My Political Life Revisited

Since the other kids  are currently waking from enchanted slumber and declaring candidacy for the coming elections, I thought it apposite to trot out this old essay, update it, and post it before my political rivals fully disenthrall themselves and get the jump on me. 
                                  *********************************************

Here is a picture of a man. He is 65 years old. He is on a big adventure to find his shadow but is walking in the wrong direction. Why is he doing that? Why is he doing that on a hot June day in California?

He is in training.



He is in training for politics because another goddawful election year is coming, full of upheavals, downheaveals and unilateral global heavals, but he doesn't care about that. This is important. He wants to be Lieutenant Governor of Wyoming. Why? Because he is currently Lieutenant Governor of Arizona and hates the Capitol Building:

That is why he lives in California. Yes, it's still dry here and he despairs of his yard but politics is a strange bedfellow and he prefers to live with his wife who says, "he's strange too because he steals all the covers". But more importantly, he braves the inclemency of the Golden State. In his words: "Those other two states, much as I love them and dedicate my political life to them, are mostly just gravel."

No other Lieutenant Governor of either state has given a kinder description of them.

Why is our candidate special? First off, he was a prime athlete who attended several prestigious community colleges on a full Cockfighting Scholarship.

He became class president through a series of debates, Machiavellian tontines and the slogan, "How do I get out of this chicken outfit? No, really, there's no zipper!"

His platform consisted of fierce promises to clean up campus lavatories --which really needed it-- expressed as, "A vote for me is a vote for sanity (a word he still confuses with sanitation)." He also perfected a directive that thematized his subsequent public life: "If we cannot progress singly, let us regress severally. You guys go first!"

There are some who say the office, to which our candidate aspires, holds no real power. In rebuttal, one can only point out the contributions of Lieutenant Governors in Arizona, Maine, Oregon, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and, of course, Wyoming. If you would like to impress alumni at your next high school reunion by claiming to be a Lieutenant Governor, make sure it's one of those six places. Other states and territories actually have that office.

Oh, and I have dibs on Wyoming.