Each new day starts off with me being wrong.  It's been this way for months and months -- every single day.  It's morning again, and I couldn't have been more wrong. Again.

A new day has arrived, and BAM!  Donald proves me wrong, once more, that he CAN, in fact, top what he said in all those OTHER previous days I had, way back when, of daily disbelief... days in which, every day, I somehow thought it impossible for him to top himself, and keep topping himself.  But he did, every day, just as he does now -- just as he's been doing for almost a year.

The off-the-wall comments began in relatively small and unimportant ways -- strange, but not too strange.  Still-connected-to-the-planet strange.

Canny move:  Saying something outrageous, and being outrageous, and doing so outrageously, providing himself a free media pipeline for his every sideshow and apparent misstep.  After all, people rubberneck at accidents.  People are busy, but everyone has time for a Fool.

Besides:  There is no more shame, after all -- and any rage has long ago been redirected at false targets.  Offering a free bullhorn to an egomaniac or sociopath or narcissist -- take your pick -- is like having everything you love, all at once, on steroids, while on hallucinogens and mood boosters.

[Starry Night, you say?  Just a half-forgotten wisp of a lesser dream, that old thing...]

We're not even into the tail-end, dog days of August and most of the country is already howling at the moon, scratching like mad at imaginary fleas, twitching and itchy all over, bothered and bewitched.

Oh, and, since exporting Industrial-Strength Gonzo-Crazy seems to be our new role in the global economy, let's add the rest of the world to the ranks of the queasy and squeamish.

I'm looking at some bookmarks and clippings heaped here and there, trying very hard to divine any signs of sanity.  Perhaps sanity no longer makes news, which is why it is not being reported.

Of course,  it could be that sanity no longer exists -- another reason it might not show up in any counts or recounts of the day's news.

Hmmm. How to measure The Crazy if The Craziness Measure is missing, or if the units of measurement change faster than our ability to keep up with them, or keep abreast of the latest calibrations?

This is probably like the tail-chasing, exponential mayhem of hiring fact-checkers to keep up with Trump's outright lies -- 21 of them, just in his acceptance speech -- and then discovering no one's footing the double-checking bill, by the time fact-check #14,238,391 comes around, and having to file bankruptcy and dissolve the fact-checking company.  (There's a certain weird balance to that, given the four or six or fourteen or 96 bankruptcies of the man, depending on whom you ask, how you count, where you place the asterisks...)

I feel a beer-thirty chiming on my inner body-clock wall.  Back in a sec.

It's another day on the road with the Totally Amazing -- I Mean, Like Wow! -- Candidate with the Snap-On Head... and the Drop-Down Pants.

But then, it's been a Totally Amazing -- I Mean, Like Wow! -- season for the Grandiose Orange People party, for the Genetically-modified Orangutans Party, for the GOP.

Having had a hearty breakfast of Lucky Charms, His Daily Bread ala Tempest-in-a-Teapot Toast, Juice of Personally-Crushed Oranges, and Oval-Office-tine, The Candidate's head was taken from its storage perch, wiped down, and fully reattached to Body #29.

(Number 29 is the one The Candidate takes to rallies in the south, because #29 has 20% more short, jerky hand motions timed to purposefully NOT match any speech elements whatsoever.  Ol' 29 also has more built-in swagger, and a programmed propensity to kick more things.)

Relief comes in many forms.  In one song, it was splish-splash, and taking a bath.  In one heartburn-aid classic commercial, the relief came right after the plop-plop, fizz-fizz.

When it comes to mosquitoes, we mostly still rely on swatting ourselves silly, and then checking around for any lucky-hit carcasses.  Those middle-of-the night, self-pummeling, slap-and-swat fests may be drawing to a merciful close.

This prospect comes as wonderful news to great numbers of people, especially those who live around thick mosquito populations, and to those who are tired of beating themselves up in the dark trying to make the Eeeeeeee-yeeeee-eeeeee stop, and to those who now scare each other by suddenly jumping out from behind doors and shouting Zika! unexpectedly.

That swatting-and-swelling-and itchy-all-over relief, you may be interested to know, is en route by way of [trumpet-and-brass sting!] genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

Stop me if you've heard this one before:  Bigwigs pull some strings, and the rest of us hardly ever know what the heck is really going on.  This is how real life works.  It's like looking at a 419-car pileup on the freeway, most days:  Lots of wreckage, and no way to know what really happened, or how to easily untangle the mess.

However, this everyday, hamstrung-pulled reality also contains trainloads of Red Herring Brand fish meal scattered all over the road, for miles around, just in case it might help cover up some of the more telling skid marks, and to help keep anyone from tracing any awkward facts back to any embarrassing sources.

And, you know, truisms, and trains, can collide, like this one:  The deeper the well-fattened, well-privileged hand goes into the forbidden cookie jar, the more fanciful the tale it tells when it gets caught.

I'm not big on predeterminism and Fate, but even less so for parlor tricks of Faith. Coincidences may not be coincidences -- it's tempting to think along these lines at times, sure.  Movies and so on.  I should have been born in Missouri, probably, a stubborn but accessible skeptic, happy to learn... a curmudgeonly agnostic with curiosity to burn.

So, it is with a sense of skewed (if not skewered) aplomb, that I had a run-in with a berserk ATM, then managed to also have an allied discussion run equally amok. Here's what happened...