Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And buy Drew’s new novel while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about… well, you know already, don’t you?
HOLY SHIT IT’S ELECTION DAY, PEOPLE. Since 2016, I am forbidden from making ANY general election predictions, because my election takes have been cursed by a sea witch. Instead, I’m gonna simply ask you to vote if you haven’t already (I voted a few weeks ago). To find out where and how to vote today, go here. And hurry the fuck up. Can’t believe you didn’t think of voting before I told you to. The fuck have you been? On a submarine?
Ah, but you see, voting isn’t enough. You’ve been told to vote a zillion times already, but you probably also know that there are massive attempts at fuckery afoot. You need to vote and you need to make sure your asshole state actually counted and certified that vote. That means, if you smell any voter suppression near you, NEVER shut the fuck up about it. Scream. Yell. Call your local leaders and tell any nearby journalist worth a shit. Donate to the ACLU and other legal aid collectives to help battle suppression in court. We’ve had to put up with a whole lot of shit for four miserable years, and we’re gonna have to put up with a lot worse if we don’t have our shit locked down. Don’t put up with Election Day fuckery, and don’t let anyone scare you. This country is run by fucking cowards right now. Force them to stand up for themselves and they’ll turn to dust.
Your letters:
Tyler:
If Biden wins the election, will the FBS champion continue to be fed a fast food smorgasbord or will they get something more upscale?
They’ll get a nicer-looking meal catered by the official White House staff. It’ll also be terrible. It’ll be like lunch at a company offsite. In the nondescript ballroom of some shitty hotel. You’ve eaten this kind of meal many times before: at work, at a generic restaurant buffet, at a bad wedding, etc. Would I rather eat Chick-fil-A than any of that shit? OH MY GOD YES. This is where having the exact same palate as a 19-year-old has served Trump quite well. Your average Clemson OT isn’t gonna be like, “Big Macs? WHY DID THEY NOT SERVE ME TOAST POINTS?!” Savvy move by our idiot President to charm players with lukewarm takeout. Eating it’s like being hungover! WHO SAYS NO.
So if Biden wins, he’ll go back nondescript party food. The food at these shindigs used to be beside the point. You were the Golden State Warriors getting a chance to rub elbows with Barack Obama. Who the fuck cares about the Caesar salad. Biden is selling everyone on a return to America’s normal horseshit, so both the food and the event itself are gonna be boring and forgettable for all parties involved. I have no complaint about this if it comes to pass.
Joe:
Do you think there is anyone in this country who regularly masturbates to the thought of Trump? I'm not talking fake comic book Trump or Jon McNaughton horrorporn. Just Donald with his typical sweaty, perpetually-falling stay puft marshmallow man look, saying stupid shit with his puckered asshole of a mouth. I don't know. Maybe this isn't the right time to ask this question.
Joe, there is never a wrong time to ask that question. This Election Day, it’s the number one topic on everyone’s mind: Who’s vigorously jacking it to Donald Trump? I regret to inform you that the answer is MANY people. This is a cult, mind you. If being in a cult can delude you into thinking that COVID masks are for weaklings and that being abandoned in subfreezing weather after a shitty MAGA rally is a pleasant turn of events, well then it can definitely convince you that your rich and powerful president is very hot and sexy.
So, as we speak, there’s some dude out there with a boat key float up his ass, milking his hog to the fantasy of Trump banging Mrs. Beautiful Boater. And there’s a Puritan mom in Georgia who loathes abortion and loves violently frigging herself at the notion of Big Strong Trump making a citizen’s arrest at a Planned Parenthood clinic. And there’s Rudy cumming onto his own shoes. Those are all very real things. It’s your fault for asking.
Gregory:
Do we have to go to virtual weddings? I've been invited to about 4 in the last 2 months and have already skipped one. That person sent a box with a cupcake and a mask with Abby and Jim on it. The cupcake melted because I live in Texas, so both went right into the trash. Just delay it, right? Why bother? Get married if you need health care then wait a year or two and do the rest. I have to stare at an endless parade of IT dudes all day long on Zoom I have zero interest in looking at anyone else on my screen at end of day. Next virtual wedding is my cousin’s so all the fam will be there but again, I want to skip it.
You’re entitled to skip it, so long as you formally leave your regrets on the evite. A virtual wedding is an intensely stupid idea. HOWEVAH, I can’t blame a happy couple for wanting to get married right now. When I got engaged, the wedding couldn’t come fast enough. I wanted to be married. I was excited to be a certified husband with a certified wife. I didn’t want to wait. I can imagine that impatience only grows as the world is falling apart around you. You want something good to hold onto, and you want it right away. And you want to share that joy with others, even if you gotta do it over a fucking Zoom call. As a marriage enthusiast, I can’t beef with any of those sentiments. Also, I walked by an actual wedding this summer. No one was in a mask. Wanting to have your wedding now but also wanting everyone you love to be safe makes a Zoom wedding a relatively decent compromise.
