voting booth.

It may not be easy. I didn’t vote until I was in my mid-20s. I know, I should die. But Clinton was President and I didn’t think blowjobs were such a big deal (I realize it’s more complex than that but please lower your standards for 19-year-old me), and the greatest human rights violation I witnessed was bars doing last call at 1:15am instead of 1:55am.

I was pretty much useless, and being useless is adorable (it’s not), but I believe that very head-in-sand-privileged-apathy is largely what got us into this festering cavern of bullshit.

Don’t worry, though. I’ve got you. We can make these fuckers vote. Here’s a list of 13 surefire methods.

1. If they’re still in school, take them out on Tuesday. Fuck school. People in power right now want to arm schoolteachers and Head School Woman thinks black bears are a threat to schoolchildren but not the AR-15s shooting them up so seriously WTF matters here? Fuck tests. Fuck worksheets. Vote.
2. Offer to buy them a burrito. Burritos are powerful things. If that doesn’t work, tell them you’ll buy their groceries for a month. And if you can’t afford that shit, buy them 80 Top Ramen, which is like food for a month, I think, when you’re 20.
3. Remind them that this guy is making choices for how the nation is run. Just literally show them this picture and let them decide.
4. Also recap Ted Cruz.  
5. Remind them that there’s a large conglomerate of humans – aka old white dudes with sour mouths and vacant eyes – who wants to whittle away Roe v Wade until we won’t have safe access to abortion. What’s that? You don’t like hearing about your kid having sex? CLUTCH YOUR FUCKIN PEARLS AND DEAL WITH IT.
6. Straight pay them. Just write a fuckin check in exchange for that voting receipt. Who cares about your money? Money will be useless when we all fall into the ocean because of climate change.
7. Lie, and hope you don’t get caught: Tell them the government wants to shut down Snapchat & Instagram after cancelling Beyonce, Drake, and Kendrik Lamar. Do kids even listen to that? Where am I. Whatever. Tell them the GOP wants to destroy everything they love.
8. Show them your student loan bill. Blow that shit up, make it into a duvet cover, and stick in on their bed.
9. Read to them how healthcare works in sane nations and how the average American lifespan is decreasing annually and the years we do live are less happy than in other countries. ASK YOUR CHILD IF SHE LIKES HAPPINESS AND BEING ALIVE GODDAMNIT MOTHERFUCKERS FUCKING VOTE.
10. Threaten to boycott them over the holidays. That’s right. No Aunt June pumpkin pie. No grandpa’s turkey. NOT ONE HOLIDAY GIFT UNTIL YOU VOTE, ASSHOLE. If your kid hates family holidays, maybe avoid this one. Also maybe don’t call your kid “asshole.”
11. The weed angle, people, the weed angle (legalization, not so much D.A.R.E.).
12. Buy them a car or small boat or just promise to do so after you see the midterm and 2020 voting receipt.
13. Remind them that the torch-bearing neo-Nazis are definitely voting, and those pieces of dog shit are implicitly, (increasingly explicitly), supported by our pussy-grabbing, constantly lying president, and the GOP in power is a sad gaggle of spineless sycophants, and the voter suppression and gerrymandering is so extreme and favoring the GOP so significantly that the only fucking chance we have to survive catastrophic dumpster fire fizzled-out democracy is to turn out in MOTHERFUCKING DROVES TO VOTE, so yes, kid, I get your apathy, and I remember being young enough to see apathy as an option, but that ship has sailed, and the entire goddamn nation is relying on you to save it so fuck your plans on November 6 and by the way here’s a burrito.

This morning my four-year-old son, Arlo, woke up on the other side of our king bed, pushed himself up onto his hands, looked over at me and yawned.

“Morning,” I said.

He gave me a big closed-mouth smile beneath wild blonde curls and scooted against me, as he always does, resting his head against my bare chest.

He slept in our bed until he was three or so. Now he sleeps in another room but invariably toddles in to join us around 3 or 4am. Somehow, I always know he’s coming. Do I hear his footsteps? I wake to watch him wander in the door, and I scoop him up and flip him into our bed, between my husband and me, where we all fall back to sleep.

This morning, he had a question. “Mama, why do you smell so good?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your body. It smells so good. Why do you smell like that? The whole house smells like you, it smells so good. Why does your body smell like that?”

