January Play Date with Hillary Clinton

Told Hillary to come over dressed for an epic snowball fight. She arrived in a $12,000 Armani suit and wouldn’t stop talking about the unacceptably soaring cost of hot chocolate. I told her to chill out. People have trouble relating to folks who wear $12,000 suits. She said that wearing a $12,000 suit made her part of an exclusive group, a minority, she added, which helped her to relate to actual minorities. In retrospect, I realize that the world around us had been covered in white and that I should have known that some snow won’t melt until we make it.

 

February Play Date with Donald Trump

He was supposed to come over so we could drink and boast about how many girls we had conned into thinking they were our Valentine, but instead we spent the night boxing – he liked that the gloves made his hands feel bigger – and arguing about who had more chest hair. I had more chest hair, but he said that he knew how to keep terrorists out of the country, so the chest hair didn’t matter. After I put my shirt back on, he accused me of somehow knowing ahead of time that we were going to have a chest hair competition.

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March with Hillary

We met up at the starting line for her annual 5k. Instead of running, she paid Debbie Wasserman Shultz to carry her on her shoulders to the finish line. When I asked Hillary which charity all the donations were going to, she said she’d check her email and get back to me. I asked her why she always had to do that. Do what? she asked. Lie about checking your email, I said. I knew she would never get back to me about where the money was going. She laughed and said not to worry. No true American would find any possible way to paint a woman in a negative light so she couldn’t break through a glass ceiling. If only Hillary could have embraced that the only true Americans had been the Native Americans who had been slaughtered hundreds of years ago by the ancestors of people who now hid those crimes within their victims’ very identities. True Americans had died so that all other Americans could pretend that the world was okay and that we were something to be proud of. We always seek the next group to blame, hold back, and eventually we run away from our history, cowards singing to embroidered stars that we’ve never lived up to.

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April with The Donald

We spent the morning plotting an epic April Fools’ Day joke on President Obama. Our eventual Instagram post got so much media attention. So much. The post was huge. Unfortunately, I did such a great Photoshop job that Donald thought the birth certificate was real. I tried to convince him it wasn’t, but he said that he had gotten the certificate via an anonymous source. The certificate proved that Obama had been born beyond American borders. I reminded Donald that no, I had made the birth certificate in Photoshop. In the most demeaning, sarcastic voice, he replied, Yeah, sure you did, and this year we’ll choose a fat woman to be Miss America.

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May with Hillary

Went to the Cincinnati Zoo because apparently Hillary is big on snakes. She says they just get her. Anyway, we had to leave early because apparently some gorilla hacked into her email account and would have released her deepest, darkest secrets if her undercover operatives hadn’t been able to distract the great ape by dropping an unsuspecting toddler into the cage. I asked Hillary if she felt bad about the gorilla getting shot. She said, sure, of course, what a tragedy, but could we please stop talking about it? She wasn’t running for the presidency of the Planet of the Apes. I shrugged, thought maybe she didn’t cope well with death, but I’ve never shaken the feeling that she did not rightly see the world she was trying to rule. Beyond our cities live the rural folk, who right now are broken folk, who right now are angry, large in number, and sick of politicians quick to toss the helpless in with the gorilla, so to speak. Never forget that the rural lands speak loud when you try to rule them all.

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June with The Donald

Birthday month! We partied every night. Unfortunately, Donald invited this weird guy named Mike to come out with us a few of the nights. One evening, I asked Mike for a condom, it was an emergency, and he looked at me as if I was the first person to ever ask him to seriously consider the plausibility of evolution. Donald told me to calm down. Mike here doesn’t believe in abortion. I asked Donald what that had to do with me using a rubber, to which Donald replied with a rant about how maybe a better idea than his wall would be engulfing Mexico inside a giant condom. I would have left after that comment, but then Donald’s daughter, Ivanka, showed up drunker than a first semester freshman, and I knew I couldn’t leave her alone with Donald and Mike and zero adult supervision.

 

July with Hillary

She had to cancel on me. Apparently she had forgotten about a big event in Philadelphia that she’d been planning on attending since she was three. I texted her we could reschedule and she replied with, Trust me, you’re in good hands. If there’s one thing the Clintons know how to do it’s cheat and get away with it, followed minutes later by the message, Sorry. Awkward. That was meant for my buddy Tim. Tim turned out to be just another white guy who believed in God. He was not, as they say in Honduras, muy bien.

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August with The Donald

We did cocaine. Like a lot of cocaine. But before the cocaine he told me that he wasn’t racist and he wasn’t misogynistic, xenophobic, or orange. He said, however, that lots of other white people were, and enough minority folks were too, so he just needed to act like he was racist, misogynistic, et al. every now and then because that’s how you reached America’s key voting demographic: Homophobic rural white women and their fascist husbands. That’s when we did the cocaine: To cope with being prejudiced. And let me tell you this about racism, how racism is just like cocaine: you wouldn’t have it if you couldn’t make it yourself, buy it, sell it, thrive off the ways it ruins you while you’re too high to notice.

 

September with Hillary

Took Hillary to see a game at Wrigley. She brought jerseys for both teams, justified her choice by saying, Just in case the team I’m wearing isn’t tied for or in the lead. I told her that the point of sports wasn’t to always root for the winning side. Sometimes you have to stand by the losers, the underdogs, the Cinderella stories waiting to happen. But Hillary said that didn’t poll well. She couldn’t sleep at night if she wasn’t polling well. That night the Cubs clinched a playoff spot.

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October with The Donald

Invited Donald over to play with my cat, but I had to force him to leave after he grabbed her with an unnecessary sense of entitlement. Later, I called him. Asked him why he had done that. He replied, I wanted to so I did it. That’s when I told him we were through. I was voting for Hillary. He told me good riddance. He didn’t need me. Enough Americans wanted to overthrow the political machine that he didn’t need my support. But if your washing machine breaks you don’t call the local carpenter. Every break requires the proper hands. And that’s when I realized he didn’t want to fix anything. He wanted to throw the washing machine out and build his own machine. The result might not even resemble a washing machine. And that terrified me. Because that – change – was the camouflage his false hope required.

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November with Hillary

Shot my girl an email saying I was so sorry for her loss. Received an auto reply stating that her account had been deleted. She could now be reached exclusively via pager. Meanwhile, white women across the country wept, although not as many as you would think, Muslims locked themselves in their homes, although oppression had turned those homes into hideouts, and others prayed that the election had been one long reality show. It turned out that it had been. But now it was getting renewed for four more seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall, have we granted enough time to resurrect the Berlin Wall?

 

December Play Date with Bernie Sanders

I told Bernie I was sorry for calling his little birdie stupid all those months ago, and he said that he still wasn’t sorry for trying to erase my college debt. We hugged. We went skateboarding at the park. We agreed that Hillary and Donald were stupid buttmunchers and that we wouldn’t choose friends so stupidly ever again. But that’s making light of the situation. What remains serious is not a play date, but a date with destiny. America: Country born of blood, sustained by slaves, fueled by what kills our planet. Say what you want about Donald. Pine all you want for Hillary. We live in no Jerusalem, but might we act as a messiah?