But everyone is burned out on Zoom calls and I’m no different. I guarantee you that every Zoom wedding you’re invited to will get an in-person do-over once we get to the other side of the pandemic. You may as well wait for that re-wedding and, in the meantime, up your gift budget for them by $50 to make up the difference. Or just attend the virtual wedding, turn off your camera and mic, and fuck around on your phone the whole time. I know that’s how I handle every Zoom call.
Andy:
I never understood people who spit in the street very publicly. It always seemed very performative, you know? You’re walking down the street and some guy, it’s almost always a guy, ahead of you coming down the opposite way just hocks a giant loogie. Even now during this time of COVID it’s more baffling. Like, why?
I do this occasionally, but only if I really do have a loogie that needs to be immediately expectorated. I do this when I walk the dog. When my wife catches me (she always catches me), I get The Look. It’s a tough moment.
I used to spit more freely when I was a teenager. I thought spitting looked cool. I looked like a cowboy: a REAL MAN who chews tobacco and don’t care ‘bout nuthin’. In reality I was a sloppy piece of shit who should have kept his saliva to himself. I know better now... unless I cough and I inadvertently hack up a really solid booger from deep within my lungs and it’s just sitting there on the back of my throat, hard as a fucking kidney stone. Ever have that happen? I’m gagging just thinking about it. Let’s talk about more pleasant things, like who might be fingerblasting themselves to Donald Trump right this second...
Jimbo:
In most sports, a foul is a dastardly act committed against the opposition that usually results in a turnover of control (basketball, soccer, water polo etc) or a punishment against the controlling team (football). Baseball has the GALL to call a foul ball something that is downright helpful to the player committing that foul, allowing them to keep on swinging. I reckon MLB should change the name of a foul to avoid this confusion and instead use it for the expected unsportsmanlike behaviour such as obstruction or interference. Can I count on your support?
You can’t. First of all, the first two foul balls are strikes, which is not helpful to the batter. And if the batter fouls a bunt with two strikes, his sorry ass is out. Fouls are most foul in those instances. What’s more, baseball has an entire foul territory that very much lives up to its name by being home to a gallery of filthy, diseased vermin: racist base coaches, mid-level bank execs who got their tickets comped, cotton candy vendors, aggro cops, drunks, urinal poopers, the Queen of England, and, of course, Cardinals fans. That’s why you get to keep the ball if it goes foul, because no sane baseball man wants the ball back from your disgusting hands, which are surely drenched in microbes that cause testicular leprosy. So you see, the word FOUL is all too appropriately used in baseball, which is itself a foul, revolting sport run by foul people:
What a brainless piece of shit Rob Manfred is.
Chris:
Is 2020 the worst year that you can remember on record? My gut (and everything else around me) tells me absolutely yes, but I am not sure if it is because it is true or simply because we are currently living through it.
I suppose today will go a LONG way to answering that question definitively. If you go by the sheer volume of deaths and ongoing lives ruined here in America (and you probably should), then it’s certainly the worst year of my lifetime. Then again, 2016 was really fucking horrible too, since it was the catalyst for all of this horrible shit. And Trump hadn’t even been sworn in by then.
You could argue ANY year of Trump’s presidency was the worst year ever. 2017 through now is all one continuous, sickly blur for me, a relentless nightmare where all the bad shit comes in ceaseless waves and you shut down emotionally so that the next horrible thing can’t hurt you as badly. It’s been a fucking assault, and I say that as someone who has NOT been targeted by this administration. Quite the contrary, the whole GOP scam is designed specifically to BENEFIT cosseted, white suburbanites like myself. So when I say I’ve had a rotten year, it pales in comparison to the year everyone else has been forced to endure. Ask those folks, and they’ll tell you, “Hell yes 2020 was the goddamn worst.” No memes required.
And this better be the worst year we EVER have to live through. This better be the worst president we have ever had. This better fucking be rock bottom, with hundreds of thousands of people dropping like flies and a president who hold rallies to tell the world he’s bored of it. I know it CAN get worse than this, and may do so in a matter of hours. But it better not. If it does, I’ll kill God myself.
HALFTIME!
Jeff:
I feel like I should get a gun. I’m anti-gun. But all the assholes are also the ones with all the guns. And all of us ninnies don’t have any guns. And Civil War II is scheduled for this month. So, despite my gun stance, if they have all the guns and we have no guns, then we’re pretty fucked. What do you think? Prime days are coming up! We could all probably get 2 for 1!
