Clinton, South Carolina, Friday, April 19, 2019, 12:19 p.m.

When I was a boy, one of my grandmothers was prone to say “it’s about to come up a cloud.”

Another line of those storms is about to roll through, flinging out lightning. It sure seems like this happens more often than it used to. Mama Davis would be agitated “sho’nuff.”

Now we gaze westward electronically. Soon the gaze will turn eastward as we track squalls blowing off the coast of Africa. Hurricane season grows ever longer in the same way as big-money sports seasons.

It’s not global warming exactly. It’s global weirding. The weather has its own Xtreme Games.

2:48 p.m.

The storms have passed through and by. DirecTV didn’t even go out, let alone the electricity.

During the occasional periods in which rain was pelting the roof, I busied myself with editing, internet research, and the routine duties of every day at the GoLaurens.com website.

I just remembered the Cubs were playing this afternoon. It’s the second inning at Wrigley Field, and it seems my early-season fate to see all the Arizona Diamondbacks’ hideous uniform combinations.

Torey Lovullo, ex-Red Sox coach, is the manager. I’d like to root for him, but with those uniforms, my eyes won’t have it.

While editing obituaries and looking up the arrest report, I watched about five minutes of an old movie with Troy Donahue, Stefanie Powers and Connie Stevens called Palm Springs Weekend. I perversely enjoyed the spectacle of Donahue’s wooden acting, mainly because Powers and Stevens were so fetching, but I didn’t stay long enough to notice it was Palm Springs or the weekend.

Once when I was writing about NASCAR in Joliet, I sat four rows behind Jerry Rice at Wrigley Field. He was wearing a Cubs jersey with his football number, 80, on the back, and his name above the number. There wasn’t any such thing as a selfie – if I’d heard someone say it, I probably would have thought it a nickname for someone who was selfish – but it probably wouldn’t have been any different. I have had my picture taken with celebrities an astonishingly small number of times.

My only recent photo with celebrities is with a Riley Freeman and a Sam Tiller, a pair of seniors on the Clinton High School soccer team.

The Cubs just scored two runs because four D-Backs let a pop fly fall amongst them. They probably lost the ball in their uniforms.

3:18 p.m.

As Rudyard Kipling never had a chance to say, Trump is Trump and the rest is the rest, and never the twain shall meet.

I don’t like his politics, but what I mostly dislike is he. Trump, not Kipling. I haven’t thought much about Kipling’s politics. Kipling can’t run because he died in 1936 and wasn’t a naturalized citizen, or an American citizen at all.

Why do people like Donald Trump? He is vain, humorless, boastful, and, as a liar, I have known only one man in my life who could compete. He takes the credit for everything and the blame for nothing.

The late Jimmy Breslin wrote a book about Watergate called How the Good Guys Finally Won. This time I’m not so sure.

Nothing amazes me more than learning that a friend likes Trump. I can’t believe it. I bat my brain figuring out how it could possibly be.

I wrote a novel about a year ago called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Nothing I envisioned in a completely fictitious president named Martin Gaynes seems exaggerated in view of what has happened in the real country. Gaynes’ role is a small one. He’s from North Carolina and doesn’t play golf. He’s a crook, though. He’s got that going for him.

Life in this country is hilarious, regardless of which side one is on. It’s theater of the absurd. I laugh uproariously right up to the time I start weeping.

Lots of Trump fans – it’s a sport, really – used to be fond of saying they wanted to “defend the Constitution.” Damned if they haven’t gotten me doing it.

I know, I know … he’s the president. The system never fails. We get what we deserve.

 

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The new novel, my eighth, is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.