It's really incredible to me, that we've had 14, or 16, or 20 or whatever the number is, of Republican presidential candidates this last go-round, plus a handful of Democrats, although that race is much more condensed, with Hillary projecting the image of inevitable, shoe-in candidate and Bernie as sole serious challenger in the slingshot-wielding insurgent mold. But just as the Republicans have an enormous lineup this year, so have Democrats in years past, at the primary level, this phenomenon of a football team's worth of candidates for the office of US President being nothing new. 

​What astounds me about this reality is: why would all these people want this job?  They work so hard, travel, spend money, attack and get attacked, all for a job that totally sucks. A job I would never want if you told me you were handing me the office tomorrow. A job I would actually wish upon an enemy. These men and women running for the top office in the nation all have tremendous skills, backgrounds, educational degrees and major real world accomplishments. Making $400,000 a year- the salary of US President- means almost nothing to them. Almost every one of them is lawyer of high achievement and a measure of fame- as senator, governor, etc.- who could become a law partner and make $1M a year at the drop of a hat. The candidates who are not lawyers are a multibillionaire real estate developer-slash-TV celebrity, a high tech CEO and a top neurosurgeon with several bestselling books. Even wild man Bernie Sanders could write a kooky political comic book or put out a T-shirt or a folk music album or endorse a Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor and make a million bucks next week. So they can't be doing it for the money.

​The President of the United States is just about automatically hated by half the population of the country. I think it's hard sometimes in my own life, as a relative nobody with almost zero power and the tiniest measure of "fame", to remain carefree and un-self conscious in the face of the dislike or disapproval of a few dozen people whose negative thoughts I have drawn. But to be despised by over 100,000,000 people, with a fraction of those committed to blogging, talking on AM or FM radio, making T-shirts and bumper stickers and railing in person at whoever is nearby about how treacherous, evil, incompetent and destructive you are? And with a smaller fraction within that working on radical, violent uprising and the overthrow of the government all because you and your personality and policies and approach to your office- and even your FACE- scare, offend and sicken them so much? I would think it would be one of the toughest emotional and psychological pressure cookers on Earth. Certainly not for the overly sensitive or easily offended,

I know that many would say look at all of the incredible benefits and advantages of being the President. You live in The White House, with a gigantic staff dedicated to your every whim and comfort, as well as your safety and security. Yes, the White House is a beautiful and classy building- I know, I've seen the movies Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down- but any of these candidates could buy a similarly nice property in most parts of the country, perhaps in a somewhat less high-powered location than Washington DC, but a pretty nice locale nonetheless.

​Yes, the President gets to meet with astoundingly powerful world leaders and movers and shakers, but the privately wealthy and powerful and accomplished get to go to formidable dinner parties as well, and can often find their way into impressive meetings- for instance Carly Fiorina, a businesswoman, has hung out and shared vodka and borscht with Vladimir Putin, where they discussing the global East/West balance of power and the possibility of Hewlett Packard improving their Cyrillic-alphabet user manuals.  Money and power can buy access. It is not only the President of the US who holds the magic key to the gold-molding grand double doors of international decision making. If any of these candidates wanted to meet with Angela Merkel or Shinzo Abe or Hassan Rouhani, all they'd probably have to do is make a phone call, send a LinkedIn inmail, flash a wad of 100's at the door and bring a nice box of strudel or Ghiradelli chocolates, perhaps a pint of Grade A Vermont maple syrup. I mean, fer Chrissakes, Dennis Rodman partied with North Korean head dingbat Kim Jong-un. How high do people think the barrier of admission is for meeting heads of state? I bet you by next week I could get LA Kings center Anze Kopitar a high tea with David Cameron.    

​You might think that the President has a lot of power to do serious things- enact laws, change the public discourse and behavior, affect the economy, influence foreign affairs- with the desire to possess such influence possibly emanating from either extreme- a true, altruistic yearning to improve the world and make things "right", or a self-aggrandizing, megalomaniacal urge to throw lighting bolts around and show all those kids back in elementary school who's the king of the hill. Either way, whatever the impulse's origin, the current US President is so hemmed in by a hostile Congress, by political gridlock, by a suspicious and often paranoid general public, that he or she will have an incredibly hard time getting the most basic legislation passed, be it environmental guidelines or appointing Chief Dogcatcher.

