When the girls first met Rachelle and I they declared us their “real” parents–probably due to our liberal rules regarding drugs and alcohol and my collection of hats. No matter, since then, they have relegated their actual mom to “birth mother.” They are currently off working as camp counsellors for the summer, and have requested that I write them a letter each week. Here is one:

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My most cherished daughters:

It’s really hot in Toronto right now. So hot your birth mother might even consider putting on the AC. I, as you know, perish in the heat. Humidity is my enemy. I am TOTALLY racist against humidity. Not woke at all in that department.

Fuck the humidity!

I would vote for anybody who proposed building a huge wall between me and the humidity.

I really would.

Anyway, as you should, but probably don’t know, I work-out up to three hours a day.

Fact.

Not fake news!

Part of this routine includes walking ( pretty fast!) on a treadmill for 30 minutes a day. Today, on account of the heat, I took my shirt off to do this. Just as I was finishing and stepping off the treadmill, sweaty and a little bit dizzy, I spotted three young women passing by our front window.

I have to admit, I kind of froze.

Obviously, I wanted to dive out of the way and hide from sight, but startled, I guess, I made eye contact with one of them. Have you ever seen a face collapse? I don’t mean literally, like in a horror movie, but more an unmediated emotional response in the face of calamity.

This woman, the one whom I made eye contact with, had a normal, even confident resting face, but when she saw me standing there shirtless, all conscious control she had over her facial features simply vanished. It was like everything caved in and turned upside down at once—as if she had been seized by a kind of supernatural possession. She gasped and then leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees and stated to gag. One of her friends looked at me and started to desperately wave me away and out of their sight line, which of course, I dutifully did.

Really, really hate sorority girls.

Pretty sure they were from Alpha Gamma Delta.

Don’t you ever join Alpha Gamma Delta. They are the worst. Very stuck-up. And sororities are all about upholding cultural and social hierarchies. Sororities are not woke!

Thankfully, I am a middle-aged white man so the incident did nothing to diminish my mystifying confidence.

Anyhow, that is how my day started.

Soon I will clean the bathroom. Did you know that Rachelle made a chore list, laminated it and has now posted 8 copies of it throughout the apartment?

That’s more copies than there are rooms! It’s true, and you would not believe how unfair the list is!! Do you think I should be cleaning her hockey equipment and the Diaper Genie three times a week??? I swear, Rachelle thinks she’s such a big shot just because she has a job. Let me give you some fatherly advice, daughters, never, ever allow yourself to be defined by paid work. Or becoming a member of a fucking sorority.

We love you very much and ask that you please send photographs of Bigfoot and Mothman,

Your father

As you probably know, the 42 year-old fitness enthusiast and Ayn Rand fanboy, is the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. He’s supposed to be vigorous and youthful, and in him we’re to see the hopeful amplification of our aspirations. He’s sort of like a Christian rock band that’s been distilled into a Bro Politician, if that makes any sense. Whatever he’s wearing looks as if it was designed to appeal to somebody else, like a costume, and not something that was an organic manifestation of who he is. He just has the look of somebody who cares more what you think of him than what he thinks of himself.

One thing that drives me crazy about him is that he went for a photo-op at a soup kitchen in Ohio and washed clean dishes for the cameras. What sort of asshole does that? Couldn’t he find a single thing to do that was needed or useful, couldn’t he have reached down deep into the abyss and summoned something sincere? But maybe I’m just blaming Ryan for a political advertising machine that disseminates symbols of intent rather than the actual results of intent. As Ryan would likely say to me in some offensive, imitation gangster accent, “Hate the game, not the playa!”

Fine.

But he lied about the time in which he ran a Marathon back in 1990. It was the only marathon the guy had ever run, and his recorded time of just over 4 hours is really impressive for a normal human being. I mean, if I had ever achieved that I would be immensely proud of the fact and it would be the first thing out of my mouth at every cocktail party I attended.

But Ryan said in an interview that, “I had a two hour and fifty-something marathon,” which he did not. This was not a mistake. This wasn’t a situation where a busy man forgot a small detail about something that took place decades ago amidst the swirl of a chaotic and fantastic life brimming with stunning victories. It was a conscience, willful lie. People who finish one Marathon have that time burned into their brain. Getting the time wrong, by over an hour, would be like forgetting you climbed Mt. Everest. And the difference between a 4-hour Marathon, which is roughly where most fit but not elite runners finish, and breaking the three hour barrier, something that would have placed Ryan 85^th in the Men’s Marathon at the London Olympics, is huge.

I presume that Ryan is a smart guy and that he had to know it would be easy to fact check this, so the only explanation for his lie was that it was a reflex–a primitive  spasm. He didn’t think, but followed the reptile instinct that told him to take this opportunity to make to make himself look better, and so he did, oblivious to consequence. This suggests a kind of compulsion to me, a conscienceless narcissism that would not be out of place amidst the preening amorality of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.