When life grows a little overwhelming, as it’s been this week… Listen to me. “This week.” It’s Wednesday. And already we’ve had a whatever-that-was at Quantico yesterday, a government shutdown, deepfake racist AI coming from the Oval — it sometimes becomes too much. When I’m feeling outmatched by reality, I go to Reddit.

Reddit, the platform where no trivial topic is too small to create a community of fellow travelers to waste time discussing it all. My current fave subreddits: John and Carolyn and Wedding Attire Approval. In the first, lonely women rehash the lives and deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, endlessly. A typical post might be a closeup of Carolyn, and a question: Do you think she had very subtle rhinoplasty? Comments: 85. It’s really amazing. Wedding Attire Approval consists in large part of innocents wandering into a den of bitches, posting photos of perfectly fine dresses and asking if it’s appropriate for a guest at a wedding. The answer, frequently? NO. Forensic analysis of this dress reveals it was once carried through a room containing white thread! Therefore it cannot be worn to any wedding or wedding-related event!

I’ve known that women shouldn’t wear a white dress to a wedding — that’s for the bride — but I swear, these lunatics make up rules I never heard of. No white to a bachelorette party. No white to a rehearsal dinner. And the latest is when someone will post a photo of a light pink or pale blue dress, but it gets the veto because it might “photograph” white. Or a stunning floor-length dress with a white collar could be photographed from the wrong angle, suggest the guest might be the bride, and RUIN ALL THE PICTURES.

I know the great thing about the internet is, there’s a corner for everyone, and if the algorithm didn’t push it into my face all the time, I could forget it exists. But it does, and I can’t.

Meanwhile, here’s an analysis of the event at Quantico yesterday (gift link, natch):

It was a speech unlike any other and just like every other.

…Several hundred military commanders turned up at Quantico on Tuesday morning. Some had flown in for it from places as far away as Germany, Brussels, Japan and South Korea. They sat mostly in silence as Mr. Trump talked for 73 minutes about the same things he talks about almost every day, no matter where he is or to whom he is speaking.

He talked to the generals about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the infamous autopen. He talked about the media. He talked about tariffs and the border. He talked about the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner. He talked about not being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.

He talked, in other words, exactly the same way he talks to rally crowds and the sycophants who gather around his table at Mar-a-lago. Only the military brass didn’t do what those crowds do — laugh and smile. They sat mostly stone-faced while President Wetbrain talked for…73 minutes. He told them he wanted American cities to serve as “training grounds” for soldiers; in other words, that he expected American troops to kill and wound Americans. What did he expect? Cheers? Clearly he did.

Lucian Truscott quotes from the same speech. It was chilling, not just because of the kill-your-countrymen thing, but the fact this man is obviously losing his marbles:

He began by attacking Biden, naturally, complaining that “We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day – every day, the guy’s falling down stairs – and I said, that’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs, I walk…very…slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just, try not to fall, ‘cause it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy, you know. Walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any records. Be cool! Be cool when you walk down, but don’t…don’t bop down the stairs. The one thing with Obama…I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen…da-da-da-da-teh-deh-bop-bop…I’ve never seen…he would go down those stairs, bop-bop, he wouldn’t hold on, he’d go down those stairs, I said, it’s great! I wouldn’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually, bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes one. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell. We had nothing.”

And let’s not let that be overshadowed by this:

There were Black generals and admirals sitting amidst their white counterparts in that audience in Quantico today. Not one of them, white or Black, could have missed the rank racism when Trump imitated Barack Obama “bopping” down a set of stairs. Trump said he “never seen” anything like it, as if he were describing a tight end in a football game catching a difficult pass. None of them missed the racism when Trump mentioned, in speaking about “the nuclear” that there are two “N-words” you can’t say. Every person in that room knew what the other N-word is, and they got it that Trump was complaining that “political correct,” as he called it, had stopped its usage.

Ugh. Our president.

OK, I have an interview coming up that I must prep for. Carry on, enjoy your Wednesday, and we’ll see how it goes.