My girl’s birthday was in mid-December. I usually would have taken her out to some 4-star restaurant, load up on the yummies, a couple glasses of wine, toast her graceful aging, and cap it off with chilling on the couch back at home, watching late night TV, a pile of doggies sprawled about us.
Yep, that year was different.
I bought her some roses via Instacart. We Grubhubbed a birthday dinner for her from one of her favorite eateries. She soldiered through the pandemic and the shit show that was American politics that year with much more panache than I did. Despite the world weariness, she still looked great and she was as trim as ever thanks to her steadfast following of her keto diet.
Me, I definitely looked older by the end of the year. I gained weight from all the drive-through and take-out. The passing of my dogs put more a lot more salt in my beard. And I’d thinned on top too.
But we were still alive.
We were not statistics.
I knew then that folks who survived the pandemic would either know how fortunate they’d been, or they’d embrace an illusory stance they were never in any real danger.
The Electoral College cast their votes. No wayward subterfuge happened, as so many feared. Biden took the majority when California certified their 55 electoral votes, pushing him up to 302 total votes as of 3 PM PST on the 14th of December.
That Guy’s long shot hopes that faithless electors might pull a rabbit out of his hat were unfounded. If only he’d been more concerned with the well-being of his constituents than his television ratings. If only he’d bothered giving one tiny fuck about anything other than himself. I wagered he was thinking a few ‘if onlys’ himself, not the least of which must have been ‘if only this fucking pandemic had happened any other year.’ There was some truth in that. He was a populist president with an oddly unwavering support base who didn’t care at all what he did or didn’t do. Except that one nagging thing…they cared if they lived or died. If he’d handled his pandemic response better, he probably would have won.
But he didn’t.