I had my hair cut in February. Then the pandemic hit. I decided after a few months to let it grow until the election and then cut it off. Then I decided to wait a few more days. It’s the longest my hair has been since college. Maybe longer

It’s an obvious improvement, but it’s the closest I’ve been to people outside my bubble in months. I hope my mask (and that of the barber) did it’s job.

And just for historical reference a shot from when I was 19. The glasses were provided by the Massachusetts DMV.

Well, it was time to get these big old creatures out of the swamp so they stuck them in an appropriate place, the parking lot at decrepit RFK Stadium.

Big Nellie posed with a few. There were dozens but the event was not yet open and the dinos were behind a long chain link fence.

Seeing a full sized T-Rex and other big dinos made Big Nellie feel like an hors d’oeuvre. My favorite was the baby dinos.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. Nearly every woman I know was devastated. Hillary was the speaker at my daughter’s high school graduation. There’s a picture of the two of them shaking hands on stage. We kidded her during the campaign that she had a picture with the future president. Understandably, my daughter took the election results hard.

Fast forward a few years. My daughter was an intern at the Irish embassy in Washington. Joe Biden came to the embassy for an event. Lily was hanging out with Biden’s chauffeur. At the end of the night, the chauffeur let Biden know that someone wanted to meet him. After a bit of a wait Biden’s rather chatty), the former VP came over and posed for some pictures and chatted. You can imagine how she felt when the news broke that he’s going to be the next president.

As a parent all I can say is “THIS IS TOTALLY COOL.”

Big Nellie and I took advantage of awesome weather to ride to the White House to check out the celebration. The Mount Vernon Trail was packed. I was stuck in line after line of as many as ten bikes heading north.

Finally I made it across the river, around the Jefferson Memorial, and up to the Washington Monument. There were hundreds of people joyfully celebrating. Among them were a few Trump diehards. My advice to them, not actually given, would be “When in Boston, take off your Yankees cap.” (I once went to a Sox-Yankees game at Fenway. The idiot next to me wore a Yankees cap and was very vocal. Suffice it to say, I was covered in peanut shells, popcorn and beer by the time the game was over.)

Constitution Avenue was gridlocked. Cars were honking. I walked my bike through the wall of cars and rode up 17th Street. After a few empty blocks thanks to a police blockade, I came upon some more traffic. Nobody was moving. Kids were sticking out sun roofs. Horns were honking. People were waving banners out their car windows. Partay!

I managed to make my way over to Black Lives Matter Plaza (16th Street) It was absolutely jammed with people celebrating. I was wore a mask and a buff, doubled over. I could barely breathe. Just to be safe, I left to avoid too much contact. On my way out of the area, I could see hundreds of people walking toward the celebration.

I spent the summer of 1973 watching the Watergate hearings on TV so I know a skunk when I see one. Knowledge in hand, I have been perplexed why, after such a train wreck of a presidency, Donald Trump has received 67 million votes as of this writing. What are these people thinking?

Then it occurred to me. Trump voters are like my father and Fords.

Sometime in my very early life, my father started buying Ford station wagons. We’re talking about the late 1950s here. My father’s car buying philosophy was simple: keep the car until the warranty expires then trade it in. This was important for two reasons.

First, we lived in the snow belt. If you ditched the car after a couple of years, the inevitable rust was someone else’s problem. Second, American cars of that era were, to use a technical term, crap. Let me give you an example. Around the early to mid 1970s, my father had a Country Squire station wagon. Andy Rooney once ridiculed buyers of this car as idiots because they paid extra, big bucks for the optional wood grain finish. This was actually a big piece of contact paper surrounded by $5 worth of plastic trim. Another feature of the car was that it got something like 8 miles to the gallon in the city and 13 on the highway. I am not making this up. It had an enormous engine that took forever to warm up on cold days. It accelerated like a manatee on land. The kicker was the dashboard.

I grew up in Albany NY (coincidentally, Andy Rooney’s hometown. He also went to my high school, but I digress.) The record low in Albany is -28F in January 1971, my sophomore year in high school. It is not unusual to have a few weeks of sub-zero temperatures every winter. Been there. Done that. One morning my father went out to warm up the car. As the interior heated up, a jagged crack formed right down the middle of the dashboard. Quality is job one.

We had to have a big car because we had seven kids and my father was a gardener. When the “wayback” was not filled with blocks of peat moss and shovels and such, it had huge cushions and a kid or three. (Seatbelts? You must be joking. My mom used to let us stand on the front seat of the car when we were little. I am not making this up.)

Another feature of this piece of automotive dung was the fact that it was so bulky that it was nearly impossible to parallel park. Guess which car I took my driving test in? The night before my test, my father set garbage cans up on the street and I practiced parallel parking between them. Clang! Clang! During the test, I put the car in reverse, looked over my shoulder and prayed. Perfect! I couldn’t do it again in 100 tries.

Day after day for my entire childhood my father would bitch about his crappy Ford station wagon. Yet every two or three years when the warranty expired, he’d trade his car in for another Ford station wagon that was, incredibly, even crappier than the one he had. (In the mid-1960s he bought a two-door Mustang instead. He kept it for a few months. We kids loved it but you couldn’t get a block of peat moss in it to save yourself. So he traded it in on another wagon.)

So why did he keep buying these shitboxes? My theory is that he bought Fords one after the other because lord knows Chevrolets and Plymouths could actually be worse. Sometime after I left home, he threw caution to the wind and bought a Chevy wagon. It was a vast improvement.

Now he may have been onto something. My younger brother once bought a VW Golf. Its transmission died the day after the warranty expired. I am not making this up either. (To its credit, the dealer honored the warrantee anyway.)

If you are under 30, I promise you that you have no idea how lucky you are Even the worst shit box on the road today is infinitely better than Fords on the 1960s and 1970s.

Which brings me back to the Donald. Why would people vote for him even after nearly four years of demonstrating that he is indisputably the worst president in U. S. history? I mean, I bet his hair cracks in half at -10F. People vote for him because they are afraid that any alternative is likely to be worse. I mean a new president could have hair that cracks at +10F. We can’t have that, now can we? It’s a variation on what Milton Friedman called the tyranny of the status quo.

Aren’t you glad the election is almost behind us.

For the record, I am a Honda man.