He looked at me with real curiosity, evidently wanting a real answer. I told him I didn’t know, and kissed his head, and thought how sweet that is, a little guy wondering about the elusive smell of the mother – her skin, her sweat, her soap, her shampoo, her odor foul and beautiful.

Who knows what it is, really?

I remember my mother’s smell. I remember the feeling of being against her skin, her arm, the softness and warmth of her body. I remember it felt like home. Like everything would be fine as long as I could inhale that scent, the scent of something I knew like air, though couldn’t define or grasp.

It’s just the way we need our mothers, I suppose. The good ones, at least. The ones who mean all those things.

As a kid, I was preoccupied with the idea of my mother dying. Of her leaving and never returning. I wrote about it in my book. I would sit for hours on the couch, or what felt like hours, rocking and listening to “M.A.S.H” (her favorite show), willing her to not be dead, imagining what I would do if she were. I would work myself into a near frantic fury, sometimes crying, praying, begging God to let her come back, and in my little brain it was so real, the abandonment.

If she wasn’t in the room, she might as well be dead.

Eventually I would hear the garage door go up. I would hear her rustling on the porch.

Alive. Home.

She’d let me crawl into bed with her. I’d fold against her. Her smell.

Oh, the mother. She’s back.

My son asked me about that today, and it made me think of the children separated from their mothers at our borders, of the visceral, physical pain of a child yearning for her mother, of the actual blood craving a reconnection to all that she knows of home.

In this case, quite literally.

I wonder how you teach somebody to give a shit about that. To not care if the mother is a “criminal” who wandered across arbitrary national lines – although most of them are “guilty” of misdemeanors – to not care if she “shouldn’t” have done that thing, because we are talking about families.

We are talking about a child.

How do you teach somebody to feel the agony of a child aching for his mother’s skin? Her smell. The only one in the world.

The only one in the whole fucking world.

My mother always came back to me. Over time, I knew she would, and I could tell myself “She’ll come back.” But it didn’t help.

The yearning of a child isn’t rational. It isn’t reasonable and it isn’t intellectual. It is a yearning in the bones, in the blood, in the same blood that raced through the body we shared.

In our womb. In our waters.

I think of those children in beds alone, with no idea where their mother is in that very moment. A phone call or two. A few moments on video. But at night, in the dark, where is she?

Her actual body.

Why do you smell so good?

Because I am yours, son. Because we shared a body once, and when you’re young, it is still somehow ours – and for a long, long time, my body is, for you, that old, sacred home, the one we know in our blood but not our brains, that has no right to be tampered with, because it is our tiny shelter in a giant, unforgiving univers. For those few moments, I am all you have.

I don’t know how to make somebody care about that. Perhaps they forgot their own humanity, their own love and blood.

The smell of home doesn’t give a shit about borders. We deny a child that for political gain. To teach them a lesson. And these people do it in God’s name? The Bible?

How strange these people are, picking and choosing the book’s teachings. Baldwin calls this hypocrisy “self-serving moral cowardice.” Have you ever heard it stated more perfectly?

Because immigrants have “broken the law” (and this, you know, is up for debate), they deserve torture? Their children deserve torture?

Self-serving moral cowardice.

Well damn, I guess I should thank God I had the dumb luck to be birthed me in a nation where we could live safely, not forced to a border to survive. How noble of me!

And you apologists: Thank God you were born in a nation where you don’t understand fleeing your home with nothing but your body, and your baby, who wails for nothing but your sweet sweat. Now, “home.”

I can’t make you see a world you’ve forgotten. But how cold it must be where you live.

***

Every time I write about this country, if feels obscenely small and self-serving to share my book, and yet, well, I am trying to feed my family, and this is my contribution to the world right now.

Some words. Some truth. I hope it helps some people. We have to remember our creative work matters, maybe now more than ever?

So I’ll keep telling you about it, and this week, I had the nice surprise to learn that Amazon editors chose I’m Just Happy to Be Here as a “Best Book of 2018 So Far” in the

– wait for it –

HUMOR category (?).

Who knew Amazon editors had such a jacked up sense of humor? (This is not an insult.)

Anyway, that made me particularly delighted, because we talk a lot about the seriousness, and not much about the parts where I, at least, laughed my ass off writing it. Nice to see that aspect of it highlighted.

Thank you, Amazon editorial staff.