Ridiculous in the City

*Tough choice: Hillary or "Mr. Billionaire?"*

In an election season so littered with absurdity, the American people have been left with no option but to vote ridiculous on Election Day. Any way you slice it, you are casting a ballot for ridiculousness in 2016, so embrace it. Wrap your arms around that hanging chad, that pregnant chad, that sad unattractive kid named Chad; ridiculous hugs are the best kind.

Perhaps you are voting for Trump on November 8th, in which case your vote will go down as the most ridiculous in history for a variety of reasons, beginning with The Donald’s road kill-chic hairdo and penchant for self-tanner, and ending with his endorsement by The Crusader, the number one newspaper of America’s favorite costumed band, the KKK.

KISS is so pissed at me right now.

Or maybe you are “with her.” A Hillary fan who may just wear your red pantsuit t-shirt to the polls, you love you some Hillary, some Bill, and the whole email thing is, well, ridiculous. Or perhaps it’s on a pendulum, swinging somewhere between flaccid non-issue and blazing obstruction (hello, constipation metaphor). In any case, Hill is your girl and you’re not budging, not even for a second. You stopped listening to the naysayers months ago and all you can think is how great her hair looks right now. Stronger together, that’s you and Hill. In it to win it.

And what of the third party candidates? Oh, there’s plenty of ridiculousness there. From anti-vaccine comments by Jill Stein, to everyone’s favorite lost man, Gary Johnson, it seems like we have all had a “What’s Aleppo?” moment during this campaign. Some of us have been mentally “What’s Aleppo?” since last fall when the current state of things could never have been imagined. And while Stein and Johnson will both eek out a few percentage points here and there, a solid third party candidate eludes American voters once again. The greatest democracy in the world and it boils down to two choices.

Incidentally, “What’s Aleppo?” may be the biggest gift I received during this campaign:

“Hey, where’s the remote?”

“What’s Aleppo?”

The debates, the attack ads, the downright lies and dissemination of misinformation now accepted as fact by large swaths of the United States population, it’s all been too much. While you may not be able to cling to any real sanity right now and, like the more ridiculous amongst us, you may be having nightmares about Wednesday morning (I’m on a cruise ship with Hill, she’s drinking a Coke and accepting defeat calmly. I realize the ship is not actually going anywhere and I wonder what happened to my bags. “I’m done with Diet,” she says. “Who cares about the calories now?”), there is plenty of ridiculousness to drown yourself in until Tuesday.

That and the continuing flood of love for Obama. Oh, Barry, never leave us.

So let’s enjoy one last ridiculous binge this weekend while we still can. Then, come Tuesday, let’s dust ourselves off, put on our finery and march to our local polling place. As you stand there casting your ballot, you can feel good about the fact that you survived the ridiculousness, at least this time. If this election is any indication, there is surely more to come.