A night out...

Last night I went, as usual, to sam bond’s garage for a few drinks with friends and acquaintances. I wasn’t there very long before I realized that I really didn’t want to “get started” if you take my meaning. I warned a couple early arrivers, who agreed not to wind me up.

 

Of course, there’s always that one person...

 

Let’s call her G.

 

G (to me): At the risk of being too political, did you vote?

 

Me: “Yeah.” Insert grumpy emoji here.

 

G: “You don’t sound happy about it. How does it make you feel?”

 

Me: Like I cut the cards.

 

G: ???

 

Me: If you are playing poker with a cardsharp, and you get a chance to cut the cards, you do it, right? But you know you’re gonna lose anyway...

 

G: You think we’re going to lose?

 

Me: No, but I am.

 

G: poke, prod, dig.

 

Me: I’m an anarchist, I despise all the candidates and both major parties...

 

G: so you’re a Libertarian?

 

Me: (thinking): ‘Don’t. Just don’t.’

 

Me: (Speaking): O hell no. I’m an anarcho-communist. Only in America could a group of conservatives hijack a perfectly good word like “libertarian” (which means ‘anarchist lite’ everywhere else in the world) in service to a truly idiotic economic theory, obviously false in all of its premises.

 

(I did not confuse her by explaining that there’s a lot I actually do admire about American “Libertarians”.)

 

At about this point someone distracted her. Then she came back to me.

 

Her: About economics, what...?

 

Me: (interrupting): I wrote five novels, more or less about that, and I’m working on a sixth. I don’t want to talk about it.

 

G: What good is it to write novels that almost no one will ever read? Why not do something...?

 

Me: (interrupting again, more rudely): Trust me, I think about that a lot. It doesn’t seem to have stopped me. And I don’t expect that there will be anyone alive to read anyone’s novels, and it won’t be long now, either.

 

G: expresses amazement

 

Me: You really think there will be anyone alive much after 2050?

 

G: O, that’s surely too pessimistic, of course we’ll come through...

 

Me:...slightly drunken version of “We are poisoning the air, water, and soil, and heating the planet and nobody is doing a thing to stop it and...

 

G: O, but things have been bad before this, we’ve come through it all...

 

Me: Begins a discourse on the global nature of the problem, not just a local eco-collapse, soon no usable water or soil, etc.

 

G: O, I know, you don’t have to convince me of that...

 

Me (thinking): ‘Why the hell are even talking about this, then?’

 

Bob, (sitting on the other side of me): I agree with him, mostly. (Explains his prediction about maybe a million people left, all living up around the Arctic Circle).

 

Me: (nodding): Maybe. Antarctica, too.

 

(Side quest about whether Antarctica will be habitable)

 

G, getting my attention again: I really think Jeff Merkley is our best hope...he could run...a better President...

 

Me (not thinking clearly by this point): The trouble with voting for the lesser evil is that things just keep getting more evil. That’s my experience, anyway.

 

“O, I don’t think Jeff is a lesser evil, he is...

 

Me: (interrupting even more abruptly): I’ll just let you have that opinion. I don’t want to argue about it.

 

G How’s your nihilism?

 

Me: Burn it all down.

 

THAT finally discouraged her. Then I drank enough more whisky to quiet my mind. And Bob and I talked about lesser evils, and Whitey Bulger, and dystopian fantasies and realities.

 

I ought not to have let her ask the questions. I ought to have asked the questions, and answered hers with other queries. Oh, well, some other time...