At first I couldn’t figure it out.
Five days … five full days …
Why did I feel so good for the past five days? Why was I so happy?
It’s not that I’m a grouch, but this was different. This felt different. This felt good.
And it wasn’t just me.
This was a mood I felt all around me.
Was it you, too?
It was everywhere. With the bottom part of almost every face covered, you have to see the smile in people’s eyes. You have to see the smile and hear the smile in their voices.
What a mystery. What was making my world happy?
I think I figured it out.
We’ve been haunted since June 16, 2015, the day Donald J. Trump announced he was a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.
From that day until November 7, 2020, when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, we heard the mournful, angry, ugly, lying voice of Donald Trump every day … every day … that’s every day for 1,971 days.
Every day you had to hear the malevolent voice of Donald Trump.
You heard it on your cell phone, on television, on your car radio. It followed you every day … everywhere.
The millions of texts were bad enough but it was his monotonous, ponderous voice that pounded this country into the ground.
It was the voice of a loser bully who was complaining he was being picked on.
It was the voice of every loser.
It was the anguished voice of a man who had just heard from his wife the reason she was leaving him after their 17-year marriage was because he was a loser.
It was the loser voice of a 58-year-old man telling the human resources director of his company how he never had a chance to be promoted and why he resented being
fired at this time of his life.
It was the voice of fighting, loser parents whose arguing every night about their money problems would convince a 12 year old that someday, when he was 18, he would be old enough to move out and never come back again.
It was the voice of Donald Trump – a voice without charm, filled with fake braggadocio.
It was the voice of Donald Trump, smug and scared at the same time.
It was the voice of that bully in the schoolyard you thought you had escaped years ago.
It’s the voice that infuriated the 78 million people who hated him.
It’s the voice that ignited the 71 million people who loved him.
It’s the voice of a loser. No matter what the words are, it’s the voice that brings everyone down.
For five days, after it was clear that Joe Biden had won the election, Trump showed a new side. He pouted. He golfed every day and he didn’t say a word. HE DIDN’T SAY A WORD.
For five days in a row we did not hear the voice of Donald Trump.
Five days of bliss. For five days we went back to a world before Donald Trump became president.
There will be more days without hearing from Trump. After a while he just won’t be making the news. He will disappear … screaming that he will run again in 2024.
2024 is a long ways off. He’s gone. We will all have years of not hearing his disgusting voice.
Next week is Thanksgiving.
Let’s celebrate. We have a lot for which to be thankful.
OK, I ADMIT I’M NOT THAT BRIGHT
Can any smart person out there explain to me the wisdom of politicians who insist that restaurants cannot stay open even a minute after 10 PM?
You know that every restaurant in New York is holding on by its fingernails, and almost all of them may go out of business because of Covid-19.
You also must know that no politician like dopey Mayor Bill de Blasio and “Someday I Want To Be President” Governor Andrew Cuomo has ever had an honest job for a single day of their lives. I guess that’s what gives them the right to tell honest hard-working people how to live.
It was these politicians who decided that a restaurant in New York state cannot serve food after 10 PM, and a customer who is chewing on his food at 10 must be pushed out the door before he swallows that last morsel.
What is different in a restaurant that makes it safe for customers at 8 PM and dangerous at 10:01 PM?
Do they think that after 10 the restaurant owners and the cooks and waiters close the door and say, “They’re all gone, let’s break out the Covid-19 and pass it around and smear on ourselves. Let’s take off our masks and cough in each other’s faces.”
It’s a stupid arbitrary rule that hurts restaurants.
And it can be argued that if you allow dining at 10 and even 11 it will spread out the customers and make for a less crowded, much safer restaurant at 8 PM.
But our politicians are too dumb to figure that out.
THE STUPIDEST SONG OF THE WEEK
So being a very very old person, I decided to listen to a song from my era. I asked Google to play me some songs by The Hilltoppers, a mediocre singing group of the 50s. This is what Google played from 1953:
“I’D RATHER DIE YOUNG THAN GROW OLD WITHOUT YOU”
What idiocy. You may wonder how we ever survived those years with that kind of dumb thinking.
I’ll tell you how.
My kind of love song was what I would whisper to my date after a hot session of making out in a car at Plum Beach in those wonderful “just above the waist” days. I would take her home and we would make sure her bra was back on straight so her parents would not disown her.
And I would whisper the song, “SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR.”
And if she ever intended to see me again she would whisper back:
“AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE.”
Now that’s what I call smart beautiful music.
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