​Any Presidential comments, statements or proclamations are overshadowed by the tidal wave of vitriol from pundits, commentators, bloggers and opposition political activists. Even if the President's opinions are a no-brainer, favored by 95% of the population, he's only a human being who gets widespread press coverage and a very small modicum of extra respect. Regardless of the office holder's brilliance, persistence or passion for world improvement, what can ANYBODY do about global warming or poverty or ISIS? The President is not Superman (or woman). He or she cannot actually fly around the globe and melt terrorists with heat vision, singlehandedly repair dams and shut down coal burning plants. The world is too big, too fast-moving, too overly populated, too much in opposition to itself.

America can no longer fix the whole playground even if we all WERE on the same page. Maybe in the Teddy Roosevelt era, the President could have whipped the world into shape from Alaska to Bali, cutting down pollution, crushing totalitarian regimes and terrorists, equalizing income distribution and food and water access and so on. But today, China or Russia alone are lumbering, often obstructionist giants that we have sadly little power over.

​Presidents can write widely published and purchased autobiographies. Presidents can bring huge TV ratings to daytime and late night talk shows and also participate in fun, wacky sketches on Saturday Night Live. Presidents can host other world leaders at opulent state dinners and offer them fabulously great gifts, and receive the same treatment in the world's other continents. Presidents and their first spouses can make more people think about reading books to kids, and slightly popularize diet and exercise, and make minority religions feel more comfortable and accepted when participating in a Hanukkah or Ramadan or Diwali celebration. But a US President can no longer singlehandedly steer the great ship, the USS Enterprise under Capt. Kirk, to create an exceptional, unified utopia of a nation under a singleminded vision. Nor can they exert much of that vision on the world. Instead, the current US president can have the ship steered a few degrees to the port or starboard, through choppy, hostile waters, and they can replace the deck chairs and change the galley's menu. But instead of widespread glory, whether they are far right or far left, moderate whatever, ultra-capitalist or heavily socialist, they will face raw unmitigated hatred and personal attacks as bad as any in history. Their entire personal histories will be under the microscope and open game for acts warranting outrage and utter condemnation. They will be The Devil for tens of millions of people and their personal safety requires constant vigilant protection against potential attacker foreign and domestic.

​Years ago when I lived in san Francisco I ran into my old Boston area neighbor, Kara Dukakis, whose dad Michael ran for President in 1988. I told her how I had worked on the Dukakis for President campaign in Oregon years earlier, and had become a "field manager" at the Portland phone bank, supervising other phone callers for the "Duke." This was well into the Clinton administration in the mid-late 90's and I think many people, let alone Democrats, forget how much the right wing absolutely, passionately detested Bill Clinton with a white-hot, bubbling poison dart hatred that should be reserved for the aliens attacking our planet in movies like War Of The Worlds.  I asked Kara how she felt, now that this other Democrat was in office, seeing the constant acid ideological and even personal attacks, not only against Bill, but against First lady Hillary and even daughter Chelsea. She said it's cool, she wouldn't want to be First Daughter, she's totally okay, even kinda glad that her dad didn't win, it's too vitriolic and mean, too unwinnable a challenge, and yes, the entire Presidential family is under such a magnifying glass for condemnation and outright judgment hatred, that it wouldn't be worth it.

​God bless those who try to help save the world, but her and her sister's lives are probably better having a Dad who was just a governor and also-ran Presidential candidate, settled into a nice and continuing constructive life as a Politics university professor. She can be normal, she can escape the mass hatred in a personal way, she can go to a dark hipster bar in San Francisco's Mission District with zero bodyguards or armed agents and no one except me, from the Boston neighborhood even knowing who she really is. I agreed wholeheartedly and said yes, totally, I don't know how anyone or any family could do it. I think it must horribly suck. I told her that her dad avoided a terrible experience, despite not going in the history books to that high and lofty level.

​So I give my hats off, really, and stand in some consternation and a fair amount of respect that tens of extremely high achieving, clearly book-smart and real-world and/or politically experienced people would so desperately want to occupy a position that is a guaranteed lighting rod for scapegoating over failed expectations regarding  almost everything that can go wrong in the world.  And all for the salary made by a really, really good electronics salesman. Don't forget, there are cities and towns in this country where the governmental apathy is so entrenched that it's hard to find multiple candidates for mayor or city council,  or even school committee. So let us appreciate this surplus of eagerly participating men and women of relatively high stature, clawing and gnawing their way to get to a job that, to my estimation, would be like captaining the ship in the movie "A Perfect Storm", except without even getting to joke around the whole time with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg.  Whoever wins, may the God of your choice have mercy upon their mortal souls.

