Your 2020 Election Day Funbag

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s new novel while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about… well, you know already, don’t you?

HOLY SHIT IT’S ELECTION DAY, PEOPLE. Since 2016, I am forbidden from making ANY general election predictions, because my election takes have been cursed by a sea witch. Instead, I’m gonna simply ask you to vote if you haven’t already (I voted a few weeks ago). To find out where and how to vote today, go here. And hurry the fuck up. Can’t believe you didn’t think of voting before I told you to. The fuck have you been? On a submarine?

Ah, but you see, voting isn’t enough. You’ve been told to vote a zillion times already, but you probably also know that there are massive attempts at fuckery afoot. You need to vote and you need to make sure your asshole state actually counted and certified that vote. That means, if you smell any voter suppression near you, NEVER shut the fuck up about it. Scream. Yell. Call your local leaders and tell any nearby journalist worth a shit. Donate to the ACLU and other legal aid collectives to help battle suppression in court. We’ve had to put up with a whole lot of shit for four miserable years, and we’re gonna have to put up with a lot worse if we don’t have our shit locked down. Don’t put up with Election Day fuckery, and don’t let anyone scare you. This country is run by fucking cowards right now. Force them to stand up for themselves and they’ll turn to dust.

Your letters:

Tyler:

They’ll get a nicer-looking meal catered by the official White House staff. It’ll also be terrible. It’ll be like lunch at a company offsite. In the nondescript ballroom of some shitty hotel. You’ve eaten this kind of meal many times before: at work, at a generic restaurant buffet, at a bad wedding, etc. Would I rather eat Chick-fil-A than any of that shit? OH MY GOD YES. This is where having the exact same palate as a 19-year-old has served Trump quite well. Your average Clemson OT isn’t gonna be like, “Big Macs? WHY DID THEY NOT SERVE ME TOAST POINTS?!” Savvy move by our idiot President to charm players with lukewarm takeout. Eating it’s like being hungover! WHO SAYS NO.

So if Biden wins, he’ll go back nondescript party food. The food at these shindigs used to be beside the point. You were the Golden State Warriors getting a chance to rub elbows with Barack Obama. Who the fuck cares about the Caesar salad. Biden is selling everyone on a return to America’s normal horseshit, so both the food and the event itself are gonna be boring and forgettable for all parties involved. I have no complaint about this if it comes to pass.

Joe:

Joe, there is never a wrong time to ask that question. This Election Day, it’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind: Who’s vigorously jacking it to Donald Trump? I regret to inform you that the answer is MANY people. This is a cult, mind you. If being in a cult can delude you into thinking that COVID masks are for weaklings and that being abandoned in subfreezing weather after a shitty MAGA rally is a pleasant turn of events, well then it can definitely convince you that your rich and powerful president is very hot and sexy.

So, as we speak, there’s some dude out there with a boat key float up his ass, milking his hog to the fantasy of Trump banging Mrs. Beautiful Boater. And there’s a Puritan mom in Georgia who loathes abortion and loves violently frigging herself at the notion of Big Strong Trump making a citizen’s arrest at a Planned Parenthood clinic. And there’s Rudy cumming onto his own shoes. Those are all very real things. It’s your fault for asking.

Gregory:

You’re entitled to skip it, so long as you formally leave your regrets on the evite. A virtual wedding is an intensely stupid idea. HOWEVAH, I can’t blame a happy couple for wanting to get married right now. When I got engaged, the wedding couldn’t come fast enough. I wanted to be married. I was excited to be a certified husband with a certified wife. I didn’t want to wait. I can imagine that impatience only grows as the world is falling apart around you. You want something good to hold onto, and you want it right away. And you want to share that joy with others, even if you gotta do it over a fucking Zoom call. As a marriage enthusiast, I can’t beef with any of those sentiments. Also, I walked by an actual wedding this summer. No one was in a mask. Wanting to have your wedding now but also wanting everyone you love to be safe makes a Zoom wedding a relatively decent compromise.

But everyone is burned out on Zoom calls and I’m no different. I guarantee you that every Zoom wedding you’re invited to will get an in-person do-over once we get to the other side of the pandemic. You may as well wait for that re-wedding and, in the meantime, up your gift budget for them by $50 to make up the difference. Or just attend the virtual wedding, turn off your camera and mic, and fuck around on your phone the whole time. I know that’s how I handle every Zoom call.

Andy:

I do this occasionally, but only if I really do have a loogie that needs to be immediately expectorated. I do this when I walk the dog. When my wife catches me (she always catches me), I get The Look. It’s a tough moment.

