Bad Sea, "Solid Air"

Terrible things are about to happen.

Photo: Judd McCullum

I hope you were out and about yesterday because it was a goddamn delight from start to finish, one of those days where no matter how horrible everything else is in your life it somehow seems, for a little while at least, that none of it matters so long as the sun is shining. In any event, that day ended, and now you’re here. And even right now, of a Monday morning, life is still so much less terrible than it is going to get.

That’s right: Tonight is the first presidential debate. You know how Twitter is always a giant, refuse-strewn hole in the ground where every inch is seeded with explosives, and the stench from the body parts of those who stepped on other mines is so overpowering that your throat closes and your eyes sting? Starting this evening it’s going to be so much worse. It’s going to be an Olympics of Idiocy where everyone competes and each competitor gets some kind of medal for being a vacuous, unfunny jackass. And those are just the amateurs. The political “pros,” who, don’t ever forget, know no more than you (and, by virtue of the chronic groupthink and desperate cynicism they try so hard to project, may very well know less), will take what is already an insufferable slog and turn it into an orgy of agony where the terrible contempt in which you hold yourself for simply being an observer is dwarfed by the disgust you feel for all the actual participants and any species which could produce such an abortion of existence. Maybe tonight is a good time to get back into reading books.

Anyway, Twitter is going to be bad forever. Accept it and move on with your life. Here’s something from a Dublin duo called Bad Sea, who are new to me and I guess to being a band. It’s a good start. Enjoy.