Tossing My B,a,b,b,it,t Tubes

Something strange happened in our house last week.  It was this: I cleaned out a closet.  If you could see the inside of our closets you might think we were hoarders.  Maybe we are.

Anyway, in this one, now clean, closet (there are many others that need cleaning and plenty of drawers to boot), I found the tubes I often used to perform a solo clarinet piece entitled B,a,b,b,it,t by composer Donald Martino.  Written as a birthday present for his teacher, Milton Babbit, it is as much performance art as it is tuneless pointillistic atonality.

B,a,b,b,it,t requires "tubes" - also called "extensions" - which are to be periodically stuck into the end of the clarinet, extending the length of the instrument and thus creating pitches below the normal range.  Once the tube has served its purpose it is pulled out of the clarinet and unceremoniously dropped on the floor.   

I made my set of tubes from rolled-up cardboard and masking tape when I was a graduate student sometime between 1974 and 1976.  I had enough extra cardboard to make a carrying tube for them.

I gave up playing the clarinet in the nineties.  I stuck these B,a,b,b,it,t tubes, case and all, into the very closet where I found them last week.  Years had not been kind to them.  The masking tape had become dry and cracked.  Some of the tubes had been crushed.  The case was falling apart.  Briefly I wondered whether I could bequeath the set to some weird young clarinetist somewhere.  Don't be silly, I told myself.  Their uselessness was obvious.

I knew what I must do.  I had to throw them away.

But hold on . . . before I did that . . . I decided to take a picture of them.  This would soften the blow of tossing a sentimental useless artifact of my long gone personal musical history into the trash.  And I continued, (trying to soften the blow even more) I could write about this on Mixed Meters and post the picture and maybe thereby repurpose my damned old blog for which my interest has been waning.  Mixed Meters could become an archive of discarded relics of interest only to myself.  (This is not a completely new idea.)

Here's the picture of my tubes.

But hold on . . . maybe I could take it one step farther . . . why not add a recording of myself playing B,a,b,b,it,t?  It took me a while to locate and then a second while to digitize.  In this day and age you probably expect a video.  Alas, I gave up performing long before videos were just one click away.

Here's my audio version:

Listen to  Donald Martino, B,a,b,b,it,t for clarinet with extensions, performed by David Ocker, clarinet - June 29, 1980 at I.D.E.A. Studio, Santa Monica CA - 241 seconds

This performance was part of a solo clarinet recital, something I did a handful of times throughout my 20-year clarinet "career".  While I was at it I digitized the whole concert.  Not nearly so wince-inducing as I feared, although I was having my problems that night.   Here's another piece from the same concert:

Listen to  J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasy, arranged for solo clarinet by Gustave Langenus, performed by David Ocker, clarinet - June 29, 1980 at I.D.E.A. Studio, Santa Monica, CA - 369 seconds

But hold on . . . there was still more . . . my recital was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.  Pretty damn amazing that the largest Southern California newspaper, back in the days when newspapers were actually important, would pay a music critic to visit a struggling second-floor dance studio above a Radio Shack to hear an unknown clarinetist play abstruse contemporary music without any accompaniment.  (Well, there was one piece where my friend Jimmy Hildebrandt played drums.)

And it was a good review overall.  So I modestly offer it, if you're curious.

Click on any picture to enlargen it.

But hold on . . . and this is the last time for holding on, I promise . . . there's an important personal issue to be dealt with here, one I'm having difficulty with.

What am I going to do with all this stuff?  Remember all those closets and drawers I mentioned?  There are a lot more memory laden items where those tubes came from.

There are my Mother's old family photo albums and piano music.  My 5-year old hand immortalized in chipped gold-painted plaster.  Tapes of my bar mitzvah, my high school band concerts, almost every one of my college recitals and a 24-hour environmental recording made outside my apartment just two blocks from the Hollywood freeway, starting at noon on December 31, 1979 (it was source material for a tape piece).   Pretty much every copy of every piece of music I've ever written and every recording ever made of them and every abstract drawing I've ever made and a sheaf of blackened manuscript paper with tens of thousands of random black scratches (from testing my ink pen before there were music notation programs).  There are boxes of old computer disks, programs plus useless data, together with the printed manuals along with the hard drives from every computer I've owned for over 20 years.  I'm guessing those drives have lots of important digital stuff I can't bear to part with on them as well.  There are old films (see below), videos, reel-to-reel tapes galore, and cassettes and CDs up the wazoo.  Old music programs, press releases, reviews (some of which only mention my name in passing) and printouts of downloaded articles I read once and thought I might want to return to.  Pretty much every book I've ever owned - many of which are still in boxes in the basement, unpacked since our last move 21 years ago.

