For those who think 2016 has not yet gotten bizarre enough (or riddled with enough unlikelihoods), ladies and gentlemen (and those laughing at us from some interstellar utopia—a comfortable distance), I give you: Wednesday.
If you grew up in Chicago, the phrase "Cubs win World Series" was a punchline for more than one cold-day-in-hell joke. Not anymore. Congrats to former Rays dudes Joe Maddon and Ben Zobrist as well as the rest of the team. And, congrats to my friends and family still holed up back there, many of whom maintained their fandom through years of utter suckage; it's wonderful to see your elation during such a bitterly divisive point in time. Although, one wonders whether that ol' curse-a-roo hasn't really been lifted, but shifted to some other realm of interest, where it will create another Bermuda Triangle of Existential Anguish for the next century. Speaking of which.
A sitting president apparently had to tell a sitting FBI director how to do his fucking job. Or, President Obama subtly reminded FBI Director James Comey (though not by name) that it isn't cool to, you know, "operate on incomplete information." That may or may not include telling Congress and thus the American public you're looking into Hillary Clinton email stuffs but leaving the world hanging as far as details much beyond that, potentially botching Tuesday's election and thus summoning certain doom. Curses, man.
To help push back these forces of evil, à la Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, the Clinton camp's own Ash Williams, a.k.a. Vice President Joe Biden, swept through town with all the humor and swagger one might imagine (minus the chainsaw hand). At a rally at Tampa's Museum of Science and Industry, Biden urged supporters to not only vote, but get everyone they know out to the polls lest we sit by and let an ancient leather-hose demon swallow our souls.
And…someone set a fire that caused severe damage to a black church in Mississippi; the church also had "Vote Trump" spray-painted on its side. It didn't take long for that existential anguish to take hold, did it?
This article appears in Nov 3-10, 2016.