A post-election survival guide

By: Reyshimar Arguelles

I am writing this the night before the midterm elections. I can barely focus, partly because Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is playing on HBO, and partly because of the creeping anxiety I get over the inevitable outcome. Along with the roar of CGI dinosaurs, bad omens are also making it hard for me to writing sentence logic and correction grammar.

There’s no type of fear more authentic and compelling as the fear of uncertainty. But there’s also the fear of certainty, of knowing that the fate of our nation has already been sealed, perhaps weeks before we take part in this enlightening and much celebrated process in our democracy. If the pre-election surveys were indeed accurate, what else is there to do? It’s like we’re being made to stand in front of a firing squad, hoping for the bullets to miss only to realize there are more than 12 gunners aiming at us.

Elections have always been this way: being made to choose between poison and panacea, we’d choose the one that tastes like muriatic acid. It’s times like these that I’d want the country to be ruled by an absolute monarch.

But hopelessness and sarcasm do nothing to change anything. We have been eternally condemned to vote caged animals into office. I’m sure the results will make you want to vomit, but life goes on. You’d still be buying pan de sal from your favorite bakery – that is, if you’re lucky enough to not get caught in the crossfire of an anti-drug operation and be counted as “collateral damage.”

For now, let’s take a look at a few things we can do to ease the post-election wounds.

First, the liquor ban has just been lifted, so it’s time to visit the nearest convenience store, pop open a bottle of Pilsen, and figure out what just frigging happened. The store is probably teeming with disgruntled Liberals, so finding a table can be a challenge – unless you ask kindly if you could share a somber table with a couple of law students ruminating whether they should get MBAs instead.

If you want to drown out the Budots tune still playing in your head like a Vietnam War flashback, go to a bar where the combination of alcohol and EDM is enough to exorcise the absurd nightmare you experienced during the campaign season. You need to displace all the stupid you have absorbed listening to blatant rip-offs of Guantanamera.

But drunkenness is not the only state we’ll find ourselves in. We all need a good massage to release all the disappointment that’s building up inside. Don’t forget to bring earbuds and put your phone’s music player on shuffle, lest you hear the masseuse blabber about how the Yellow-Leftist-Catholic conspiracy failed to dismantle the administration’s hopes of turning the Senate into a city pound. For best results, try listening to speed metal. The riffs and screaming vocals work great to mask out the words “dilawan” and “oligarchy.”

You know what else is therapeutic? A stroll around the city. Walking helps you think more clearly, especially when you’re coming to grips with a future filled with vulgar language and where every piece of legislation is expressed through a matrix. As you pass by plazas, avert your eyes from posters of candidates who shouldn’t have made the cut and who are probably having a victory orgy with their financiers.

To cap the day, you go home and watch wholesome shows like you always do. You just have to wait until the evening news wraps up. But by then, you would have your fill of humanoid snakes thanking the nation for “making the right choice.” Most of all, they owe their victory to the blessings they received from kickbacks, shady dealings, and contributions from conniving bastards who won’t give a crap about the nation so long as they get what they yearned for.

I just hope we can sleep soundly at night, thinking there will always be a chance for things to get better. And if they won’t, then we’ll just have to roll with it, comforted by the fact that we will never submit to a hypocritical garbage dump of a system.

Let’s be fearful for the future, but this fear eventually morphs into a desire to keep on resisting.