I've hoarded all of this (and more) with the vague plan that I'd do something with it someday.  Most of it has memories - my memories.  I labor under the delusion that holding onto my memories is important.  I want to remember these things and I know my memory isn't what it used to be.  My brain, you know.

I'm ambivalent about spending a big chunk of my present life dealing with all these things.  It wasn't that great of a past - although it was okay, I guess.  I'm old enough now to know that I don't have forever yet to go.  In my best moods I still hope for two decades yet, but one never knows.  Cataloging all this crap is probably not a good use of my energies or my time.  If I can't bring myself to toss all of it, at least I can apologize to whomever will have do the tossing when I'm gone.

I saved it all for a reason - it was once meaningful to me.  I wouldn't have taken the picture of the tubes if they still had absolutely no value.  And, as long as there's an Internet, I'll be able to refresh my memory of them and of how hard they were to toss out.

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Here's a short music video I did to an early home movie.  I was not quite 2 years old.

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And here's the Times' review, in text instead of picture, so Google will find it the next time someone searches for Dark as a Dungeon by Christian Wolff.

Ocker in Solo Clarinet Recital

by John Henken 

July 1, 1980 

Los Angeles Times

A solo clarinet recital would seem to promise a surfeit of unadorned tootling.  But Sunday evening at the I.D.E.A. Studio in Santa Monica raconteur and clarinetist David Ocker carried it off nicely: a loose, intriguing program done with wit, spirit and abundant technical glitter.

Ocker opened vigorously with Stravinsky's Three Pieces (1919). Succinct, jazzy and with ample interpretive leeway, they represented a prevailing current.  Donald Martino's "A Set for Clarinet" (1954) is certainly in much the same mold, though more dependent on literal jazz formulations.  It was Ocker's interpretive stance, however, that provided the most common ground.  Both brash and beguiling, he played with marvelous fluency and expressive nuance.

It was the performance also that pulled through Robert Jacobs' "Inner Light" (1979), a piece with all the potential of "Bolero" for popular abuse.  With percussionist James Hildebrandt, Ocker kept the relentless rhythmic drive purposeful, the bluesy theme passionate but not unduly primitive.

After watching a man hold a black stick in h is mouth for a while, a air of surrealism can grip the watcher.  In "Several Unrelated Events" (1976) by John Steinmetz, this musical Dada effect becomes tangible.  Fortunately, Ocker is an actor with a nice sense of timing and "Events" emerged with humor and sparkle.

Martino's "B,A,B,B,IT,T" (1966), a musical birthday card for composer Milton Babbitt, exploits some improbable sounds produced by inserting paper tubes into the bell-less bore of the instrument.  Martin probably had more in mind, but Sunday, funny noises sufficed.

Also on the program was an arrangement of Bach's "Chromatic" Fantasy (stunning) and Fugue (ho-hum, with multiple Ockers on tape), and Christian Wolff's "Dark as a Dungeon" (1977), a mild exercise in pitch manipulation, particularly octave displacement.  Ocker served both well.

This extraordinary clarinetist also provided verbal annotation for the program.  "Mo's Vacation" (1978) by Frank Zappa made a nice story, but the piece proved to be routine atonal wandering, punctuated by Casbah riffs.

Tubas

Right now the world needs the occasional escape from politics.  What could be less political than . . . tubas?

Mixed Meters has given you tubas before.  Most prominently, way back in 2008, in the post Tubas on the Beach in Art and Advertising. which showed two actual print ads featuring scantily clad women sporting that most feminine of all instruments, the sousaphone (which is just a tuba bent differently).   About a year later we had the much more male oriented Tubas and the Federal Reserve.   Tubas can also be found in this post (scroll down).

Ever since then I've been collecting the occasional tuba photograph or cartoon just for today.  Click on any picture for an enlargement.  We begin with a series of tuba related comics by Gary Larson, creator of the Far Side.

No review of humorous tuba drawings should overlook Gerard Hoffnung.  Besides being a cartoonist, Hoffnung actually played the tuba.  The last panel shows a tubist walking his instrument on a leash across the opening measures of the solo part to the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto.  (Hands up all of you who actually knew there was a Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto.)

