Costco Confession

Ex-Trump fixer / attorney Michael Cohen testifies in
front of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday

This past Wednesday I left work early to make a 4pm appointment to get the oil changed in my SUV over at Midas.

The manager there is a young guy named Rob who's really cool, knows his stuff and is always honest and upfront about pricing and service needs - so I like to bring my business there.

My trusty Honda SUV is nine years-old and coming up on 66,000 miles and it's in good shape.

Like most Hondas it's been reliable, reasonable on gas and the only reasons it's ever in the shop is for oil changes, tire rotations, or the occasional new battery or windshield wiper blades.

A couple headlight bulbs have petered out now and then, but I learned how to change those myself (amazing what you can learn on YouTube) and they're pretty cheap at an AutoZone or on Amazon.

The oil change itself went pretty quick, I watched highlights of Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony (pictured above) in the waiting area while the mechanic was doing his thing - and he took me back in the garage area to show me a screw that was embedded in my rear passenger-side tire.

Fortunately I purchased the tires at Costco, so they came with a pretty generous warranty that covers the tires up to 70,000 miles with some restrictions depending on the wear and depth on the tire tread - basically if a tire gets damaged from a road hazard, they'll replace it for free.*

(* Note: I don't make any money from this blog, nor do I accept ads, so just to be clear, that's not some kind of guerrilla marketing campaign for Costco, it's just my experience. And they make a damned good rotisserie chicken in case you've never had one. Plump, juicy and $5.32 with tax.)

So I left work early again on Friday to roll over to Costco in Lawrenceville, NJ to get the tire replaced.

How I spent my late Friday afternoon

Being that I was a walk-in, the guy at the tire counter told me it would be about a 90-minute wait, which was fine as I wanted to go pick up a roasted rotisserie chicken to have for the weekend and also cash in my 2018 rewards for my Costco Visa card.

Not being in a hurry, I took my time and people-watched for a bit before finding a checkout line with a short wait with a cashier who seemed pretty efficient.

She was a white American woman with glasses who looked like she was in her late 60's or early 70's.

She was very nice with kind of a mischievous look in her eye, and as I handed her my Costco card she asked me how I was doing and I smiled and said I was doing pretty good as it was a Friday.

When I asked her how she was doing, she paused for a moment and gave me a rather serious look as she ran the plastic container holding my delicious-smelling rotisserie chicken over the scanner and said, "I'm not happy about my taxes."

"Uh, oh." I said raising my eyebrows with a sympathetic frown.

As you may recall the last blog I wrote in February was partly about Americans facing the unpleasant realities about the Republican Tax Con - including the fact that millions of middle and working class Americans are actually seeing significant tax increases and lower tax returns compared to 2018.

My Costco cashier was one of those people.

With a trace of wistful sadness, she told me she was a single widow living on her own and looked down at the register in thought  - as if for a moment the image of her deceased husband and the life they'd once shared had suddenly materialized in her mind.

I couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards her.

Based on my years of experience screening hundreds of prospective renters for apartments, it's a good bet that she lives on Social Security and some kind of modest pension, and is working at Costco part-time to make ends meet.

Parts of the Republican Tax Cut that Republican
politicians don't like to talk about publicly

If she's a homeowner, she may also have lost out on the Republican's decision to cap the mortgage interest deduction at $10,000 on state and local taxes in states with high property taxes.

Blue-leaning states like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and California - states which coincidentally (or not) voted for Hillary in 2016.

During my leisurely stroll of Costco's gargantuan warehouse-like interior, I noticed something interesting.

The vast majority of the employees I saw out on the polished concrete floor wearing red Costco vests were clearly seniors 60-years-old or older - including African-American, white and Hispanic folks.

Personally I think that says something about the "booming economy" Herr Trump likes to brag about.

As I asked the cashier if her tax bill was a big increase from 2018, she rang up my rotisserie chicken and thought for a moment, then shook her head with an open flash of resentment, glanced at me and admitted in a clipped voice, "I was NOT expecting this."

Now in that momentary glance, listening to the sudden acid tone of her voice, I recognized that she had voted for Trump in 2016 - I can't tell you how I knew, the way she was dressed, the way she looked, I just knew it.

There was something about the expression on her face and the way she looked me in the eye, along with a palpable sense of betrayal in her voice - like she'd seen something for the first time.

When Trump supporters like this see their tax bills
or refunds, how are they going to vote in 2020? 

And somehow, and I'm completely speculating here folks, I got the sense that she was kind of confessing that to me, an African-American, in particular.

Just for a second it seemed like she wanted to say more.

Then the chipper smile magically reappeared on her face and she took the printout of the email with my Costco Visa rewards that I'd brought, deducted the $5.32 for the rotisserie chicken and handed me my change in cash and said something to the effect that she'd already said too much.


