Politics are punchlines already

I live in the United States, which, for all of 2016 and lots of 2015, means I've been bombarded with crap about the upcoming election. Everybody wants to know, especially, what I think about that carrot-looking fellow with the hair. Personally, I think that we should all stop talking about him if we want him to go away (the fact that you know who I'm talking about is the problem [if you don't know who I'm talking about, I like you]).

But honestly, I couldn't give a rat's ass right now about the results of November's election. It's still five months away! I'm grieving, which means I'm still trying to come to terms with five days from now. As far as I'm concerned, November isn't real, or at best, it's a story to frighten children into behaving. "If you don't calm down and go to sleep, November's gonna getcha!"

And if you'd like my political views, which I'm sure you don't, I'll say this: if they're a politician, I don't trust them and they won't keep their promises. This coming election is no different. The most important thing in my life right now is dead. I'll happily vote for whichever candidate can bring my wife back to life. If that's not part of your platform, I don't care about you. That's why, this year, I'm writing in my candidate: Dr. Emmett Brown from Back To The Future.

We could all use a little (passive aggressive) change

No, I don't have any spare change. I have ALL of the unwanted change, though. I started drinking coffee, I'm trying to eat 'healthier,' joined a gym, the love of my life is gone forever. That sort of change. I believe strongly in the power of human beings to change. Or at least this human being. Since Muhammad Ali just died, here's one of his: "a man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." Or something like that. Google is full of variants and paraphrases, so that's what you get from me.

It seems like my parents have both been flabbergasted by all the changes in me. When I dragged my wife's Keurig machine from storage and started using it, you'd think my parents were in 1840's France looking at a daguerreotype. No, me drinking coffee isn't gonna steal your soul.

Augusten Burroughs speaks thusly in This Is How about losing a loved one: "...they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone, just as surely as they are." That being said, I still have a mostly animate lump of flesh to pilot through the rest of my time on this Earth. I have to find out who I've become now, since that me is dead. Maybe I'm not really a coffee drinker in the long run. Maybe I'm the kind of person now who wears tinfoil argues with pigeons and asks you for spare change. Maybe I'm the next President of the United States of America, despite still being under the legal age (hey, Cruz was born in Canada, who knows?). But one thing I'm not, and can never be again, is the person my parents used to know when she was alive. Same name, same face, new contents. Explicit contents (parental advisory).

My tombstone will say "Rest In Pizza"

I would generally describe pizza as "salty," "savory," or "greasy." But there's a kind of pizza that's bittersweet, at least now. At the risk of revealing the location of my Batcave Of Solitude, up the street from my wife's old high school in our hometown is a branch of Cam's Pizza. I went to a different high school, but many afternoons, I would take the bus out to hers while we were dating in our late teens. I love pizza, and she thought it was adorable how much I love pizza, so of those many afternoons, often we walked up to Cam's.

So many formative memories happened while dining or loitering in that NY-style pizzeria. They had huge windows for watching the rain. One inside joke that caused us much mirth was that we would be staring at each other, slack-faced, and one or the other would let our jaw drop open and say "muh." That's all. We took turns doing it. We thought it was absolutely hysterical. And that was us stone cold sober. The college-age girls behind the counter surely thought we were bonkers.

You could also say Cam's was where we got started with our larcenous ways. I never drank coffee back then, but pilfered their little cups of hazelnut creamer. I can still remember Mia's order, if she had money and an appetite: fried mushrooms. Some days we didn't get anything but a soda to split, happy to have a place to sit in a satisfactory amount of shared solitude. I'm sure I'll never stop eating pizza. But now there's one pizza joint that, like Diet Mt. Dew, has an inescapable aftertaste.

Smooth as clutter

As I've gone through boxes of my wife and I's things after moving back to our hometown, I've discovered one thing: we were not organized. No two notebooks came from the same box. Loose photos and albums are stored in half a dozen places at least. And don't get me started on art supplies and books (spoiler alert: they're everywhere). If we ever had children, we were gonna name our son 'Chaos,' no joke.

So naturally, I haven't taken any steps toward organization. I generally kinda know sorta where stuff probably might be. That's good enough, right? To be honest, the task of organizing is just too much right now. It was painful enough to rummage through the boxes in the first place. Apart from a few things I decided I was willing to throw away (photos of my ex-mother- and father-in-law for example), I just threw everything back into boxes from whence they came after a brief look through.

Now, I know what you're thinking, how can I say that we were both disorganized, when I packed all the boxes? Because she would admit to being disorganized, too. I can say that about her, I lived with her for like 8 years. She was more organized than I was, though. But sometimes she organized my stuff without telling me, you know how marriage is. One day I'll organize everything and put all the old ticket stubs together and the greeting cards will all be in one place and from the afterlife, my wife will chuckle as it all slowly drifts into disorganization again, my/our natural state. Entropy is real. She would be proud. Or at least amused.