Now the category called Women With Tubas, beginning with the most wholesome, a banner advertising our local music school.  Next, Mrs. Emma Peel (as played by Diana Rigg, both video and still) on The Avengers television series.  Then it gets kinky.

This cartoon, by Claude Serre, might be interest mainly to music copyists such as myself.  I guess that's the proper notation for "blatt" even in that altissimo register.

And finally - Tuba with Tentacles (a refrigerator magnet left over from a monthly hipster gathering at the Natural History Museum where Leslie works), Tuba as Ostrich and Wagner Tubas as Urinals.

A picture of a Wagner Tuba made into a lamp can be found a ways into this post.

Thanks to Mixed Meters' remaining reader, EricNP - who provided the video clip of Mrs. Peel, tubist.

Other MM posts with lots of pictures:
Half Grassed
Collected Selfies
Discarded Gloves
Tile Patterns
Camera Shake
Discarded Gloves
Facelike Part 1 - Part 2
Hidden Meanings
Branches Before Blue

Still here? Here's something political, about inequality, just so this post is not totally pointless.

And here's Johnathan Pie.  Outrage!

Albert Marsh (1930-2017)

Leslie and I were very saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Albert Marsh.  We met Albert and his husband Johnnathan through an accident of real estate when they moved into the house next door.   That was nearly 25 years ago.  For a few years our lives met figuratively and literally over the back fence.  They became our adopted family, a relationship which has persisted in the years since we moved away from that street.

Albert grew up in a Texas border-town and, after college in the fifties, settled in New York City, then San Francisco and finally in Los Angeles which is where he met Johnnathan.  He worked as an architect and designer.  He was also an artist.  I really like his geometrical three-dimensional paintings - or maybe they should be called wall sculptures.  Later in life he became interested in shamanism, drumming and designing jewelry.  Some of his art and his necklaces can be seen in the pictures below.

Here's a caricature by the otherwise unidentified B.J. from Albert's time in San Francisco.  Then an apparently blissful moment I snapped over dinner one recent evening.

Here are two shots of Albert visiting our home.  In the first he is sitting with Leslie's Aunt Rose.  In the second he is investigating my new iPad, completely unaware that he is shooting selfie after selfie with his thumb.  Later I combined the shots into this animated gif.

A Halloween costume and striking a pose in his backyard.

Leslie and I send our profound condolences to Johnnathan Korver, Albert's husband.  Johnn wrote about Albert on Facebook and he kindly gave me permission to reproduce his thoughts here:

Dear Friends—It is with extreme heartbreak that I write this post today. My beloved husband, Albert Marsh passed away quietly and comfortably early yesterday morning. As I knew he was transitioning soon, I held his hand and played his favorite music with my IPad placed on his pillow. He was listening to some Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Karen Carpenter.

Albert and I have been together since March of 1989. We had a commitment ceremony in June of 1994 and were married in Pasadena, Ca in March of 2014, two days before our 25th Anniversary. 

As many of you know I always referred to him as My Sweet Albert. Although we were 19 years apart, our two generations were perfectly matched as we learned so much about each others experiences, and opinions. He was a spiritual being with so much to teach me. One of the first things he taught me was to not define myself by tragic experiences and take responsibility for being the only one to be able to change my circumstances should I not like them. I’m certainly one to bitch and moan about the same thing too many times. He said to me quite clearly, “if this is a new story or problem, I’d be glad to listen and perhaps give some advice…if it’s something I’ve heard before, and you haven’t done anything about it, I’m not interested in hearing it”. That’s great advice.

Thank you all for the wonderful and kind emails, messages and phone calls. I’m truly touched by them and I know he would be too. So take care of one another, listen to one another, and work together to solve problems and issues that put you both on the same page. Write your life screenplay together and Star in the Film of your lives. You will be rewarded with The Academy Award of your life.

Oh and one other thing, put the hammer, nails and other tools away after you’re done using them…..Trust me on this one.  I love you all.

Once same-sex marriage became legal, Albert and Johnnathan held their marriage ceremony in our living room.   To commemorate the event and to thank us, they gave us this work by Albert.  Everyday the beautiful piece reminds us of him and of the happiness he and Johnn shared.  On the back it says:

"Twin Flames" collage by Albert Marsh, circa 1985

Reframed February 29, 2014

to David and Leslie

From Johnnathan and Albert

On the occasion of our wedding day

March 1, 2014

One more picture because of the big smiles - Albert and Leslie making a ring around the tree.