As I carefully placed the tantalizingly-warm plastic container holding my chicken into my reusable shopping bag and resisted the urge to tear it open, rip off a juicy leg and devour it right there in the checkout line, I wished the cashier a nice day and she glanced at me with a mischievous smile and said pleasantly (and not a little sarcastically), "I hope you get a nice tax refund."

With the news on Friday that Washington Governor Jay Inslee has officially declared his candidacy for the 2020 presidential race, the number of Democratic candidates now running is at least 12 - with some big names like former VP Joe Biden and former billionaire New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg still considering.

Based on the impromptu Costco confession I heard on Friday, it's not the growing list of Democratic presidential hopefuls, or even voters like me that the Trump campaign should be worrying about in 2020.

It's people like that cashier at Costco.

Old Fox Guy, The Singer & Aleister Crowley

Govt. Shutdown Day 13 - Fake President at Thursday's
fake press briefing with his posse of bald xenophobes 

It was my intention to begin 2019 not so much with the daunting pressure and outsized expectations of a bold "New Year's Resolution".

But rather with the simple, honest pursuit of good intent.

So after work on Wednesday I closed my office door, changed into my workout clothes and drove over to the Retrofitness gym just around the corner from my apartment.

I needed to escape the incessant media coverage of Trump's delusional whining about building a pointless wall.

After spending much of my New Year's Day nursing a hangover, eating and watching Penn State come up short against a resurgent University of Kentucky football team in the Citrus Bowl on Tuesday, it felt good to work up a good sweat and burn some calories.

Now for some folks, the gym is a social experience, some people spend as much time talking and shooting the breeze with others as they do working out - which is cool.

But I'm more the cerebral type, and after a day of ringing phones, nonstop emails and constant interruptions at work, just meditating and thinking quietly while working out is much more relaxing and rejuvenating to me than talking.

Excessively chatty people at the gym, especially the types who thrive on a captive audience in a confined space where others are forced to hear them talk, can really annoy me by intruding on the peaceful, quiet place I try to create inside my head when I'm working out.

An asylum seeker pulls her children away from tear
gas fired by U.S. Border Patrol agents

My first workout of 2019 went pretty well, I did 30 minutes of lifting and ab work, then 30 minutes of cardio.

While on the treadmill I flipped back and forth between local weather and a CNN panel discussion of Trump's delusional demands for Congress to authorize $5 billion in taxpayer funds to begin construction on a useless monument to his xenophobia, bigotry and infantile ego along the southern border with Mexico.


Afterwards I walked into the locker room to change and grab a hot shower, and these two regulars are in there - one of whom is an older conservative guy I know to be a Fox News watcher.

He's not a bad guy, but he tends to roam the expanse of the gym looking for people willing to listen to him spend 15 to 20 minutes talking in excruciating detail about the woes of the Philadelphia Eagles or his right-wingy political views - which come straight from the aforementioned Fox News.

Allow me to share an example.

Back in the summer of 2017 I heard him angrily denounce Arizona Republican Senator John McCain as a traitor after the feisty, decorated Vietnam vet and former POW famously gave his thumbs-down on a Senate floor vote to pass that sketchy, cobbled-together Republican bill to repeal Obamacare - torpedoing Trump's disturbing obsession with rolling back the Affordable Care Act.

That's just one sample of the kinds of things I've heard him say in the gym at high-volume.

So as I enter the locker room on Wednesday, there's Old Fox Guy talking to this other gym regular who defies the Retrofitness dress code by insisting on working out in jeans, black leather boots, a black t-shirt, and a black baseball hat - he also wears headphones and spends much of his workouts singing loud, off-key snippets of classic rock like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd.

(I enjoy classic rock, but if I'm going to listen to 'Breathe' from Dark Side of the Moon I want to hear Roger Waters sing it - not some sweaty dude in a gym with no musical tone staring at himself in a mirror pretending he knows the lyrics.)

Trash normally collected by Park Service employees
piles up across from the White House

Anyway, I see these two characters talking so I scurry over to my locker to change as fast as I can to try and get in the shower as quickly as possible where it was my hope that:

A) neither of them will try to engage me in conversation.

And B) the force of the water will hopefully drown out the sound of whatever conversation I know they're about to have.

I was making good time peeling off my sweaty clothes when The Singer brings up the government shutdown.

Old Fox Guy quickly agrees that something must be done, but before he can launch into some kind of tirade about Nancy Pelosi being responsible for it, The Singer stops in the middle of the locker room and his face gets red.

He raises his voice and announces that he's "sick of the whole thing", and with Ayn Rand-ian flourish says he could care less what happens to the 800,000 federal workers who are still going without a paycheck.

Many of whom have no means to pay their monthly mortgage, car loan or rent for January.

Now even Old Fox Guy was taken aback by such a statement, and despite his decidedly right-leaning political views starts to make a point about federal workers deserving to get paid.