I was walking home, down a hill, in our LA suburb of Burbank the other evening when I suddenly noticed a family of raccoons hanging out in a front lawn right next to me. This was a full nuclear family unit, two big raccoons and three smaller ones. They scurried along in single file. I took out my keychain flashlight- I obsessively carry flashlights, army knives and bottle openers on my person for whatever dire Macguyver / Street Fighter emergency may arise- and pointed it at the raccoon family and watched them scurry away toward the next property. The only problem was the fence separating the two adjacent properties, which the raccoon family had to figure out and then climb over, using a nearby and various dense shrubbery to aid their ascent. They craftily made it over the fence, ran through the next yard and then scrambled across the cross street, looking like the mammal version of the human families, running in a chain, that one sees depicted on signs near the US/Mexican border. Raccoons, when I've seen them in our neighborhood, have an impressively cavalier attitude about people. They become mildly concerned and back away when I get a bit close, but their movements generally display an attitude of blase lack of concern and an almost forced insistence on appearing casual and not rushed. What strikes me most about the raccons, though, beside their intelligence and dexterity, is their adherence to a tight family structure. Here I am, living across a large continent from my parents and sister, who themselves live 200 miles apart, and these raccoons stick together like The Waltons, a compact, immediate family unit, no doubt with lots of communication between siblings and concern for the children by the parents. It made me wonder: "Who are the really civilized ones here?" I would love to think that somewhere, at some point in time, one of the raccoons would blog about running into me. That'd be one hell of a read!  

The other day I was walking down Fairfax, just south of Melrose, midday on a Friday, on my way to a meeting.  I had grabbed an apple on my way out of the apartment - between Robyn and I, we usually try to maintain a nice big bag of organic apples in the wide, rustic wooden bowl on the dining area table. I'm not an organic fascist- several years ago I NEVER thought about organic, thought it was insanely expensive, pretentious preciousness for control-freak foodies with a little too much money and not enough common sense.  But then I realized two things- one, I don't actually want weird harsh chemicals like pesticides in my body, building up over time, and two, a lot of organic produce also happens to be high quality and just tastes really good.  Like apples. So anyway, I'm struttin' down the sidewalk, with my apple that's now probably more than 75% eaten, and as I near the meeting building, a freaky, wired homeless guy, skinny and full of electrical energy, like a Jim Carrey character covered in a layer of scruff and wearing clothes that seemed too small on him, glues his site onto my apple. Instantly and with some kind of instinctive sense, I hold the apple at just the right height, his palm swipes across toward me, and we do a perfect hand-off.  Simultaneously, his eyes light up like a man seeing an meteorite of gold fall from the sky and he declares "A potato!!".  He whips that bare remains of an apple into his mouth and takes a bite.  It seems to please him, he finds it to be good.  I love this guy.  He is eating the last bit of my food I would be chucking into the bushes and is making me feel like a great humanitarian at the same time.  If I'd known about this, I would've brought a whole apple just for him, maybe two.  Exactly as this was going down, a trio of cute, thin, leggy girls were treading the sidewalk southward from Melrose.  They had the aura of suburban girls perhaps in their late teens or barely 20, looking a little bit Sunset Strip clubby or fashion model-esque.  They struck me as the kind of young women who make a real point of hitting multiple modern apparel stores on the Melrose Strip and who must certainly drive a sparkling new VW sedan or perhaps even a Mini Cooper.  For a minute I did wonder what they would think of this interaction, this stranger grabbing and eating my apple core, which he claimed to have thought was a potato.  Maybe they would have thought "What a nice guy, to give the homeless crazy man his apple."  Or maybe they thought "Yuck! How could you just trust someone else's germs?" If times ever get much tougher, this guy, with his eager sidewalk scrounging, is a huge step ahead of all of us.