I used to spit more freely when I was a teenager. I thought spitting looked cool. I looked like a cowboy: a REAL MAN who chews tobacco and don’t care ‘bout nuthin’. In reality I was a sloppy piece of shit who should have kept his saliva to himself. I know better now... unless I cough and I inadvertently hack up a really solid booger from deep within my lungs and it’s just sitting there on the back of my throat, hard as a fucking kidney stone. Ever have that happen? I’m gagging just thinking about it. Let’s talk about more pleasant things, like who might be fingerblasting themselves to Donald Trump right this second...

Jimbo:

You can’t. First of all, the first two foul balls are strikes, which is not helpful to the batter. And if the batter fouls a bunt with two strikes, his sorry ass is out. Fouls are most foul in those instances. What’s more, baseball has an entire foul territory that very much lives up to its name by being home to a gallery of filthy, diseased vermin: racist base coaches, mid-level bank execs who got their tickets comped, cotton candy vendors, aggro cops, drunks, urinal poopers, the Queen of England, and, of course, Cardinals fans. That’s why you get to keep the ball if it goes foul, because no sane baseball man wants the ball back from your disgusting hands, which are surely drenched in microbes that cause testicular leprosy. So you see, the word FOUL is all too appropriately used in baseball, which is itself a foul, revolting sport run by foul people:

What a brainless piece of shit Rob Manfred is.

Chris:

I suppose today will go a LONG way to answering that question definitively. If you go by the sheer volume of deaths and ongoing lives ruined here in America (and you probably should), then it’s certainly the worst year of my lifetime. Then again, 2016 was really fucking horrible too, since it was the catalyst for all of this horrible shit. And Trump hadn’t even been sworn in by then.

You could argue ANY year of Trump’s presidency was the worst year ever. 2017 through now is all one continuous, sickly blur for me, a relentless nightmare where all the bad shit comes in ceaseless waves and you shut down emotionally so that the next horrible thing can’t hurt you as badly. It’s been a fucking assault, and I say that as someone who has NOT been targeted by this administration. Quite the contrary, the whole GOP scam is designed specifically to BENEFIT cosseted, white suburbanites like myself. So when I say I’ve had a rotten year, it pales in comparison to the year everyone else has been forced to endure. Ask those folks, and they’ll tell you, “Hell yes 2020 was the goddamn worst.” No memes required.

And this better be the worst year we EVER have to live through. This better be the worst president we have ever had. This better fucking be rock bottom, with hundreds of thousands of people dropping like flies and a president who hold rallies to tell the world he’s bored of it. I know it CAN get worse than this, and may do so in a matter of hours. But it better not. If it does, I’ll kill God myself.

HALFTIME!

Jeff:

No no no, you buy a gun for the ZOMBIE apocalypse, not the human one. For this apocalypse, there are credible studies showing that nonviolent revolutions have been much more effective than taking up arms. You can read about it here and here. Or you look here at home to the civil rights movement, and to the gay rights movement, and on and on. A gun is a cheap, empty change agent. I know all the pieces of shit in MAGA country would like to think otherwise, but their guns are all they have. They have nothing resembling reason, charisma, or logic on their side. That’s why the bad guys resort to guns, to gerrymandering, to corrupt judges, and to throwing fresh votes into a bonfire to keep their tenuous grip on power. They know there’s a lot more of us than them. And they’re afraid of us flexing our collective muscles. Those two things will make you feel more secure than an AR-15 ever will. Nothing but scared boys and girls pulling the trigger on those.

So, like I said at the top, make your voice heard today. Not just at the booth, but literally. If we all say, in unison, that we’ve had enough of this bullshit, it’ll cut through. It’ll matter. Don’t think the worst possible outcome is the ONLY possible outcome, because then you’ll have given up before you even had the chance to fight. It’s easy to spend all day doomscrolling and thinking there’s no way out of this, and then TELLING people that the end is nigh. The latter is an easy thing to do, and an obvious byproduct of being scarred from 2016. But don’t do it. I fucking hate all that goth shit. It’s of zero help to anyone. Get your ass on the dance floor instead and use your energy for better purposes. These Nazis can’t handle the pressure. They’re stupid. Don’t forget that. You are dealing with simple minds that can easily be outmatched.

And yell at Biden too if he wins, because he's got a long way to go to stop sucking in his own right.

Paul:

Oh, a bag. Not even close. I wouldn’t trust foil to keep a sandwich fresh, or even contained. What if I put mustard on my shit? Then I have to hope there’s not a rogue opening in the foil that’ll ruin my TPS reports? Too much of a risk.