But The Singer cuts him off, and shoots back that federal workers all get better benefits and pensions than he does and that they don't care about him.

Right-wing Net rumor: English occultist Aleister Crowley
was the father of First Lady Barbara Bush

He suggested they're all in cahoots with "the politicians" and out of the blue ( I shit you not) he says:

"Dude, you know Barbra Bush's father was Aleister Crowley, right?" 

Old Fox Guy is suddenly and uncharacteristically silent, as he ponders this question.

There are others besides myself in the locker room, and he has to realize how totally bat-shit crazy that sounds.

To me, suggesting that the wife of former President George HW Bush is actually the biological daughter of Aleister Crowley, the notorious British occult leader and prolific womanizer, ranks up there with the Pizzagate conspiracy that revolved around allegations that Hillary Clinton was a member of a pedophile ring that was run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant - which doesn't actually have a basement.

Curious about where The Singer could have dredged up this Bush-Crowley nonsense, I looked it up online and read an article on Gizmodo.com by Charlie Jane Anders which pointed out that the source of the rumor was an article published on the Cannonfire Website - on April Fools Day 2006.

Anders reported that he contacted author Tobias Churton, who wrote a biography about Crowley, to ask him about the rumor - Churton claims that Crowley, who like many cult leaders incorporated sex into the "rituals" associated with the occult practice he founded, kept meticulous notes of the various women he had sex with in his diary - there's no mention of him ever having had sex with Barbara Bush's mother Pauline Pierce.

So back to the gym, at this point I'm all but running past these two guys to get to the shower.

As I pass him, The Singer is red faced and pacing the small locker room area complaining that the Bush family are part of a cult that worships Satan.

By the time The Singer asks Old Fox Guy, "Do you believe in Lucifer?" I've got the shower going full blast and am rinsing my head to try and drown out the rest of his muttering about Trump foes being Satanists - this kind of irrational vilification of moderate Republicans by MAGA-hat wearing Trump loyalists is truly frightening.

8-YO Guatemalan immigrant Felipe Gomez Alonzo who
died in US Border Patrol custody on Christmas Eve

What's sad about that odd verbal exchange in my gym is how it reflects the kind of de-evolution of intelligent discourse and substantive political debate in this nation.

It's a direct byproduct of our deeply polarized political climate, and Trump's toxic presence in a White House where lies and deceit have become a daily part of the narrative.

His efforts to normalize racism, his paranoid attacks on institutions like the free press, the judiciary and free and fair elections go hand in hand with the denial of facts that Trump peddles like his xenophobia and bigotry.

The remarkable thing is that this Con Man-in-Chief doesn't actually care about any of these reprehensible views any more than he gives a shit about migrant children languishing (or dying) in detention facilities around the U.S. because of a policy he implemented.

Like 8-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Felipe Gomez Alonzo who died while in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol on Christmas Eve as a direct result of the intentionally inhumane immigration policy that's been the centerpiece of this nightmare presidency.

Trump's absurd policy positions and clownish statements are little more than crude tools used to prod and stoke the anger of the approximately 34% of American people who fawn over him like a cult leader, or quietly tolerate his intolerance.

Simply because it serves as a psychological outlet for the pent up fear and anger over their growing economic marginalization in a nation that's growing more racially and ethnically diverse every day.

A nation where the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to widen thanks in part to the Republican Party's zombie-like devotion to their corporate oligarch donor base.

All The President's Men

The quasi-delusional chaos Trump sews also serves as a way for him to try and deflect attention away from the shocking revelations of the Mueller investigation.

Like the fact that his former fixer-slash-personal lawyer (Michael Cohen), ex-campaign chief (Paul Manafort) and ex-national security adviser (Michael Flynn) have all been found guilty of varying degrees legal and ethical violations that point to a clear and sustained effort by the Trump campaign to actively conspire with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections.

So it's troubling that I went to my gym to try and escape the ceaseless barrage of media coverage centering on Trump's rampant idiocy, and ended up being forced to listen to a "Freedom Caucus" Trump supporter whose contempt for mainstream Republicans is so extreme, that he's literally standing in a crowded public locker room repeating a baseless internet rumor about former First Lady Barbara Bush being the biological daughter of Aleister Crowley.

But that's okay, I get in, do my workout, shower and get out - calmed and reassured by the knowledge that a solid Democratic majority has just been sworn into the House of Representatives.

Politicians motivated by a desire to legislate on behalf of the majority of the American people, and energized by a sense of responsibility to reign in the chaos of a man who has turned the White House into a cesspool.

Besides, if the quasi-delusional rantings of The Singer are any indication of what's motivating Trump's base and the divisions within a Republican Party that's shown itself unable to govern, then the 2020 elections are shaping up to bode well for Democrats at the local, state and national level.

Happy New Year indeed.