i slept badly and had a bad dream about a bad government coming after me. little me. i think the monster for me was always the government, authority, a cruelly absent, distantly violent patriarch as far from fatherly as i could be. i knew the government is only there to lie and steal. i wonder what monster will be the most popular this year. i remember when it was nixon, and i saw a sea of nixon face masks ghosting the wharf of san francisco, in hippie garb. that sea of bobbing faces in the town of vertigo, kinda funny, kinda scary. i wonder if there is anything funny about donnie john. even as a grown-up i think i'll be full of dread if i see trump faces on little legs. i think this year it will be trump that haunts the children's dreams, even if they just say it was the monster, and make it more cool. kid's dreams are real. they are the ones we depress during business as usual. the children dream of primitive things, like being hunted by flesh eating monsters, trolls, and evil monsters that are real, they may look like something else on reality tv, or smiling out false speech, but children know depravity, by instincts, the way dogs know evil intent, by smell, by the jangley disturbance they create in the atmosphere. by the bombs they drop far away coming nearer day by day.