It was a long nap, not as long as some, but better by an hour than the one yesterday. The resonant wind in his curls brought a freshness beyond sleep to the customarily stale early evening. This troubled him for a moment, nothing troubled him for much longer than that, but for that brief interlude he wondered if he’d been pursuing the wrong discipline. Maybe he should abandon his commitment to napping and instead figure out why his hair felt so right in the slight gale. Was it the product choice, the Tenax, that made the difference up there? How could it be so different than whatever he’d stolen from the apothecary aisle last month? Maybe it was the increasing length of the locks – he’d been saving money by avoiding regular haircuts. Or maybe – perhaps this was it, the way he slept had unmatted or otherwise arranged his hair just right, and now it caught the breeze like a sail. If so, he could chalk it all up to mere coincidence, and he wouldn’t have to give up napping, a relief indeed, for he didn’t know what else he’d do on all his idle afternoons. He tied up that rationalization like a sailor. Smirking, he fixed a gaze through his sunglasses at the setting sun, and presently turned in the opposite direction, heading into the night.

 

-Danny Grosso

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Super Delegate

Like a message from prehistory, a multitudinous swarm, or a darkening sky, the general election pestilence of the Super Delegates casts a pall over the hopes of common pols. Thundering home the message of the elders, the SD stifles the cries for reform and change that, in one of nature’s ironies, pop up in sequence with the SD’s quadrennial pre-election appearance. The Super Delegate has extraordinary strength in numbers, as each SD carries a power weighted greater than its pitiful cousin, the lowly, simple Delegate. En masse, the SD population can sap the energy from a primary season and decimate interest in a convention. It can eviscerate expected television ad revenues for convention week, and cause the unemployment of hundreds of advance people. The SD is, as such, widely reviled, and yet, in keeping with the country’s norms, is also left unchecked to continue its plunder of political reason. However, the changing times bring snippets of news from the field: poachers hunting outside of election season, under the radar of parties concerned, may be slowly but inexorably thinning the Super Delegate herd.  Check back in four years.

 

-Danny Grosso