Stafford: Never-ending presidential election drags on

I’m 62 now.

As best I can remember, the current presidential campaign started when I was 4, maybe 5.

I place its beginning sometime around the birthday when I held a clothespin to my forehead and, leaning over, tried to drop it in the mouth of the glass milk bottle that sat on the basement floor.

That was shortly after the day my parents sent me through the milk chute to unlock the door from the inside. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a form of early hacking. I appear to have been Russian or Chinese at the time.

A lot has happened in my world since then.

Children’s movies, in particular, have come a long way.

Pixar and its spin-offs have made some great headway, leading up to the recent Pantsuit Studios release of “The Deplorables,” which I can’t wait to see.

But, to be fair, science has come a long way, too.

Not long after the Revelation of St. Don that a man who has been president of the United States for nearly eight years was actually born here, we were hit with the revelation that, despite all appearances, Earth is not flat.

MSNBC is way out there saying it’s round, but even Fox is reporting a modest curve. While some say it warps to the left, some to the right, some to a gender neutral place, everybody seems to agree there’s a warp — even when they hear it from the mainstream media, which has recently become the MM at the end of LGBTQMM.

It’s part of the same phenomenon that has some members of mainline parties nominating one another for inclusion on the terrorist no-fly list.

As you might suspect, not all the change that’s taken place since I was 4 or 5 has been progress.

The switch to cell phones has been an annoyance because it’s canceled out the major benefit of old-style phones. Because they dangle from the end a chord like an idiot mitten, the old ones were neither as easily lost nor as often found floating in toilets.

I think that’s what people who have several mean when they say they’re flush with phones. But that’s not the only reason I’m keeping my landline. I figure that by doing so, I’m keeping the scam artists, pollsters and fake firemen’s funds occupied. If they’re calling me, they can’t do as much damage as they’d otherwise do.

Every once in a while — just for fun — I pick up the phone and tell them in my best perky voice that they’ve been selected to receive a free vacation to the Bahamas and can read over the details when the IRS delivers the papers to them in the pending legal action that’s already been filed and to which they must respond immediately.

But since I lost my best perky voice sometime during the Iowa caucuses, I usually just let the robo-calls ring and smile because it gives me that rare chance to use my smiling muscles.

I’m using my TV like my phone, too. It’s usually off, but when it’s on, I listen in again as one side talks about making America great again and the other says it’s already great.

I know it doesn’t make anybody feel the burn, but my greatest aspiration is “Make America at Least Get Something Done Again.”

Bridges, roads, maybe water with lead levels approximating the ones found in gasoline — they’re all on my short list. And if we could do something about traffic to dial it back to the level of an R movie rating that would be progress.

Again, there’s good news here, because our safety forces are on it.

Instead of teaching kindergartners in safety school to say, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” the safety folks have the little ones saying: “We’ll inspect that bridge when we come to it.”

Now there’s a step forward.

I might feel a little better about all this if I’d go see my doctor and attend to some of the aches and pains I’ve picked up of late. But I’m pretty much afraid to do that. Who wants to pony up the co-pay and meet the deductible only to find out you can’t afford the medicine once you get there?

Why you’d have to give your eye teeth for that, which may not be such a bad idea because getting root canals and crowns on them is just too expensive. The plus is that if you get two or more teeth done at the same time, you get three free months of Sirius Radio.

By the way, the whole drug price increase thing has unfolded since a Super PAC managed to have the word greed extracted from all American dictionaries.

For those worried about not being able to let their kids out during bee season because of the cost of epinephrine? Relax. There’s some evidence the Narcan shots work just as well and you can get those free.

That’s it for now — and keep your chins up, buckos.

The first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is just around the corner — say about 17 years away.

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