No no no, you buy a gun for the ZOMBIE apocalypse, not the human one. For this apocalypse, there are credible studies showing that nonviolent revolutions have been much more effective than taking up arms. You can read about it here and here. Or you look here at home to the civil rights movement, and to the gay rights movement, and on and on. A gun is a cheap, empty change agent. I know all the pieces of shit in MAGA country would like to think otherwise, but their guns are all they have. They have nothing resembling reason, charisma, or logic on their side. That’s why the bad guys resort to guns, to gerrymandering, to corrupt judges, and to throwing fresh votes into a bonfire to keep their tenuous grip on power. They know there’s a lot more of us than them. And they’re afraid of us flexing our collective muscles. Those two things will make you feel more secure than an AR-15 ever will. Nothing but scared boys and girls pulling the trigger on those.
So, like I said at the top, make your voice heard today. Not just at the booth, but literally. If we all say, in unison, that we’ve had enough of this bullshit, it’ll cut through. It’ll matter. Don’t think the worst possible outcome is the ONLY possible outcome, because then you’ll have given up before you even had the chance to fight. It’s easy to spend all day doomscrolling and thinking there’s no way out of this, and then TELLING people that the end is nigh. The latter is an easy thing to do, and an obvious byproduct of being scarred from 2016. But don’t do it. I fucking hate all that goth shit. It’s of zero help to anyone. Get your ass on the dance floor instead and use your energy for better purposes. These Nazis can’t handle the pressure. They’re stupid. Don’t forget that. You are dealing with simple minds that can easily be outmatched.
And yell at Biden too if he wins, because he's got a long way to go to stop sucking in his own right.
Paul:
I go to the office two days a week now, in these troubling times, and I noticed there are a couple of distinct groups in the "transporting a sad little sandwich from home" gang. You've got your plastic sandwich baggers, and your sick and twisted foil-wrappers. A quick Googling gives me info on which is more green, but I need to know which is correct in total! So foil vs. bag, who ya got?
Oh, a bag. Not even close. I wouldn’t trust foil to keep a sandwich fresh, or even contained. What if I put mustard on my shit? Then I have to hope there’s not a rogue opening in the foil that’ll ruin my TPS reports? Too much of a risk.
When I worked in an office, I made the same lunch every day. I made black forest turkey and lettuce on lightly toasted Levy’s Jewish Rye. Then I wrapped the sandwich up in a paper towel and put it into a Ziploc bag. Then I let the sandwich stay in my work bag all morning. I never put it in the fridge, because the cold ruins the bread. Then, come lunchtime, I went out for a Coke Zero and a bag of chips and brought them both back to my desk so I could enjoy them with my soft, lukewarm turkey sandwich. You might think that’s a sad lunch. But honestly? I miss it. Might make myself one tomorrow morning and leave it out for a few hours later.
Dustin:
Now that a large portion of us are working from home, what is the etiquette of mowing your lawn during the middle of the day? On weekends I like to wait until after 10am so I don't wake anyone up, but during the week do I have to wait until after 5pm as to not interrupt anyone's ZOOM or distance learning?
You can mow your lawn during a weekday. Don’t do it at, like, 5 a.m. But midday? That’s legal. I’ve worked from home for over a decade now, and I live next to a goddamn highway. Ambient noise is part of the deal when you work remotely. Your neighbors can tune out your lawnmower (and you theirs) with good headphones, or by simply getting used to it. Expecting any neighborhood to be 100 percent quiet at all times is idiotic, unless you’re a rich asshole living in Newport Beach who’s also president of a fascist neighborhood association. Everywhere else, there’ll be the occasional racket. So long as you don’t spend six hours mowing your lawn, and provided you don’t pull start the engine next to your neighbor’s bedroom every chance you get, you’re on solid ground.
Eric:
My nine-year-old is obsessed with the Simpsons on Disney Plus, but only watches the more recent seasons, which are not very good. I’ve tried getting him to watch some prime Conan years and he wants no part of it. I’m assuming from your Twitter feed that you, like myself, have every line from the show’s first nine or so seasons memorized. Is there any chance I get him going on the classic era Simpsons or do I just accept this meager substitute Simpsons as “his” Simpsons?
It’s too late for you. Before we had kids, I happened to own seasons 4–6 of The Simpsons on DVD. When our kids were old enough to watch it (and this was before Disney+ got it, and even before FXX started running the show on a loop), we let them watch those DVDs. It worked. I told them that everything after season eight sucked, and they took it to heart. I stumbled bass-ackwards into making them discerning Simpsons fanboys from the get-go. If my kids were born any sooner, with every Simpsons episode ever a mere click away, I wouldn’t have pulled that shit off. To wit, our eight-year-old will watch pretty much any episode. So he’s nearly in the same boat as your kid. The circumstances have conspired to fuck us over.
But I have successfully kept all my kids from ever seeing the Star Wars prequels. Small victories matter these days.
