If I had been drinking in the middle of the day
yesterday, or even in the late afternoon, I would have been able to say to
myself, “Don’t ever drink in the middle of the day again.” But I wasn’t.
I can’t blame the Pellegrino or the herbal tea.
I have no explanation for the trip I went on. I think
I departed at around 5:30 p.m. and returned at around 8:45 when my cell phone
rang and I saw it was my husband calling. I took it as a good sign that I
was on my bed and no longer on Donald Trump’s private plane. Or, to be more
accurate, his private plane that was kind of like a whole city that didn’t
appear to be a plane until we were landing. I must have been really tired.
That’s my whole explanation for being on my bed at 5:30.
Yes, there was the big, Godzilla El Nino-fueled storm
going on outside, proof that all of the “Looks Like More Of The Same” forecasts
were correct, but I had not been bashed on the head—Dorothy style—by any
dislodged window frames. It was just a giant rainstorm. It was not a
fucking house-lifting twister out there.
The last thing I remember, I was watching CNN. Not the
super cute, Anderson Cooper giggling through Kathy Griffin, New Year’s Eve CNN.
I was watching that last week in 2015 and stayed awake, no problem. No. This
time it was just a regular Wednesday “What’s-The-Donald-Up-To-Now?”
hour…or five minutes, or whatever time he was allotted. Tired or not, no wonder
I went to sleep.
I get how everything that happened to Dorothy in Oz
and everyone she met there related to some shit going on back in Kansas. Toto
had bitten Miss Gulch, who—according to Wikipedia—was going to have him
“euthanized”. I know that old biatch was going to do something bad, but
"euthanized"? It sounds so, I don't know… efficient. No one
forgets Miss Gulch/The Wicked Witch cackling, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your
little dog, too.” We do know that for almost every person or “issue” in
Dorothy’s dream there was a parallel back home in the Sunflower State. Right?
And, with The Wizard of Oz being a fantasy and all, we do know that no
little dog was gettin' euthanized. Right? If you don’t know that, I don’t know
what to say to you.
Even though it was only fatigue that sent me off to
dreamland yesterday around the time that I’d have preferred to be at a cocktail
party, I can see very plainly that the news is sometimes like that piece of
wood torn loose in Dorothy’s house—the one that went, quite literally, straight
to her head.
I’m now completely sure that everything happening on
CNN was making its way into my sleep state. I know this from reading
yesterday’s news today. I didn’t know where I was exactly, other than in a
freakishly tall, ultra-modern high rise—kind of a big, glass mall, that was
sort of a city, in the form of a shopping center. I remember Donald Trump’s
voice over a loudspeaker system. I don’t know what he was saying, which is true
most of the time, even when he is saying something.
I recall going into a Macy’s, worried that I might buy
something that I already owned, but I don’t remember clearly whether the people
helping me were CNN anchor/reporters re-imagined as the store’s salespeople.
That’s how it would have worked in Dorothy’s situation. You’d think I might
remember if it was Wolf Blitzer selling me a pair of shoes. Meanwhile, the
voice over the loudspeaker was unmistakable. It was definitely The Donald—the
wizard of odd. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Fine by me.
After the mildly traumatic shopping experience, I went
back to my room. Don’t ask me to explain why I had a room. Nobody told me
why, so I can’t tell you. Once there, my husband appeared. He took one look out
of the floor-to-ceiling window and said, “We are landing.”
“What the fuck?” is what I said. Landing? We
are on a fucking plane? Shouldn’t the pilot have announced the fucking
landing? The least he could do is turn on the fucking seatbelt sign,
although, there was no fucking seatbelt since I was lounging comfortably
on a fucking king-sized bed. I held on to the side of the mattress as if
this would be an acceptable substitute for a safety device. As we touched down,
I realized that the wings that had appeared on the building were going to make
the “plane” too wide to taxi down the street—yes, the regular street.
No fooling—Donald Trump’s whatever was just going to
plow through a regular old busy street, not giving a shit what was in its way.
As if on cue, the wings folded into the side of what we were on, or in…plane or
building. Don’t ask me.
As we were preparing to disembark, I was thinking we
had not arranged for ground transportation, although, I could hardly be held at
fault since until five seconds ago I didn’t know we were on a plane. But, I was
sure there would be nothing so “regular-person” as a cab since Donald Trump was
involved. So, what I'm saying is, I didn't know how we were going to get out of
there. I’m also sure this part was symbolic—meant to shame me for not having
the Uber app on my phone in real life.
Next, everyone went into a tented area to get his or
her belongings. There weren’t that many people, especially when you consider
the size of what we had just flown in on. We sat at fancy, white picnic tables
and didn’t worry about whether our luggage would show up. We were given
something to eat while we waited.
That’s when it started—the burping and the dropping of
salad out of my mouth, onto my clothes. It was uncontrollable. Frankly, I was
disgusting. Donald Trump looked over at me and I thought I would be embarrassed,
but I guess it would take a lot more than that for me to feel like the
ill-mannered, inappropriate one. I hope I stayed unembarrassed, but I'll never
know.
My cell phone rang loudly in the bedroom. It was my
husband calling. There’s no place like home.
