A friend asked me if she’d been missing my posts.
“No,” I said. “I just haven’t been writing any.” I laughed and told her it’s hard to write funny blogs when the world is distinctively not funny right now. I’m suffering a low level disappointment in humanity. Not quite a depression, just, a hair under that. It is exasperated by the daily source of horribleness, it just keeps coming, you know? It’s as if the news is a bowl of steaming crap, and someone has turned a fan on it, and it’s filling the air everywhere I go. It’s sticking to me, to everything. The fan is set on high, on oscillate. But here goes.
IF I WERE TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
First I’d need to acquire a ton of money. I might need to step on the backs of small business’ and not pay them in order to succeed. And if my many business’ fail, I can just write them off, claim bankruptcy, yadda-yadda, keep moving upwards and onwards until I know all the people who own fancy yachts and hotels and business’. I will appoint them to high level positions, like Secretary of Education, which apparently you don’t really need any credentials to get. This person can be my puppet and I can make him or her demand that schools teach books that I like. Wait…. this is just sarcasm. See? Its hard people, harder than you think. I’ll try again.
IF I WERE TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
But I’m a woman. So… first I’d need a sex change. And I’d change my name to something loveable, like Barry. Also I’d have to move back to the states. But not too far in. Bellingham, maybe.
Barry MacNair for president!!!
I will have to hide my sex change and have my rich and powerful friends come up with a history for me. One that includes a high school debate team, a lawn mowing business to put myself through University, and a scandal to detract from the sex change thing. Because if Trump has taught us anything, it’s that if you throw a dead cat in the room everyone will look at that instead of focusing on the real stuff (i.e. twitter- and thanks G for that analogy).
My scandal will be having joined the University’s All Star Wizard Academy. There will be a superimposed picture me with “Tha Wizards” having a beer, decked out in spirited, shooting star hats. At first people will say that I practiced witchcraft. But I will poo-poo this idea and say it was all just to get girls, which will somehow be ok. I will use this to my advantage, in a slogan.
Magically Transform America into Something Resembling Greatness again! My P.R. team will think this is really great, until somebody gets the grand idea to reduce the concept to Transform America! We hire the guy from the Bellingham Mall who dresses up as Optimus Prime, the great transformer, to breakdance on stage. This is a hit with everybody because who doesn’t like dancing?
And also, I’ll have to be a third party. Just to be interesting and to keep going with the magic thing I’ll call it the Third Eye Party. “We intuitively know what we need to do here, folks.” At first people will be highly suspicious, but after all the breakdancing and the slogan-ing and the Groupons to my speaking events, people will be won over. Republicans won’t be able to resist saying things like “We are going to poke Barry right in the eye” which will make everyone instinctively cringe. Voters will switch over just because of this cringing feeling. My team will use mindfulness workshops and Zen retreats and live in the moment speeches and re-connect with nature slogans to push our cause. This too, will appeal to everybody, because after years of not having meaningful conversations due to iphones and ipads, they are tired, and just want a break. Mostly, they want people to just pay attention, to anything really, and what better cause than the animals?
Against all odds, I will win.
BARRY MACNAIR IS PRESIDENT! The news will spread far and wide. I will bone up on my diplomacy (ask anyone, I’m fairly diplomatic as it is) but immediately crack down on poachers worldwide. In fact, I’ll create a militia dedicated to protecting animals, and deploy the troops immediately. When countries complain that they can no longer get bones from animals for grinding into magical powders, I will have my scientists supply them with a ready, molecularly exacting substitute, and have my fake friends from college bless them with magic (because secretly, they did do magic. Still just to get girls, but blood was shed). We will give the poachers other jobs, like planting trees, and make it very lucrative for them.
And since the presidency is now more like a dictatorship, I’ll have a few decrees that will also begin immediately! I will sign papers like mad. Each day there will be something new.
Day 1:
From here forth and forevermore (as long as I am president, anyway) all married couples shall have not one, but two blankets on their bed, so everyone can be comfortable and the correct temperature. (I informally researched this one. Apparently it is not the norm for couples to shout Give me the blankets, you fucker, in the middle of the night to each other.) Problem solved, marriages saved.
Day 2:
Come ten a.m. standard time, all Amazon Alexa’s must be thrown away. My actual friend Alexa is sick and tired of the jokes and having to re-ask everything that anyone tells her, in that robotic voice, which Amazon has now programmed her to do. Besides, everyone should learn to live with a little hardship. Look up your own damn info. And if you need someone to talk to, talk to the walls, like the rest of us. It builds character.
Day 3:
I hereby decree that everyone put down their phones and listen to one person talking to them, for at least ten minutes. This was a campaign promise, and a highly popular one. Apple has begrudgingly decided to work on it. The phone will log your time in the presence of another, and administer an electric shock if you don’t put it down for at least ten minutes. Some people will of course fight this, and just repeatedly yelp Ow. Ow! OW. Ow, as they switch from hand to hand, unable to part with their information stream for even a moment.
Day 4:
Barry MacNair has been shot! Oh no! I’m dead? Already? Turns out it is a disgruntled Apple worker (who happens to love guns, an issue that was going to be resolved today, in fact). My funeral will be a big one. There will be, of course, breakdancing.
Dispirited, the Third Eye Party will continue to try and save the animals, repeal the gun laws, strengthen jobs (in the booming environmental business related to kinetic energy) and will make modest gains. Years later, the autopsy report will be leaked, and that I was, in fact, at one point, a woman. An expose entitled “I Knew Barry Was a Woman!” will come out and be penned by several people who knew me. Alexa will write a touching tribute.
And I will have died happy, knowing that I had at least, tried.