Lordy, where did the week go? I’ll tell you: In a million errands, a doctor visit, more errands, all complicated by construction on the major artery at the end of our street. But at the end of the week, all the things on the to-do list are crossed off, and one of them saved us some money. (An adjustment of our car insurance.) So I earned my keep, so to speak.

This is August: Just a big ol’ slog of humidity, road construction and trying to avoid the back-to-school ads everywhere. Realistically, adult summer runs through the end of September, with the beginning of October one of the most glorious parts of life in Michigan. A second June, warm enough to wear shirtsleeves during the day and sweata weatha at night.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Never rush summer, if you can help it.

I need a reset, a place to focus beyond The Current Situation, but is it hard. Every! Goddamn! Day! is something new and horrifying, some outrage against taste or decency or norms or whatever. It’s exhausting. Today alone we got Trump pushback on the Kennedy Center humiliation:

The board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to inscribe President Trump’s name on the building beneath the main signage, according to two people with direct knowledge of the proceedings, aggressively testing a federal judge’s order.

According to the resolution approved by the Trump-allied board, the inscription underneath the institution’s name would read: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” The board’s decision, which directs officials to act by “all legal means,” came shortly after it voted to move forward with Mr. Trump’s plan to shutter the building for renovations.

We talk from time to time about the word hate. We use it too casually, some say. We say we hate everything from liver and onions to Hallmark movies to exes. Hate makes us prisoners of resentment and fear, our betters tell us. It’s swallowing rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. And so on. Even though my sharp tongue may suggest otherwise, I’m actually a pretty empathetic person. I can see the wounded child inside any number of contemporary monsters, and that alone makes it hard for me to say I hate someone, and mean it.

But honestly? I hate Donald Trump. I will rejoice the day he dies. I hope to live to see it. It’s probably a grave sin to say I pray that I live so long, but it does capture the depth of my contempt.

I also know this isn’t news to anyone, that I’ve been indicating it in a million ways for the last decade, but it’s like every single day this summer, it’s something new. Something stupid in the grand scheme — like the Kennedy Center — or something ghastly, like ICE getting new shock gloves, or the sight of Tubby at his desk proclaiming that “a soda can” of vaccines are injected into children, or the jaw-dropping sums being spent, and often wasted, on bullshit like re-gilding statues and the fucking Reflecting Pool, and well, it adds up.

Add to that the toadies like the Kennedy Center board, or the thousands of other cult members, and it just grows.

The other day I had to stop for a couple things at the grocery, just a few minutes after they opened. This was the fancy store, and I passed an end cap stocked with champagne, the good stuff. First thought: Do they know something I don’t? Was there news breaking overnight? Nah, couldn’t be. I’d know by now. At the top of the shelf was a magnum of Veuve Clicquot, a very nice bottle with a very hefty price tag, and I thought: That’s the bottle I’m buying when he dies, if someone else doesn’t buy it first.

I’ll probably have to throw elbows to get to it. Even here, people will clamor.

These aren’t comfortable thoughts. I am not letting them spoil my summer, but man — they are there, every day.

So. Just one bit of bloggage today, another great piece by an independent journalist, a story that would have been written by the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Akron Beacon-Journal back in the day, on the so-called Patriot Games this week in Geneva, Ohio. It was part of the 250th anniversary barrage of half-baked, badly produced entertainments we’ve had all summer. It’s young people, high school age, competing for big scholarship money ($125,000 for one boy and one girl) in American Ninja Warrior-type contests. Laura Jedeed cut right to the heart of it:

I found the Patriot Games somewhat hard to watch. There was no second place; if you ain’t first, you’re last. Crueler things have happened, of course, than falling just a few seconds short of a college education. Maybe these kids have families who can afford it, I don’t know. It still got to me. I wish there’d at least been second place.

…The American dream of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was always out of reach for most people, but at least it was a good dream. Now, the dream is: get lucky. Win big. Escape the Matrix and exploit everyone beneath you. No one’s going from grocery clerk to CEO in 21st century America. Those days, to the extent they ever existed, are over.

Desperate people make for good entertainment. They make good subjects too. People barely hanging on aren’t going to take risks, speak out, or unionize, especially if they’ve become convinced that AI can replace them. It’s hard to think straight when your cortisol is high, when you spend so much of your time worrying about making rent or staying out of the hospital. Desperation is good business, and business is booming.

With that? Have a good weekend. You deserve it.