September 8 1974, Snake River Canyon, Idaho. A battered dude named Evel Knievel straddles a Skycycle X-2 at the base of a ramp. 1600 feet away across the canyon is the ramp’s twin. No motorcycle can make that jump, so the Skycycle is a skyrocket rigged to blast him across. He revs and starts up the ramp. His red-white-and-blue starred white jumpsuit and cape make him look like Captain America after some questionable life choices. 3.5 million spectators watch at home and another 15,000 people have crowded the canyon area to see the spectacle. What everyone is about to see is as American as apple pie and unaffordable healthcare.  

We humans have long enjoyed spectacle. Droves gathered in the Colosseum to watch humans maul and brain each other. In the UK, families would pack a lunch and go watch the public executions or public punishments. Nothing complements a fruit cup and a ham sandwich like the sound of someone’s spine snapping on the rack. In Elizabethan London, dog and bear baiting were rabidly enjoyed by a drooling audience. Sometimes the bear would break loose of their chains and turn on the audience. All in the price of the ticket.   

So, when Europeans showed up in the New World, they brought their inherent want of spectacle. And this was fortuitous because America was filled with things of size and grandeur. Canyons, waterfalls, cliffs, rivers, animals, party subs. So it was only a matter of time before someone recognized the opportunities within this grandeur to entertain people and make money. After all, there’s little point in having a grand canyon unless we can pay to watch someone jump off of it. Thus arose a profession aimed at entertaining spectators at the doer’s peril. The dare devil.

The dare devil specialized in climbing up, walking over, or jumping off high things in front of a crowd. In 1859, Charles Blondin became the first person to visit Niagara Falls and pointed out that what was missing from this natural wonder was a man walking above it on a very narrow rope. A mistake he corrected. In 1901, a schoolteacher named Annie Taylor celebrated her 63^rd birthday by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel she designed – but not before testing out the barrel on her cat. Both survived. Taylor was a widower and her barrel stunt was to lead to financial security for the remainder of her life. Unfortunately, her manager stole her barrel and ran off to Chicago (the traditional destination for barrel thieves). She spent the money she’d made trying to track it down. In the end, she had nothing and had made an enemy for life in her cat. She should have just moonlighted as an Uber driver like all the other teachers.  

At the forefront of America’s early dare devil craze was Jersey Sam Patch. Dubbed the Jersey Jumper, in the early 1820s Patch had made a name for himself jumping from a mill into a reservoir. Noting his rise in popularly, he moved up to jumping off waterfalls. At Niagara Falls, he jumped from Goat Island into the roiling waters below. People came from far and paid to watch him jump. But Patch was more than a jumper; he was the forerunner of Knievel in his swagger and personality. He was witty and vocal. A wit evidently lost in his most famous and blindingly bland aphorism ‘Some things can be done as well as others’. He walked around towns in all white clothing (in the early 1820s, this was like going to a bar wearing a solar system diorama on your head). He had a pet black bear. According to the flyers for his jumps, sometimes the black bear jumped too. Like Annie Taylor’s cat, the black bear probably wondered where it had all gone wrong for him.

I’m walking into my doctor’s office. It’s 7:45 am. I am carrying a vial of my own mountain-sourced, mineral-rich, pristine, untouched urine. The nurse greets me warmly. She eyes up my arm and accepts my warm bottle of urine. She points me to a chair.

My arm is tied off at the bicep and I am told to exercise to work up a vein. In any other time or place this wouldn’t be hard. I learned the trick as a kid: let your arm dangle, squeeze fist rapidly, and suddenly you look like Stallone in Rocky. But in the early morning, my veins seem to have a sixth sense about being tapped and they are shy. They have descended into the sunken place and watch in quiet as the nurse probes. The nurse has none of it. She prods until a little blue earthworm appears. She goes in with her needle and hooks in her venom vials. I become interested in the clock.  

She takes my blood pressure and nods at the numbers.

‘It’s a little high.’

‘Um.’ I am fairly sure that 145 is never a good number unless it’s the score of a basketball team you have bet for.

‘You are nervous, you just gave blood,’ she says. I finished off her list of excuses ‘and I walked here [pause for effect] from IP!’

‘Oh, pbbt,’ she scoffs our concern. ‘The doctor will be here at 8.’

Despite our nerve-quelling dialogue, the hot second my ass hits the chair in the waiting room I consult Dr. Google to find out about blood pressures. According to Dr. Google, 145 is not a number you want anywhere near a blood pressure unless it belongs to your arch-nemesis and he lives next to Dennis the Menace.

On Saturday afternoon I go out with the doggy. We step out and we are instantly engulfed in a thick, soupy mist. I can’t see the metro station – which is enormous and only about 100 yards away. After a few more steps the dog looks back at me with a ‘really?’ look on her face. I shrug at her and we move forth.

After a few more yards still we cannot see either the metro or the building – both too large to lose while being immediately nearby and not drunk on absinthe. Though I don’t put much direct thought into it, something about the scenario seems familiar. Something scary is lingering at the edges of my thought process.

But I shake away these misgivings. We’re in our front park, for Pete’s sake. And it’s Saturday at around 2 pm – Cheat Day! What could go wrong on Cheat Day? Only a monster would kill a man on the day he can eat whatever he wants. Only a monster.

