Me and a bunch of people waiting to go through my wallet.

Although my confidence in the medical profession remains at a low ebb after last year’s vertigo debacle,¹ I went to the doctor yesterday. I’m glad I did. I’ll spare you the greenish-yellow details, but I have a variety of exciting infections in pretty much all the orifices of my head, and now I am on antibiotics. They are definitely making me better, particularly in the category of sore throat and ears, but they are also wiping me out. I assume my body is mostly bacteria, and this course of treatment will cure me by majority killing me. In this way I resemble the body politic: disgusting, injurious to public health, and likely to get worse before it gets better.

Today is a big day for presidential primaries: Ohio, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Illinois all go to the polls. If John Kasich and Marco Rubio don’t beat Donald Trump in their home states tonight, their campaigns are functionally over. That would leave Republicans to choose between Trump and Ted Cruz, not just in the primaries that follow but at the convention in July. Ohio and Florida are winner-take-all states, and if Trump wins both he could reach the convention with a simple majority of delegates. More likely, though, he’ll roll in with a plurality, leaving the party establishment to broker a compromise between two candidates it hates, or risk alienating its voters with a third candidate who didn’t run in any primaries at all.

It’s an exciting day for Republican politics, is what I’m saying here. We may be watching the first stages of a split in the GOP. Either that or we’re watching the second stage of a nationalist strongman’s ascent to power, but I don’t think so. This is a friendly reminder that polls have Trump getting smashed by Clinton in a general election, and Sanders does even better. It’s going to be okay. I mean, it’s clearly not: one of our two major parties is on the verge of nominating an incoherent and racist reality television celebrity. But it’s going to be not-okay with a president other than Donald Trump. And I’m going to live, dammit.

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