When I worked in an office, I made the same lunch every day. I made black forest turkey and lettuce on lightly toasted Levy’s Jewish Rye. Then I wrapped the sandwich up in a paper towel and put it into a Ziploc bag. Then I let the sandwich stay in my work bag all morning. I never put it in the fridge, because the cold ruins the bread. Then, come lunchtime, I went out for a Coke Zero and a bag of chips and brought them both back to my desk so I could enjoy them with my soft, lukewarm turkey sandwich. You might think that’s a sad lunch. But honestly? I miss it. Might make myself one tomorrow morning and leave it out for a few hours later.

Dustin:

You can mow your lawn during a weekday. Don’t do it at, like, 5 a.m. But midday? That’s legal. I’ve worked from home for over a decade now, and I live next to a goddamn highway. Ambient noise is part of the deal when you work remotely. Your neighbors can tune out your lawnmower (and you theirs) with good headphones, or by simply getting used to it. Expecting any neighborhood to be 100 percent quiet at all times is idiotic, unless you’re a rich asshole living in Newport Beach who’s also president of a fascist neighborhood association. Everywhere else, there’ll be the occasional racket. So long as you don’t spend six hours mowing your lawn, and provided you don’t pull start the engine next to your neighbor’s bedroom every chance you get, you’re on solid ground.

Eric:

It’s too late for you. Before we had kids, I happened to own seasons 4–6 of The Simpsons on DVD. When our kids were old enough to watch it (and this was before Disney+ got it, and even before FXX started running the show on a loop), we let them watch those DVDs. It worked. I told them that everything after season eight sucked, and they took it to heart. I stumbled bass-ackwards into making them discerning Simpsons fanboys from the get-go. If my kids were born any sooner, with every Simpsons episode ever a mere click away, I wouldn’t have pulled that shit off. To wit, our eight-year-old will watch pretty much any episode. So he’s nearly in the same boat as your kid. The circumstances have conspired to fuck us over.

But I have successfully kept all my kids from ever seeing the Star Wars prequels. Small victories matter these days.

John:

Neither of you. They’re just vitamins. You don’t have to SpikeTV them. Call them what they are.

I took my kids’ gummy vitamins for a bit when I was recovering from a brain hemorrhage. They were DELICIOUS. I was very sad when I had to stop taking them. Luckily for me, I still have to take AREDS2 vitamins to help prevent macular degeneration. Those ones are not gummy though. Real missed opportunity there, Bausch + Lomb.

James:

Maybe a President Biden would order such a thing, but the DMV isn’t gonna have it. First of all, I’ve heard people use the term Delmarva around here. I’m offended, Masshole-style, by your ignorance. Secondly, the governor of Maryland is a mutoid dipshit named Larry Hogan who has designed all of his policies to please Ocean City umbrella shack owners and no one else in the state. Thirdly, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel connects the tip of the Delmarva schlong to Virginia Beach, which probably makes that thoroughfare important to Virginians in some stupid way.

So while I believe that the 50-state union is a lost cause and that we, as Americans, should all agree to amicably divorce, I think Delmarva should stay the way it is. Inland Delaware is a chicken farm, but the beach parts are nice. I don’t want Delaware to have much more than that, because it’s a pyramid scheme.

Davey:

The latter. He’s not going to Russia because he’s a snowbird and it’s too cold. And he’s not going to Brazil because he fears anyone and anything south of the US border. He would stick around here for the rest of his days, wasting money and oxygen in equal measure. He’ll absolutely start a TV network too, and it’ll be fucking horrible.

I wanna think that, if Trump loses, he’ll leave office immediately, like the deadbeat he is. But he needs his lame duck term to get in that last bit of stealing, genocide, and setting up legal blockades for himself. He’ll do ALL of that from New York and from Palm Beach. He’ll never set foot in Washington again after this, but he’ll stay on the job in an official capacity to sign anything that makes his life easier and yours more miserable. Pretty much the way he has for four years now. The lazy pile of shit.

Dan:

This is where I confess that I’ve never smelled a burp. I lost my sense of smell two years ago, but even before then, I wasn’t any good at smelling belches from afar. It’s a mouth fart, so I assume it has fart-like qualities. But I never noticed them, not even my own. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m just an oblivious moron.

Sent my wife scurrying from the room the other day with a burp, though. So I still got some magic of my own going on in there.

Email of the week!

Marie:

My congrats to you both. Here’s to many more good ones, for you guys AND for the rest of us.