And that’s when I realize what I’m reminded about – just about every horror movie I have ever seen. The one that particularly concerns me is Stephen King’s The Mist. If you haven’t seen this feelgood charmer, it’s about a group of strangers that get caught inside a grocery store together when a mist swallows their town and moves them into an alternate dimension (or moves an alternate dimension’s residents to this one). Anyone who goes into the mist dies – badly, and at the hands of other-dimensional spiders.   

I am now in the mist. Like, well into the mist. I begin looking at the ground and its environs. I mistook a plastic bag for a giant spider. When I bump into a trashcan I nearly had a heart attack. My shih tzu is not the kind of dog known to fight off other-dimensional poisonous spiders. And neither am I. Since it’s 2 pm and November in Prague, it’s going to get dark soon. I pick the dog up and we run home. Once inside, I breathe a sigh.       

Like most of you, I am relatively susceptible to horror movies. When I was a kid, we watched Friday the 13^th at a neighbor’s house. To get home from this neighbor’s home, we had to walk through a forest. I came very close to gripping a tree and sending for my mother. This terror made itself known to me a few years later when I saw Nightmare on Elm Street with a buddy. I was underage and so was he, but his parents got us in the Eric 4 Feasterville and we felt like such big boys. That is, of course, until I went home later with a glazed mustache of movie theater popcorn and realized that I had to fall asleep. See, the catch 22 of dealing with one Mr. Frederick Kreuger is that he gets you in your dreams when you are asleep. You can’t win. I hope the guy who came up with that one has a beach house. But I also hope it’s infested with Stephen King’s spiders.

This is the fun of horror movies – the tension it creates. What could be better than being one abrupt sound – a phone-ring, a sneeze, a door-knock – away from screeching at the top of your lungs? In the movie, this tension is released by the scare, the jump, the graphic visual of a hockey-masked psychopath slicing a bikini-clad teen open with a machete. You know, the norm.

But when you get home and the girl from The Ring lurks behind each door, there’s nothing there to release the tension. Sure, you could argue that there is no real tension there because, well, you know, the girl from The Ring isn’t behind my door (right? Right?!!), but still. Horror movies are the gift that keep on giving. And so I have come to terms with the facts that every camping trip reminds me that The Hills Have Eyes. Every stay at a hotel reminds me that every boy’s best friend is his mother. Every fun afternoon at a warm beach in summertime reminds me that I thought it was safe to go back into the water. Then I look for fins. Every jaunt to an arctic research station is marred by some Thing.

Later on in the evening, I subtly try to barter doing dishes for bringing out the dog. I’ll give anything to avoid the outside, the mist isn’t gone – it’s just dark now. However, Burke has designs to hold onto the dish job. I finally relent. As I am getting on my shoes, she puts out a peace offering.   

“Here, look at this shih tzu. It looks like Maisy, but a little wonkier.”

The picture is a shih tzu who has the same white and gray markings my dog has, but this one has matted fur and a tail that has seen better days. My shih tzu’s crooked teeth look a little like a graveyard. This shih tzu’s teeth are so crooked it could pick its nose with its bottom canines. And while my pup has a wonky shih tzu eye, this one is so cross-eyed it could read two different newspapers on opposite walls. Basically, it looks like a cute shih tzu who’s seen some shit.  

“Cute!”

I leave with the dog.

Downstairs, I text Burke: It’s like Maisy’s ‘Us’ dog.

PJ and I sat huddled over my ballot in early October. We were at his kitchen table. His daughter came close, a melting chocolate bar painting her fingers.

“No!” we both shrieked, setting off a lifelong and terribly specific phobia.

“Nothing can go wrong with this one.” We were one second away from slipping on rubber gloves and using tweezers and a glue pad to lick the stamp. We both wanted a beer, but would not dare compromise sobriety before this ballot was in the hands of a postal engineer. When we had completed the surgical application of ballot to secret envelope, secret envelope to envelope, and envelope to my bag, we let out a breath. I went to the post office and prayed for an accidentally good day from the Czech Post Office.

I know it’s cliched at this point, but this is the most important election of my lifetime. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with Republican vs. Democrat. It’s the fact that Donald Trump is a walking bag of feces from any animal you’d care to name. He is the most miserable person who has ever walked the planet.

He’s a billionaire – he was born into a billionaire family – and he never stops complaining. Everyone is against him. He’s marauded by all. Dems. Crooked Hillary. Sleepy Joe. Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Low Energy Jeb. (Also Dems and their voters are thieves, scum, and garbage, but Dog forbid if someone on our side calls his people that.) He’s a charlatan, stupid, allergic to reason and intelligence, and in the last decade he hasn’t made one successfully coherent thought out loud. His ‘speeches’ sound like Captain Beefheart lyrics read backwards underwater in ancient Babylonian. When Donald talks, he sounds how a snake regurgitating another snake looks. On top of this, he is human herpes. He does not stop and he will not go away. He is an unrelenting source – day in, day out – of grievances, hate, anger, and attacks. I have never cast eyes on a Tweet in which he simply wishes someone a happy birthday, congratulates a team on a victory, sends out a positive message to the world. Everything has a carve, a swirl, an attack. Merry Christmas, even to the CROOKED Dems, who are trying to LIE THEIR WAY TO A VICTORY WHEN IT’S CLEAR IT WAS RIGGED! Also, happy New Year. But not to Shifty Schiff and Crazy Bernie!

Ten years of this. The exhaustion is overwhelming.