John:
I've started taking men's multivitamins because I'm over 35 and my colon isn't getting any younger. I get the sugary chewable ones because I'm also a small child. Anyway, I'm looking for a judgment on their proper name. I call them mantamins but my wife says vitamen's. Who is correct?
Neither of you. They’re just vitamins. You don’t have to SpikeTV them. Call them what they are.
I took my kids’ gummy vitamins for a bit when I was recovering from a brain hemorrhage. They were DELICIOUS. I was very sad when I had to stop taking them. Luckily for me, I still have to take AREDS2 vitamins to help prevent macular degeneration. Those ones are not gummy though. Real missed opportunity there, Bausch + Lomb.
James:
Delaware should get to be this whole peninsula (apparently it is called the Delmarva Peninsula but I've never heard someone use that term). Look at Delaware now - it has stupid right angles like it’s some prairie state and it has nothing else going for it. Meanwhile, Maryland and Virginia probably could give two shits about the outer edges of their states East of the Chesapeake. Let Delaware have the whole uvula shaped peninsula and finally have some identity.
Maybe a President Biden would order such a thing, but the DMV isn’t gonna have it. First of all, I’ve heard people use the term Delmarva around here. I’m offended, Masshole-style, by your ignorance. Secondly, the governor of Maryland is a mutoid dipshit named Larry Hogan who has designed all of his policies to please Ocean City umbrella shack owners and no one else in the state. Thirdly, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel connects the tip of the Delmarva schlong to Virginia Beach, which probably makes that thoroughfare important to Virginians in some stupid way.
So while I believe that the 50-state union is a lost cause and that we, as Americans, should all agree to amicably divorce, I think Delmarva should stay the way it is. Inland Delaware is a chicken farm, but the beach parts are nice. I don’t want Delaware to have much more than that, because it’s a pyramid scheme.
Davey:
Let's pretend for the moment that Trump is defeated decisively. The votes come in, the margins are big enough and broad enough that his lawyers can't fight every one and he's forced to give up. What are the odds that he leaves the country, and where would he go? Brazil and Russia are the two that pop into my mind the fastest. Or does he just set up blank-check pardons for himself and all his cronies and stick around, charging the Secret Service to guard him at Mar-a-Lago for the rest of his life?
The latter. He’s not going to Russia because he’s a snowbird and it’s too cold. And he’s not going to Brazil because he fears anyone and anything south of the US border. He would stick around here for the rest of his days, wasting money and oxygen in equal measure. He’ll absolutely start a TV network too, and it’ll be fucking horrible.
I wanna think that, if Trump loses, he’ll leave office immediately, like the deadbeat he is. But he needs his lame duck term to get in that last bit of stealing, genocide, and setting up legal blockades for himself. He’ll do ALL of that from New York and from Palm Beach. He’ll never set foot in Washington again after this, but he’ll stay on the job in an official capacity to sign anything that makes his life easier and yours more miserable. Pretty much the way he has for four years now. The lazy pile of shit.
Dan:
I grabbed a quick hot dog from the stand in front of the local Lowes. Scarfed it down way too fast while standing far enough away from people to have my mask down. Pulled my mask on and ran into the store. I had a massive hot dog burp right into the mask. It just lingered and I nearly barfed. So my question is what would the worst food burps to experience in your mask? Hot dog is bad, but I am thinking any seafood based burps have to be #1.
This is where I confess that I’ve never smelled a burp. I lost my sense of smell two years ago, but even before then, I wasn’t any good at smelling belches from afar. It’s a mouth fart, so I assume it has fart-like qualities. But I never noticed them, not even my own. I have no idea why. Maybe I’m just an oblivious moron.
Sent my wife scurrying from the room the other day with a burp, though. So I still got some magic of my own going on in there.
Email of the week!
Marie:
When my husband and I first started dating I was invited on a trip with his family. Me and (then) boyfriend got a room to ourselves, yay! We went to dinner, I ordered fish. His family suggested a light stroll after dinner. That’s when whatever was baked into that fish suddenly struck me. I barely knew these people and was way too shy to say anything. We go on a leisurely stroll. Theirs was leisurely, mine was tense. I was walking ahead of them hoping to set the pace so we could get back to the goddamn hotel room. They were having none of it. Enjoying the evening. We stop for some ice cream. My forehead is sweating from the pressure building inside me. His parents keep trying to give me samples. But I knew if anything went in, everything would come out. I deny the samples and they are very confused. I’m full I say. Even for a sample. As I finally approach the room, boyfriend is understandably concerned. Asking questions as I shove the keycard into the thingy. We get in the room, I turn to him and say “I’m about to shit my pants, turn on the TV.” and dart to the bathroom. We’ve been married 7 years.
My congrats to you both. Here’s to many more good ones, for you guys AND for the rest of us.
