Notices by Mats Holberg (holberg@mstdn.social)

Very Vegas: Every single local ad during this game has been for a personal injury attorney.

Related: Car insurance here is insanely expensive.

It’s just amazing how blatantly awful people have gotten even in small talk. Like, someone I met at a party last night, who assumed I’d fled ‘communist’ California—a notion/conversation I batted away by saying actually I’m a Hollywood liberal—and who, when someone else was asking about local organizations I support, snarked ‘I hope you weren’t counting on USAID.’

I’m talking about homeless youth and he’s scoring points on depriving the whole world’s most vulnerable people of basic necessities.

I fucking hate Republicans for being such awful people, and being so awful to people, and interfering even with my enjoyment of gin.

I’ve realized my coping mechanism, for the time being, is to realize our white trash president and his apartheid pal are going to bumpkinize the government, and maintain big-picture fury while not bursting an aorta every time I learn they’ve found yet another worthwhile federal department or service to destroy.

The GOP really has abandoned any pretense of propriety, hasn’t it?

Their new morality is a brazen end-justifies-the-means dismantling of democracy by two narcissistic psychopaths with astonishing conflicts of interest.

@kims Sorry I missed you! And thanks for the invitation! Got in a deep long convo with a buddy.

The most fantastically Vegas couple sitting next to me—early 60s probably—and a bartender just complimented the wife’s boots. ‘They’re fabulous!’

‘Forty-five hundred dollars!’ exclaims the husband in response. The wife laughs. They really can’t get more perfect.

The boots:

All those years I rolled my eyes at fundamentalist evangelical relatives who believed in the coming of a literal antichrist.

Never suspecting they—themselves—would fulfill their own prophecy by putting in the White House a man who lives and breathes in active defiance of everything Christ taught while masquerading as an angel of light.

Still incredibly charmed by the sloshing martini glass my little nephew made me for Christmas.

It’s now a permanent fixture on my bar cart with some other favorite tchotchkes that have been there forever: A photo of my Granddad—also a martini drinker—a pair of wooden dice that were a present from David Linley and my favorite little brown jade Ganesha.

@kims Was this at McMullan’s?? Some STIFF competition there!

If I genuinely believed I’d only done what I had to do to protect myself and others, nothing more, I’d count myself lucky I’d been acquitted and try to vanish back into obscurity.

But the way these guys capitalize on opportunities for fortune and fame seems—ipso facto—to contradict any pretense of innocence. Because Rittenhouse-style celebrity isn’t built on courtroom justice. There’s no reason for more than 15 minutes of that. No, it’s making a career that celebrates getting away with murder.

No surprise, of course, that the white guy acquitted of choking to death a homeless Black man would immediately accept an invitation to sit with Vance at a football game.

Trumpist values all the way: Be a murderous racist then go bask in the worshipful right-wing adoration.

Every so often, some random person will explain to me what I’ve posted. And it’s like oh my god this is what women deal with all day long.

Y’know, just another atheist waging war on Christmas.

Admittedly, I’m not *keeping the Christ in Christmas* but neither is this pagan artifact haha.

Thought I’d pop into CVS for a few random vaccines it turned out I was eligible for and hadn’t gotten. While I still can, etc.

And just canceled my appointment because the joint was SLAMMED with people waiting for vaccinations. The RFK Jr effect, I suppose.

I’m so old I can remember when Marco Rubio was close to actual tears discussing the prospect of Trump as a general election nominee. And making insinuations about the size of Trump’s penis?

The frenemy situation in Trumpworld is cuckoo.

I’m assuming most of the insanely unqualified people Trump’s nominating is a function of wanting absolute fealty this time around—without the pesky interference of competence or expertise—and few competent experts wanting to destroy their personal and professional lives by formal association with him.

So, we’re going to spend billions of dollars deporting people whose labor we exploit to hold down food costs while also surrendering all the taxes they pay without receiving benefits.

Yep, sounds like the genius who managed to bankrupt casinos.

The shock this time is different. In 2016, I walked around in a fog for a week—getting used to the reality of an inconceivable outcome and knowing it’d be awful without knowing exactly how. Constant doomscrolling.

This time, it’s understanding everything—in all its multifarious implications—all too well. And I’m feeling dread, physically, at the cellular level. Barely able to open this app or look at headlines.

Tomorrow’s drink/dinner plans will be the first I’ve spoken about what happened.