Last Saturday my girlfriend Robyn and her friend Jen and I decided to go out dancing. I used to go to dance clubs with my friends years ago in Boston and San Francicsco, but I suppose that was mainly to try to pick up chicks, rather than for the dancing per se. Still, unlike my friends, I often actually liked the activity. I found it to be sweaty aerobic exercise, personal expression, hyperactive limbering and the exorcising of demons. I sometimes thought I had a plan of attack with my "dancing" but then I would suddenly  become self-conscious and drastically change it up. My moves would vary between earnest old-school disco, a grotesque parody of old-school disco, short circuiting robot and arthritic Eastern European gym instructor. But invariably at the end of the night I would return to my car and drive home, drenched in sweat, lungs feeling cleared out and ankles throbbing with the same worked-out sensation as after a day of skiing. All in all, always well worth it, successful chick pickup or not.

Well now I have a live-in girlfriend, Robyn, so the chick-pickup is not relevant but the opportunity for vigorous exercise and spastic physical self-expression are,  and so off we drove across town from an outdoor picnic in Santa Monica to Akbar, a well known hetero-friendly gay bar in Silverlake that I'd ducked my head into a few times when I lived a walk down the street from there for several years. I'd had no idea that they have a completely separate dance floor room and second bar on the opposite side of the structure. First we chilled in the main bar room, where the bartender made me a bloody mary with like a quadruple shot of vodka, for the regular price. Half way into the drink I was buzzed enough to start forgetting about my various general apprehensions and bullshit and start remembering how fun it is to be out buzzed on a Saturday night, be it at a gay bar, straight bar, mixed bar, industrial warehouse, sailing ship or underground missile silo.  Soon they opened the door to the other half of the club and we were the first ones out on the dance floor. It was a medium sized spare black space with a couple of mirror balls hanging from the ceiling along with various other colored lights. The music mix was very 80's, rhythmic and upbeat enough to move to. 

Before long we were joined by a rapidly increase throng of other dancing folks. Akbar being a fairly mixed type of establishment, there were some femme lesbians and straight men and women mixed in with the gay boys. What was noticeably lacking was the slight edge of macho meat-head threat that I had sometimes noticed at dance clubs in years past. Unlike the scenario spoken of in so many comedians' bits, of being hit on and treated like a desirable sex object in the gay club- of being treated like a "hot chick"- I just picked up on a vibe of calm acceptance and low-key respect. I knew I was not "man candy" to these Silverlake gays. I am not that good-looking, well-dressed or in ripped enough shape to stand out in any way in that scene. And I probably came across as pretty obviously not gay- especially with my girlfriend and her female friend.  But I didn't need to be a drooled-on meat snack in order to feel good about myself. I just needed to dance and move and shake it out and drink that incredibly strong vodka drink and then have another. Soon the floor was a densely packed mass of dancing bodies, the music seeming louder, more intense, faster, more fun, our moves getting crazier, weirder, even less self-conscious, and simultaneously more aerobic and stylish. 

The pattern from the two counter-rotating mirror balls created an illusory effect whereas if I just stared at one point on the floor it began to turn and move, a sensation similar to being on a light dose of mushrooms. We danced at the top of our lungs, moving as if we were dancing for Simon Cowell and a potential million dollar prize, using every limb and muscle we could think of, for a solid hour and a half. It was equivalent to a 90 minute boot camp but it felt like a walk in the park. The dumb new age/techno 80's rock hits, the vodka and the trippy lighting grabbed a hold and infused me with an electrical surge of muscle motivation reminding me, once again, why human beings in nearly all cultures independently developed traditions of vigorously manipulating their bodies in specific rhythms and patterns, usually to some sort of musical accompaniment. If someone wearing a ball cap and coach's whistle had tried to make me do one tenth as much physical exercise I would've viewed it as unconscionably excruciating torture. But there in the gay dance club on a Saturday night, with my girlfriend and her friend, moving and shaking like the demonically possessed, eyes stinging from salty sweat, it just had the inevitably natural feel of living... really living. 

