JON ZAL

Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

Greatest Hits

There must be a reckoning

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Listen, I was willing to put it all behind me … the entire four-year-long grift and deadly disaster that has been the Trump presidency. I just wanted Donald Trump gone.

While some debated whether or not Biden’s DOJ should pursue criminal charges against Trump, against his administration, and against his family, I realized that I no longer much cared one way or the other. After four long years of feeling nothing but hatred, disgust and rage for Trump, for his wretched offspring, for his sycophantic enablers, and for his ignorant, brainwashed, racist followers, I was exhausted. I had allowed them all to sap more than their fair share of my energy, and I was willing to give them not one more ounce of it. I just wanted to put this awful chapter in American history behind me, welcome the new beginning that the Biden/Harris Administration represents, and embrace a return to a world in which the president of the United States is not 100% batshit crazy, racist, cruel, incompetent, and a clear-and-present danger to everyone on the planet.

As far as I was concerned, Trump and his entire cult could go spend the rest of their sad lives crying “No fair!” at the clouds while he bilked them out of more money with whatever new scam he could devise. Good riddance.

All of that changed on Wednesday.

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Is it November yet?

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For a while there, before things got as unimaginably bad as they’ve gotten, I somewhat enjoyed writing about the unprecedented incompetence, corruption, scandal, and cartoon-like madness of Donald Trump’s chaos presidency. There was mystery and intrigue and reasons galore for me to vent my righteous outrage about the petty, self-obsessed, lizard-brained conman who had ridden a wave of racism, misogyny, ignorance and greed into the most powerful office on earth … and, most compellingly, there was what, on multiple occasions, appeared to be the very real possibility that damning and richly deserved consequences were about to befall him.

It is adorable that Old Me had the capacity for that sort of optimism. I miss him.

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Hell hath no fury like white-male privilege threatened

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For a brief moment last Thursday, as Brett Kavanaugh began his opening remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I mistakenly thought he sounded contrite, and the sound that I mistook for contrition led me to believe for just a split second that he might actually take responsibility for his actions, apologize to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and withdraw his own nomination.

I think we all can agree it truly is adorable that, nearly two years into Donald Trump’s presidency and long after having had the concomitant realization that everyone with whom Trump surrounds himself is profoundly broken and unfailingly awful, I still was somehow capable of such unrealistic optimism.

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An Open Letter of Apology to President Barack Obama

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Haven’t posted anything new since my piece on the January 6th insurrection. Needed a break. Planning to get back at it very soon, but in the meantime, I’m pinning this entry at the top of my homepage because it is the post of which I remain the most proud, and I’d rather it be the first thing people see/hear than my (justifiably) angry rant about the insurrection. -JZ, January 2023

Dear Mr. President,

Let me begin by saying the two words you deserve to hear cross the lips of every American citizen, whether they know it or not:

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Take Me Out to the Therapist… Take Me Out to the Shrink…

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The game of baseball has become a major part of my family’s life … which, based on the following photo, should come as a surprise to no one. I mean, let’s face it: when your background includes playing on a team of this caliber, your family is pretty much guaranteed a baseball-rich life:

Topeka

I’ll point myself out in a moment, but first: How ’bout that coach, huh? He makes Morris Buttermaker look like Anthony Robbins. Of course, in his defense: Look at the collection of misfits he had to work with. I would suggest that his lack of enthusiasm was well justified.

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Zombie Dinner Party … with your chef, Dr. Hannibal Lector

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Before dinner

“Ugh. Brains,” I whispered to my wife after the chef announced that the third course would include sweetbreads.

“What?”

“Sweetbreads,” I whispered, “are brains.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding rather amused, though far from relieved. “I thought they were balls.”

Hey, they might as well have been balls, because guess what brains and balls both have in common? Neither one goes in my mouth.

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No, really: This job-search thing is like shooting fish in a barrel

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Pretty sure the fish in the metaphor are presumed to be swimming, but, still … live fish, dead fish … put ’em in a barrel and they’d be easy to shoot is the point, amirite?

OK, seriously: What’s with all the hubbub about high unemployment rates in this country? Because I’m still two business days away from my lay-off, and already the job offers are coming at me faster than I can keep up with them. You jobless whiners out there must be a bunch of losers; this job-search shit is even easier than kicking my kids’ asses at Candyland.

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