ARE WE THERE YET?

My heart is a child, forever in the back seat of the car, endlessly asking: Are we there yet?

Sadly, my car, just like yours, is self-driving and try as I may to influence the trip’s timetable or even commandeer the wheel, the reality is, the car is going to get to its destination at its own, sweet time.

The good parent part of me has become rather deft in its ability to distract, deflect and entertain my heart from its impatience with both me and to the journey itself and I have to admit that my success rate varies tremendously based on a number of factors, which includes my willingness to believe in my own magical thinking or the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed.

Coffee, it seems, is a great short-term mood supplement which is why you rarely if ever see anyone depressed or inconsolable at a Starbucks.

Starbucks is our own, personal Cheers because one if their imperatives is to know your name. In Los Angeles, where I lived for years, they just don’t call out your name. They say: “And the winner is…David!”

At the moment of this writing, we are fast blasting down the HOV Lane towards the holidays' exit, where the speed limit is so fast, that before we even get to Halloween, we are already celebrating Christmas. The heart, the one strapped into the child’s safety seat, is completely thrown by this, as in why am I dressed like Freddy Krueger if Santa is waving come on over at the mall?

Now we all know that the heart wants what the heart wants, and for the most part, on nicer, slower days, all it wants is the same thing that any child wants: love, kindness, and attention.

But in these accelerated time of extremes, where BREAKING NEWS arrives every two or three-seconds, (announced by frantic newscasters who sound like Butterfly McQueen in Gone With The Wind), where great looking couples in commercials buy each other matching cars wrapped in red ribbons, my poor heart starts to have a meltdown.

It is tired, hungry, and no longer knows how to self-regulate its emotions.

During these days of relentless stress, where the Department of Justice is suddenly being run by an incompetent, experience free Trump stooge/scam artist whose association with a company that promoted products that included time travel and a man toilet for “well-endowed” men is currently under investigation by the FBI for fraud, as we are forced fed images of unbearable events, from the California fires to the shootings in Pittsburgh and Thousand Oaks it becomes increasingly more difficult to romp around town like a hopeful elf, humming Christmas songs and being sugar cookie high on life.

And when you are single, like I am, and are cursed by being an incurable romantic, around now is when the dash light of loneliness suddenly goes on which informs me that I’m running on my last gasp reserve tank, whose fuel is composed of the high octane mix of sadness, regret and tiny pieces of free-floating, broken dreams.

Like you, I feel trapped in the chasm, caught between all this happiness and dark, endlessly gut-wrenching news.

Add to this fast coming celebration of good will towards man, moments like that guy in a Baltimore theater balcony, during a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof,” who suddenly shouted out, during intermission, “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump!” and you see why my heart keeps asking me:

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

The answer it seems, is, no.

But hopefully soon.

It’s remarkable, that Trump, who is one, impotent, self-loathing, failure of a man (in every single business and personal relationship that he has ever been involved in) could turn Capitol Hill into Professor Harold Hill and convince millions that they too can play beautiful music just like him: without benefit of talent or lessons.

Since his agreement with the Soviet Union was implicit that his instructions were to destroy America from the inside, he continues to elevate and reward people made in his own image, like Ben Carson, Ryan Zinke and our newest ambassador to South Africa: who like Ivanka, is a bleached blonde handbag designer to the heights of power and influence.

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, has issued more than 100 criminal counts against 32 people and three companies. Add to all this the GOP’s relentless pursuit in trying to take away our health care and social security, the Kavanaugh hearings, the just ended, brutal, shit slinging election cycle that was highlighted by gerrymandering and outsized fraud and the uptick in fascist behavior and blatant antisemitism and is it any wonder that I am down to maybe one “Ho?”

I have always felt like Christmas got it wrong. It seems to me that given that we are living in the single greatest country in the history of mankind, that in return, Christmas should be practiced every single day instead of one and on the day of Christ’s birth, we should just have little cake, like at an office party and then go right back tot he business of being kind.

