It’s not even noon here in Florida but I’m starting to get an alarming twinge in my gut about the midterm congressional elections. Not that i know anything about the preliminary vote count but I am beginning to catch a whiff in the salty air of acrid sweat, anticipatory anxiety, and primal fear. Even my elderly rescue black lab Harmony appears to smell something amiss when I took her out to pee for the tenth time. She kept sniffing and lifting her grey streaked snout skyward in various directions but especially towards certain swing states and GOP gerrymandered voting districts here in sometimes sunny Florida. These are places for the most part where broad based knowledge and higher education means edible gummies, college football, Fox news and maybe a Tucker Carlson advanced learning seminar on “Feminism and Falling Sperm Count”. Perhaps Old Harmony is just smelling a dead or dying seagull washed up on the beach or maybe it’s the latest climate change related storm front (Nicole?) about to finish off whats left of South Florida’s already crippled coastline and crumbling infrastructure…but I dont think so. In fact I wish that was all my trusty incontinent mutt and I are spidey-sensing.

Honestly I fear I’m vibing Tolkien-esque smoke signals on the far horizon of Middle-earth. Call it intuition or delusional paranoia but I believe I may have picked up an almost imperceptible shudder in the ethereal astral plane, a seemingly subtle seismic shift in the fabric of space-time but also quite possibly a dark foreboding and warning sign that portends the return of the Evil One, Lord Sauron Trump to Mordor along with his Orc army of grotesque looking and badly-dressed MAGA followers, flag-waving felons and hideous side kick minions, ministers and magistrates including Rudy Giuliani of “melting face mascara fame” and Marjorie Taylor Greene who actually resembles an Orc homecoming queen in drag. That said I’m most afraid of the bloated Orange Comb-over Man. The Donald. He cant be killed and he never gives up.

Even without the exaggerated Hobbit imagery such as Sauran’s creepy disembodied flaming eye as an explicit symbol of impending doom there is a dawning sense within me about the midterm elections going on today as well as the down the line Final Fantasy/Final Destination winner-take-all Presidential election in 2024.

Maybe it’s just my never-ending frustration with the never working properly electronic perimeter gates, security system and key fob enabled door locks to my overpriced Sarasota condo complex but this election cycle seems like a well planned takeover by the Trump wing of the Republican Party, one that could have been avoided if Sleepy Joe would have just woken up. It’s as if Old King Biden in his White House castle along with other aged Democratic leaders hobbled by a plethora of family related problems, QAnon death threats, home invasions and baseless accusations of sex trafficking and rampant baby cannibalism left the front door to winning the congressional elections unlocked, unguarded and ever so slightly ajar. Just like the Capitol police during the Jan 6 insurrection who were the US government’s premier D.C. security force … they too were wholly unprepared, undersupplied, understaffed, fully compromised and highly conflicted about their need and solemn duty to use deadly force to secure the Capitol Building. As a result they looked in some cases like amateur Pail Blart shopping mall cops unable to turn away what was not only a serious national security threat but a riotous mob of unruly weirdos, village idiots and Trump zombies wearing buffalo horn helmets and screaming for blood sacrifices.

So too these elections are occurring smack dab in the middle of an unprecedented time of psychological and behavioral craziness. A Covid crises, social media misinformation, and rapid societal, technological and political change has resulted in extreme fear, distrust, polarized thinking, social isolation, increasing violence, economic insecurity and generally bad music. In other words, nothing is really feeling “secure” at the moment including my Florida apartment complex’s so called iron clad 24/7 security system. Instead the Kingdom of USA itself is divided almost to the point it was when President Abraham Lincoln warned “A house divided cannot stand”. Weakened, polarized and in continual crisis…distracted by economic and financial woes and a wily Coyote recurring plague virus that’s already dispatched a million vulnerable Americans and compromised the physical and mental health of millions more. So yeah, the gates of individual and collective sanity, compassion, morality, understanding and common civility were left wide open and a mutant horde of brain-dead zombies, election deniers and QAnon rabble rousers are now likely to breach the ramparts and gain full control of the House of Representatives and many state and general elections. And THEN, even worse, they (the newly elected) might then just do the absolutely unthinkable and release the Kracken, the MAGA master monster and return the Mad King to his gold toilet bowl presidential throne… along with his assorted racist/violent vengeance-seeking gun-toting fringe followers. I’m REALLY hoping my nausea and this rambling reflux reflection is nothing more than exaggerated anxiety, paranoia or some leftover remnant of a flu bug or covid virus strain yet to be isolated . However, sometimes its the little things like ones past behavior that count and turn out to be the best predictors of future outcomes… including the kind of lunatic sycophants who will end up running the show when the democratic party dust settles, so to speak. To wit: the complete absence of any publicly stated compassion, empathy, concern or common respect shown by so many Republican party leaders and Congressmen in regards to Nancy Pelosi’s elderly husband getting his skull caved in by a demented and deranged politically motivated intruder gives me a slight shiver and just the kind of dark foreshadowing feeling that reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s classic line in Jurassic Park, “God I hate being right all the time”.