I stopped in a cell phone store the other day to ask the guy behind the counter some questions, as I am thinking of getting a new phone- an Android. I was disappointed to find out that the Android I'd been looking at, on sale at $79, had gone up 20 bucks to $99 in the several days that I'd put off going in and actually buying it. I had been hesitant, complacent, afraid of making the purchase, even though I knew it was a damn good deal- SO damn good, evidently, that my provider realized this and jacked up the price. They thought: "Screw these assholes who are too cheap to pay our regular low prices,and double-screw these even bigger assholes who, seeing our obviously insanely low SALE prices, decide THAT'S too expensive and don't buy anything anyway!" In my imaginary scenario, my cell phone company swears like a pool hall delinquent and talks specifically about ME. Anyway, I asked the guy when the phones might go on sale again, and he thought and then said that the company tends to have discount sales on holidays, and then searched his mind for upcoming holidays. "They'll probably have a sale for Easter." He said. The only problem is, Easter was already more than 2 weeks in the past. It had come and gone with all of the customary, accompanying fanfare.  A lot of people can forget a lot of things, and Lord knows I forget some weird stuff now and then, but this guy was Latino- which means at least nominally Christian- so how the hell does he forget EASTER? It's not like he forgot that we'd already passed Advent or St. Aloysius' Day, he forgot a HUGE, FAMOUS HOLIDAY, surrounded by one to two weeks off of school for kids, massive church services everywhere, and Easter egg hunts, brunches and dinners even for the atheistic and non-Christian. This guy had to be either out of his mind high on weed or just majorly preoccupied by whatever is rattling around in his brain. But I was delighted to witness such a slip, because I myself have done as bad- maybe worse. 

 Years ago I was talking on the phone with one of my oldest childhood friends, Ben, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife who had given birth to a son named Hugo several years before.  I was somewhat out of the loop and hazy on which friends and family had had what kids in what years, exactly how many kids this one had and that one had, and I asked Ben if there was a second one expected soon for he and his wife. He said that they had in fact already had the second child. I then instantaneously asked- with a straight face, and not kidding around at all, if they knew the gender of the child. Somehow the words that Ben had uttered had not properly been absorbed as information by my neurons, axons, synapses or whatever they're called.  Ben replied, with a very even keel, and an obvious grin that came through in his voice "Um, dude, yeah we know the gender of the child. He's here. He's already been born." I then laughed and Ben laughed and I quickly explained that I'd somehow had a brain misfire, that I just didn't correctly process the necessary bits of basic logic to make that very simple and obvious leap, that I guess I'd been burnt out or distracted or just out of my brain. He's known me a long time and he didn't take any offense because, as anyone who really knows me would know, no offense was meant. I will never ever again forget that my friend Ben has two kids, both boys.  

Today I was driving to meet with my friend Jeremy in East Hollywood- we're working on a screenplay together- and my car ran out of gas. I usually get a LOT of miles when it says 'empty' but I took it too close to the wire and the car sputtered and choked out after only a couple of acceleration bursts. I totally know the drill- yeah, I've run out of gas several times before because I'm a risk junkie and/or idiot- and I switched off between rolling in neutral to allow maximum distance with my established momentum, and putting it back in forward gear to squeeze bursts of motorized acceleration from whatever last clouds of fumes were in the tank. It crapped out and came to stop on the 101 Freeway, across from Universal, a 10 min walk to the next exit. I parked in the far right shoulder lane, put on my emergency reds, got my plastic gas tank out of the trunk and walked down to the exit, where, luckily, there was a gas station. If you've never walked on the side of an LA freeway, these roadways are vastly different when you're right on their edge and not inside a vehicle. Speeds that seem casual and normal when one is in traffic become excessive and intimidating when you're a stationary and unprotected human being just a few feet away. Cars, SUV's, trucks and motorcycles become loud, hostile, potential killing machines and even their motorized roar harbors a cold meanness. I walked along with my gas can, pushing the thought of grotesque, near-instant death out of my mind, and took in the scrubby, shrubby terrain next to the asphalt. Multiple small lizards darted away as we crossed paths. Random garbage dotted the strange embankment landscape. And then I came across an object for which I had to do a double take. It was a very large brown dildo- the realistic kind, shaped like an actual penis, except bigger than probably 99% of real ones. It had the abridged, bottom-flattened attached "balls",  was lying on it's side and appeared to be made out of rubber or even some speckled waxy substance. Why was this extra large brown dildo abandoned on the side of the 101? And who throws such a thing out a car window?  Perhaps non-automobile-owning pedestrians in the embankment/shoulder area were responsible for the sadly neglected sex toy and this scrubby, fringey terrain was their playroom. I successfully got my gas, walked back to the car and got out of there, safely. Some mysteries are better left alone, and far back beyond the receding horizon of the rear view mirror.

This is Adam Gropman. I am writing thoughts and stories here. You may enjoy it!