What stops us all from leaping headfirst off the cliff, right into the field of rye, is the fact that we are all wired for optimism, which is why, when things go wrong, it is our instinct to step one: throw a tantrum and then, step two: get over it. This includes everything from staining your favorite silk shirt to the Twin Towers going down.

We simply all have our limit as to how much we can take.

Eventually we either mute our TVs the second Trump’s pumpkin head, topped with Joey Heatherton’s hairdo, shows up, or we run, screaming all the way to TCM, so we can time travel back to a time where America really was great (in theory) and the movies that we watched were made to embolden and inspire us, instead of assaulting us with violence and cheap thrills.

This is why we revisit “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “The Sound of Music,” “Meet John Doe,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and all those wonderful holiday films over and over and over again. We have gone from the simplicity of black and white to way too much color. I mean how many pixels does an average person really need?

Movies used to offer us the chance to enter a safe bubble place where we could unconsciously become soft and vulnerable, let our guard down and take a refresher course on the entire concept of what it means to be American men and women of enormous faith and purpose.

Those films sometimes condemned hate and often did, but they did not judge us. No matter what color we were or what kind of sex we enjoyed, we are all welcome to be part of that holy, cinematic experience whose cathedral was made of hopes, dreams, tolerance, acceptance and pure inspiration.

Music can do that too. Listening to great Christmas music is a one-way ticket back tot he moment where we first heard them when our biggest questions in life was to figure out what kind of present you were going to get.

Perhaps, symbolically, we should focus on the kind of present we now want. After all, we do have the gift of change. We just forget how to exchange them or that they even exist.

The new normal in this county is to feel self-entitled, that everything should be done for us by Alexa or Siri without literally lifting a finger. We no longer have to turn on our own lights or TVs or stereos. Our electronic servants will do that for us. Soon they will no doubt top off our drinks, rub our feet and maybe even have the aforementioned sex with that we enjoy.

When I was a kid, the future was something that they built gigantic World Fairs around, which were acres and acres of altars built to pray to the romance of tomorrow.

At night, we stared at the reachable stars and dreamed with our eyes wide open.

We had heroes who dared to face the unknown on our behalf, for the greater good, or who stood up to the evil of communism.

In school we idolized presidents and great generals and we attended sporting events to catch a real-life glimpse of our mythological Gods most of whom, in our minds, smelled like bubble gum soaked baseball cards which we played “colors” in a game of flipping, in order to win as many of them as we could. Nothing felt pure gold weightier than a shoe box stuffed with cards.

We went to the movie theaters to idolize our bigger than life stars and turned our night time beds into floating rafts which would guide us towards the wide open sea of any and all possibilities.

Our pop songs were about hand-holding love, walking in the sand and the thrill of a kiss.

Today we treat love like Pavlovian button obsessed dogs. We don’t, for example, picture-linger and consider the depth of any one person on Tinder. Instead we SWIPE our way past them until we come down with a chronic case of Tindernitis. I think we take out our anger for feeling unloved on those sites too. We get back at our ex spouses. The men and women who hurt us. We are impatient, quick to judge and quick to dismiss, all in the pursuit of the perfection that we think that we want. The one who can make us feel like the one who caught away once did which in the end, after that first date, which we open like a new iPhone box, on the way home we are already heading for home to troll of the next upgrade.

The fact is, we are simply too much of our times, in a time, where we are always running out of time which few of us ever focus on. At least during the first two acts of life. Those of us in the midst of Act Three have the kind of sweeping perspective which allows us to compare then and now, which makes these times impossible to fathom or endure.

Today the concept of patriotism is all about what your country can do for you. Jack Kennedy is spinning in his eternal lit grave.

It’s all about MY God, MY belief. MY needs. MY guns.

YOUR uterus.

Today’s GOP and the obviously godless heathen/incapable of empathy Trump panders and pretend prays to the hot new form of Christianity (code name: Racism) by making the flock feel threatened on a Biblical level to the point of rallying together in order to form a more perfect union.

Personally, I cannot wait for January, when the Democrats, the grown-ups in the room, begin to do what the Constitution demands that they do: parent. Set limits. And when necessary, teach and punish.

But until then, my heart continues to ask:

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?