Mixed Meters Attempts Political Optimism

Progressives could use some good news. It’s pretty bleak out there right now for the far left.  Hard it is to write something even minimally positive.

The best news we might get in the near term - the next three years or so - is that some of the front and center political stories, the ones we can’t escape daily, the ones that scream headlines at us from every media pore, might somehow resolve themselves without turning into utter catastrophes. There’s an awful lot of assuming the worst at the moment.  Doom and gloom is par for the course.

Assuming the worst is not an unrealistic standpoint, it’s just depressing.   And, if we're lucky, maybe the bullets will only graze us, not score direct hits.  Trusting to luck may be the best we can do.

For example, maybe the Republican scrooges won’t be able to replace our bad but functional healthcare bill, the ACA (aka Obamacare).  They got within one vote of pushing exactly that agenda last week.  They failed.  That's lucky.  (Don't be fooled.  They'll be back.)

Politicians are well known for promising things they can’t deliver, but in the case of health care the Republicans have set a whole new standard.  They've promised repeal and replace so many times that even they felt the need to give the impression of having told the truth, to make good on their promise any which way, by hook or by crook.  Their parliamentary antics would be pretty funny to watch, like in a movie, if real-world consequences weren’t so serious.

Try to think of Congress as a Keystone Cops movie.  Just remember, they're trying to do bad things and, as a country, we're better off when they screw up at their jobs.

Another example — it might be that the Russia/Trump campaign story won't amount to anything.   And maybe the United States won’t be racked by another impeachment.  Once the dust settles it’s possible that there’ll be no smoking gun.  This might teach us to go into future elections on high alert to any outside influence, maybe even with a tiny bit of contrition over past U.S. attempts to influence elections in other countries.  (Who am I kidding?  Contrition?)

And we can hope that Russiagate, when it’s finally unwound to the very end, might teach all Americans that someone who brings only his shady business ethics to the office of President is not qualified for that job.  And maybe he'll bumble through his entire term without being removed from office, without giving the other Republicans a do over.

Here's another one - maybe our environment is not completely doomed.  Yes, Trump’s minions are toiling unnoticed underground at the EPA and the Energy Department to unlock extra huge profits for environment-plundering mega-corporations.  Meanwhile, maybe America’s free market system, so touted by Koch-brother-funded think tanks, will allow state governments and enlightened businesses and concerned individuals to protect bits of the environment on their own as best they can.

Like the famous Hebrew National hot dog commercial, Americans can start answering to an authority higher than the government, in this case Mother Earth herself, except the issue is how to dispose of our shit rather than silly rules about what we eat to produce it in the first place.

One thing's for sure, whatever happens on any of these stories (and there are many more equally important topics each with similarly small bits of hidden optimism which can only be revealed by double talk and self delusion), our brazen liar president will find a way to declare himself victorious on all of them.  He’s our own Indiana Jones-ish political anti-hero: he cuts a dashing figure, spins every story to look like a winner, gets help on the hard stuff from shady stunt men and then takes all the credit and all the close-ups.

We left-wingers can only watch as the political right and the radical political right duke it out for control of the ruling Republican party with one hand while attempting to run the country at the same time with the other.  So far mostly they've ended up slugging themselves in the face.  This has resulted in lots of failure - so much failure you're probably getting tired of failure, to paraphrase I forget who.  That failure is pure manure for left-wing optimism.

So - with dumb luck and with the help of Trump-family administration incompetence plus Republican congressional disfunction and then with even more even dumber luck, we as a nation might muddle through.  There'll be one hell of a lot of crap to clean up afterwards.  Piles and piles of it.  The many self-inflicted bruises will take a long time to heal.  And if something big happens on Donald's watch - a North Korean bomb or a stock market crash or a terrorist attack or merely a generic, garden variety national crisis - all optimism will be summarily cancelled.

There you have it.  That's my "positive" message.  Aren't you glad I'm trying to think on the bright side?

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Meanwhile - here's the scariest article I read this month: Meet the Group of Right-Wing Christians Who Believe President Trump Was Chosen by God

Here's a quote:

Seven Mountains’ strategic goal is for Christians to seize control of all aspects of civil and political society by whatever means necessary. This includes the media, arts, education, government, religion, business, and family. Once these believers secure all of these “seven mountains,” Christ will return. And for POTUS Shield, Donald Trump is the guy to do it.

