This whole time I’ve been saying pardon me as though it were a polite imperative, as in [please] pardon me. Now I find out it’s a declarative sentence, [I] pardon me. Once again, my exemplar is Donald Trump. Entering his 70s as a famous billionaire who recently became president of the United States, he is naturally preoccupied by technicalities of criminal law. For example: Can he pardon himself? [Long silence where he does not ask how people would remember that.] Great, look into it. [Watches several hours of TV in front of guy whose girlfriend’s roommate writes for the Washington Post.] Today is Friday, and right and wrong mean nothing even in the public imagination. Won’t you excuse yourself with me?

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Remember yesterday, when I gleefully promised you Friday Links today? I even used an exclamation point. It just goes to show you should never deploy those things, because I must waste my day in remunerative labor. Sorry champ. On the plus side, it’s 100 degrees in Missoula. The trees drip sap. Cats sprawl in the high grass. My neighbor who spends all day on the front porch in his underwear has nowhere to go, literally and figuratively. I stay inside and type, periodically looking at the dessicated grass and wondering what might have been. Oh, life. It’s too hot today.

I am snowed under around here, figuratively and damn near literally. While Combat! blog slept off an inordinate quantity of work last night, Missoula got a couple inches of snow. It was 85 this time last week. For the second year in a row, my lilac bush has taken a brutal beating, and dazzling mountain springtime has lapsed back into drear. Every year, I learn the same hard lesson—don’t trust spring—and every year I forget. Speaking of lessons repeatedly unlearned, President Trump put out another scandal yesterday. Perhaps you heard that he tried to get James Comey to call off the investigation of Michael Flynn. That’s obstruction, right? This one has to be the one that brings him down. Yet part of me thinks it won’t matter. Maybe it’s just the pervasive sense of unreality that the Trump presidency has generated, but I have become scandal fatigued. I have a hard time believing that anything can derail the Trump train before it pulls us all over the edge of a cliff. Either way, though, we’re watching history. This is either the unfolding of a Watergate-style meltdown or the beginning of the era when literally nothing that happens matters to American democracy. We live in interesting times.

For someone who despises work, I sure have been doing a lot of it lately. There is no Combat! blog today, because I have spent myself in productive labor. I worked both days this weekend, too, and both days the weekend before that. Trust me—I’m still contributing a lot less to society than pretty much anyone who gets a W-2. But I am also not contributing a blog today, because I have composed north of 2000 words already, and my brain is tired. While I stare into the middle distance, how about you check in on the organizers of the ill-fated Fyre Festival, who—spoiler alert—seem to have had no idea what they were doing. As someone who used to work with rich people, I recognized a certain je ne sais quoi in this paragraph:

According to Chloe Gordon, a production coordinator, the team laughed off warnings that they wouldn’t be able to finish in time. “Let’s just do it and be legends, man,” she said a man on the marketing team said in response to advice that they should postpone the festival to 2018.

See, a true leader has the vision to realize that the team should just be wildly successful instead of getting bogged down in details. Most people don’t think that way. In fact, I’d say you pretty much have to be rich to successfully wield that kind of acumen. Anyway, that’s probably why I work for a living. Will be back tomorrow with a more substantive labor of love.

As you may have gathered, there is no Combat! blog today. I am in Iowa with my wonderful girlfriend, visiting my parents. It’s not scary at all. Every time I think about the natural gravity of such a situation, the gentle constant sound of the wind whispering through the cornfields dead, gray trees reminds me of my carefree midwestern girlhood, and I am soothed. What I am not is blogging. I would instruct you to call me Mister Leisure, but that is already the name of a fugitive sea lion I also find soothing. How about you read about him, and I’ll be back with a real blog on Wednesday? I know, it’s a long way away. In the meantime, you can just keep clicking on the random posts in the left-hand sidebar. Did you know there’s a sidebar on this blog? Some browsers don’t show it, but if you click on the little hash marks in the upper left-hand corner, it will appear. Do that and read weird, probably embarrassing posts from 2010 and whatnot. I’ll see you again soon. I promise.