Love Minus Zero. With Limits.

Everybody's talking about love.

Well, fuck that shit. I'm gonna talk about hate. 

Specifically, my hate for Donald Trump.

I am not new to hating presidents; I've protested against them, campaigned against them, boo'ed them in person, drew Hitler mustaches on photos of them, and allegedly threw my apple core at one of them as his motorcade passed by although it was never proven no matter what that reactionary Nixon-loving asshole standing next to me told the authorities. 

But Trump.

But Trump.

This is a level of vitriol, hate, disgust I have never reached before.

When my sister and I were young, we lived next door to a family whom we declared our arch enemies. Such was the depth of hate that fomented in four-year-old me that every once in a while, just for sport, I try to find any of them on Facebook. You know, just to work myself up.

This neighbor family was deserving of our enmity. They were racists, they were war hawks, they slammed the door in my mom's face when we went door-to-door campaigning for the California Fair Housing Act in 1959. And although those were reasons that my parents disliked them, we - my sister Karen and me - took the issues deeply to heart and made our mission to make them - the three kids - pay for the sins of their parents. 

Oh yeah, shit was real in North Hollywood.

I hated those kids with the red hot burning passion of a thousand suns. For years, we waged The War (as Karen and I called it). We sabotaged their lawn, we broke their bikes, we got into screaming fights and chases with them, and more than once, we stole their lunch boxes at school and threw them in the trashcan.

The War was on after school, on weekends and summer vacations. It went on for years. We had no plan, no exit strategy, no support from our allies, nothing that Colin Powell's Doctrine of War would have advised us to do. It was our 'Nam.

One day, the dad of the family yelled at me and shook me by the shoulders because I told his kids that Barry Goldwater was an idiot and anyone who voted for him was also an idiot. I also told the kids that there is no Santa Claus which, as far as I knew, was a far worse thing to say and I wondered for a long time why that wasn't the transgression that brought his shitstorm on me.

When MY dad found out what the neighbor had done, he blew out of our house and stormed next door.

Karen and I, watching from our front porch, couldn't see what went on inside their house but we heard the mom screaming, "Mr. Brown is killing your father!" These words were indelibly printed onto my brain not because my dad - who had never raised a hand, EVER, in anger - was kicking the guy's ass, but because in my progressive, liberal family, nobody was referred to as, "Mr." or "Misses", we called everyone by their first name. It made me giggle. Mister Brown.

An observer - maybe that asshole who reported me for throwing the apple core at Nixon - might have deduced that I found it funny to see someone being beat up, but the observer would be wrong.

The neighbor was calling my dad, "Mr. Brown." 

While he was kicking her husband's ass.

Tell me that isn't funny.

Anyway, the incident pretty much laid to rest my roiling rage at the family. Oh, I still hated them and the kids were still horrible little shits who - and this is a verifiably true story - put our CAT in their garage freezer. (We rescued the cat. He lived, happily, to a ripe old age.) Karen and I still organized neighborhood chases and rumbles but that's mostly because the soundtrack to "West Side Story" had recently been released and we were obsessed with it. Chasing them was an opportunity for me to hone my choreography, pirouette-ing and gran jete-ing my way down Laurel Canyon Blvd, crouched low, snapping my fingers. Wearing my flowered corduroy pedal pushers and rubber-toed PF Flyers.

Bad to the (chicken soup) bone.

If my dad were alive today, and if he could kick Trump's ass, would I feel as free of the gripping fury that clutches at me every time I read the news as I did when he punched out a racist asshole neighbor?

Probably not. Because violence doesn't solve anything and blah blah blah blah blah blah. 

And because Trump would just claim that HE kicked my dad's ass. And he'd doctor a photo of my dad with a broken nose.

And his mofo minions would swear to the lie.

And I'd be mired in disgust and hate for them all over again. And I can't handle more hate than I already have. I swear I am going back to eating white starch carbs because scones and baguettes don't lie or put babies in cages or start bullshit wars to distract from impeachment hearings.

Anyway, as it turns out, my dad had already been itching to punch the neighbor because he had caught the guy peeping into my bedroom window from his backyard. The guy was a creepy sicko perv.

Huh. A racist who was also a perv. Where have we heard that before?

Gonna grab my tennies. I feel a dance sequence coming on.