First Person Rants

We at Mixed Meters love rants.  By "we" of course I mean me, David Ocker, who single-handedly writes every word of this blog with his two bare hands.  Personally I really hate it when he mixes first person writing with third person.  I'm sure you agree.

Anyway, as I was saying, we adore good rants, especially political rants.   There's an awful lot to rant about nowadays, don't you know, but good clean progressive ranting still seems quite rare.  I guess all the real energy in the Democratic Party is going into normalizing our so-called president or raising wads of money for losing candidates in Congressional by-elections.  Since I don't have the time or energy to write my own rants at the moment, I'd like to share a two good ones I found online.

Rant one is from a comedian named Lee Camp.   Never heard of him.  His bio says he wrote for the Onion so he must have a firm grip on reality.  In this piece his target is the so-called debate on health care.  He strongly emphasizes the "so-called" angle.  The rant title is "Here's why there's no legitimate debate about healthcare in this country."  Go read the whole thing.  Here's a quote.

Sure, there are red-faced politicians screaming about one make-believe side or the other, but that doesn’t mean there’s a legitimate debate.  In order for there to be a debate, there needs to exist two sides that – if argued well – could seem to hold merit.  But that’s nowhere to be found in the current healthcare debate.  Instead there are two sides, both of which are disingenuous, both of which are corrupted by big money, both of which are hardly even SIDES;  instead they’re two separate spots in the center of whatever proverbial thing we’re picturing having sides.  (I’m picturing a duck.  Not sure why.)

As we at Mixed Meters always say, if the U.S. wanted health care for its citizens we'd pass single-payer.   Instead, the politcos are keeping extra busy trying to decide whether to maintain Obamacare as corporate welfare for insurance companies or to just give the richest people in the country a direct tax break.

For good measures, here's another quote:

We are debating between two horrific, criminal versions of healthcare designed to make people rich off of the pain and suffering of every American.  Yes, Obamacare is better.  Yes, Trumpcare is worse.  Yes, I don’t care.  By acting like this is a legitimate debate, we are subconsciously solidifying cultural hegemony for the idea that healthcare should be something exploited for profit.  It should not.  Stop dignifying that thought process.

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The health care debate, of course, is far from over.  It's like the war in Afghanistan or the Arab-Israeli conflict.  None of these will have definitive resolutions during my lifetime.  On-going stalemates have become incredibly prevalent in American politics.  That's why I think it's wise to take the long view.

Few politicians in America are as qualified to give the long-view as Ralph Nader.   Today's Ralph rant is called "Ralph Nader: The Democrats Are Unable To Defend The U.S. From The 'Most Vicious' Republican Party In History".  It's an interview in The Intercept which sets the scene so:

The Democratic Party is at its lowest ebb in the memory of everyone now alive. It’s lost the White House and both houses of Congress.  On the state level it’s weaker than at any time since 1920.  And so far in 2017 Democrats have gone 0 for 4 in special elections to replace Republican members of Congress who joined the Trump administration.

How did it come to this?  One person the Democratic Party is not going to ask, but perhaps should, is legendary consumer advocate and three-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

How, according to Nader, did the Dems lose their way?  Here's some excerpts:

I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.  The first big one was in 1979.  Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money.  Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan. And the Republicans took note.  That means a soft tone, smiling … You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have [that] type of presentation. [Democrats] were still thinking Republican conservatives were dull, stupid, and humorless.  They didn’t adjust.

Raising money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from health insurance companies, the energy companies, kept [Democrats] from their main contrasting advantage over the Republicans, which is, in FDR’s parlance, “The Democratic Party is the party of working families, Republicans are the party of the rich.”  That flipped it completely and left the Democrats extremely vulnerable.

In the course of the interview Nader lists multiple millstones that serve as milestones in the demise of the Democrats.  I can't list them all.  Go read it.

The Democrats began the process of message preceding policy.  No — policy precedes message.  That means they kept saying how bad the Republicans are. They campaigned not by saying, look how good we are, we’re going to bring you full Medicare [for all], we’re going to crack down on corporate crime against workers and consumers and the environment, stealing, lying, cheating you.  We’re going to get you a living wage.  We’re going to get a lean defense, a better defense, and get some of this money and start rebuilding your schools and bridges and water and sewage systems and libraries and clinics.

Instead of saying that, they campaign by saying “Can you believe how bad the Republicans are?”  Now once they say that, they trap their progressive wing, because their progressive wing is the only segment that’s going to change the party to be a more formidable opponent. Because they say to their progressive wing, “You’ve got nowhere to go, get off our back.”

