This is a true story.
I woke up this Election Day morning itching.
Itching to get chores done so my wife and I could go vote that straight blue line, sure. Neither of us has ever missed voting, and a vote against the minions of Donzo is the closest we can manage to hurling a road-killed skunk over the fence at 1600 Occupied Territory.
No, this itch was sharper. More immediate. More visceral. Localized.
I scratched, examined the scratch-point with blurry eyes, and found out that there was a tick fastened to the starboard side of my scrotum. Really. Well, at that point it was what was left of the tick; in the night scratching, or my half-awake fingernail work seemed to have taken the body off the thing, leaving the horrible black head burrowed into some fairly tender flesh.
I'm not a superstitious man, but I had to wonder: is this an omen of some sort? And if so, what kind? Did mean that today we were going to scrape loose the worst of a parasitical infestation, with only the dumb ugly head (orange this time) fastened to us afterward? I was able to pry most of that loose with tweezers--the magic tweezers of impeachment? I--and America--was ready for a peroxide rinse and some good topical antibiotics.
It's early evening as I write this, no real election results yet. But starting my day having a tick fastened to my nut-sack is a decent metaphor for how I've felt about our country since the will of the majority was overthrown and a monstrous fraud was thrust on our people: we have a greedy, potentially deadly bloodsucker attached to us, a loathsome critter with no redeeming value. A bearer of disease, of plague.
Sure hope we scrape the worst of the bastard off, and neutralize--sterilize--the leftover bits starting tomorrow.