JON ZAL

Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

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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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Game Theory: Stupid Watergate, Part 1

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It is human nature to try to make sense of the crazy thing happening before your very eyes by looking at it through the lens of the most similar thing to which it compares, so holding Trump’s aberrant presidency up against that of Richard Nixon is a natural response. The ways in which those two men, their presidencies, and their respective scandals differ, however, are at least as effective at predicting Trump’s fate as are the ways in which they are similar — the most notable difference, of course, being that Nixon was a smart and savvy politician who committed a crime, while Trump is an arrogant fool and dimwitted criminal who accidentally stumbled into the presidency while executing what he thought would be his greatest con.

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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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Interview: Richie Kotzen of The Winery Dogs

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Originally published on Dec 15, 2015 at SoundSpike.com

Back in the early ’90s, Richie Kotzen replaced the original guitarist in the band Poison for about five minutes, and if his brief and unlikely stint with that hair-metal outfit is the only thing for which you know him, then you don’t know him at all. In fact, you’ve probably got the wrong impression.

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I’ve narrowly cheated death yet again

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There are many downsides to being a hypochondriac … but it does have its benefits. Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday, I headed to my doctor’s office for the third time in about two weeks … which, for me, is unprecedented, since my immune system is basically on par with Wolverine’s. And yet, despite my mutant healing powers, I’ve had a persistent cough for, like, a month now.

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