Notice that Nader gives a list of things the Dems should be talking about.  Medicare for all.  Infrastructure.  Living wage.  Consumer protections against corporate malfeasance.  Democratic leaders don't actually talk about such positive things.  Instead they talk about how bad Trump and his cronies are, about Trump's tweets, about Russia's election interference.  Hey, I don't call the Democrats "my second least favorite political party" without a good reason.

A couple last Nader quotes (or read the article here):

Republicans, when they lose they fight over ideas, however horrific they are.  Tea Party ideas, libertarian ideas, staid Republican ideas.  They fight.  But the Democrats want uniformity, they want to shut people up.  So they have the most deficient transition of all.  They have the transition of Nancy Pelosi to Nancy Pelosi, four-time loser against the worst Republican Party in the Republican Party’s history.

There are some people who think the Democratic Party can be reformed from within by changing the personnel.  I say good luck to that.  What’s happened in the last twenty years?  They’ve gotten more entrenched. Get rid of Pelosi, you get Steny Hoyer.  You get rid of Harry Reid, you get [Charles] Schumer. Good luck.

Unfortunately, to put it in one phrase, the Democrats are unable to defend the United States of America from the most vicious, ignorant, corporate-indentured, militaristic, anti-union, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-posterity [Republican Party] in history.

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Let us close this month with a view of American politics by my favorite political ranter from across the pond, Jonathan Pie.  If you don't want to face the facts about the Democratic party, an anti-Trump rant might help you normalize the Trump administration a little more.

Here's a quick quote just to give you the flavor:

It’s not funny any more.   It’s gone beyond being able to take the piss.  It’s all very well me being able to go Ohhhh, he looks like beer-battered sheep bollock with, instead of hair, a whole damp shredded wheat biscuit on his head.  You know.  He is that.  But also he’s also clearly a tyrant.  A despot.  A tin-pot despot with shredded wheat for hair.

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P.S.  If you're one of those trogs who still blames Ralph Nader for George W.'s election in 2000, here's the link for you.  Also, we at Mixed Meters always say "I'd like to thank you for reading to the end."

Normalization Fatigue

Donald Trump has been President of the United States for over four months. I am sick of it.

Please note that I just called him Donald Trump.  I didn't call him Donald Fucking Trump as I always did before the election.  Nor did I refer to him with some third person pseudo-pronoun, like "the new president" or an acronym ("SCROTUS") as I have since.

Calling him by his actual name is a sure sign of normalization.

Normalization is wearing me down.

I know that this fatigue is not unique to me.   Indeed those Americans who are actively and valiantly resisting the evils of the Trump administration (not to mention all the additional evils of the fucking Republicans in Congress) must be suffering from normalization far more than I.  The resisters are the heroes.  I'm just a guy who has a hard time finding enough energy to write one angry blog post per month.

It turns out that normalizing Donald Trump is strenuous work.  Based only on the behavior of every previous president, the man keeps doing completely unpredictable things.  In his few months in office Donald Trump has proven to be personally erratic, egotistical, boorish, bigoted, angry and greedy.

It's hard to understand how his unwavering base can still support him.   Somehow they do.  They evidently are okay living in a country that's becoming more and more erratic, egotistical, boorish, bigoted, angry and greedy.

For someone in office for such a short period of time, President Trump is beset by many problems: extremely low approval ratings, a special prosecutor investigating his ties to Putin and Russia, an otherwise disorganized opposition baying in unison for his impeachment, disorganization in his own Republican party baying for tax cuts for billionaires.

My opinion is that those problems couldn't happen to a nicer guy.  And I mean that quite literally. If Donald Trump were a nicer guy - even just a little bit nicer - many of his problems would disappear.

However, it appears that Donald Trump is a new kind of politician: a jerk incapable of even insincere gestures of reconciliation to his opponents.  There are forty four more months left in his first term. He is raising money for his 2020 re-election campaign.

His re-election slogan is "Keep America Great".  Cart Before Horse.

President Donald J. Trump is going to drag the United States through a lot more mud and shit before the next presidential election.  His supporters, those people in the other bubble, will cheer mindlessly even when the mud and shit splatters on them.  For the rest of us, the fatigue has only just begun.

Meanwhile, here's something out of the Other Bubble: a paragraph from an apparently real White House press release describing President Donald J. Trump, "great leader":

President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor . . . and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.

If only.