Trick question: How do you offset the whirlwinds, windmills, and tornadoes of lies from a Republican presidential candidate, running mate, and from all members of their party -- people who hate 'Gummint,' want to drown it in a bathtub, yet are desperate, just dying to run the whole show, including YOUR life?

Trick answer:  You bring in bigger, bolder, brighter, and broader lies for distraction and comparative perspective -- you bring in religion and other such long-inflamed sores and assorted soreheads for diversion.

Now, before you light up like the Griswold's house finally does in National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation," imperiling resources at the regional nuclear plant, most people -- even your idiot servant here -- acknowledge some creative force in the universe larger than themselves.

Anyone else plagued by a persistent, deep foreboding... the sense that the fix is in?

This sensation's become the occasional, droning companion to my thoughts, a mosquito I can hear but somehow not quite swat.  It is not yet an epic tale, but it feels like we're getting there, we're getting there.

Closest I can come to explaining the goose-bumped phenomenon:  It's akin to The Feeling That Descended Like a Cloud of Ice Fog in 2000, when SCOTUS suspended the Constitution, and Our Democracy, and installed its own choice of president to power.

We yawned, shrugged, scratched, stretched, and embraced that decision -- which should have been cause for another round of hair-raising alerts.  It was suddenly clear that we would accept anything.

That mosquito whine continues -- distantly heard, as in half-awake sleep, triggering the willingness and readiness to slap oneself black and blue, all over, trying to get it, trying to make it stop...

... If it makes any difference at all, it's probably not the Halloween stuff at the stores and at home, even though the kids always go nuts for this "creep out" stuff.  More and more adults, too, looks like -- some say it's the second-biggest holiday of the year, if not THE biggest.

Ca-Ching, goes the cash register, and another angel costume gets its wings bent, straight out of the box -- isn't that how that one goes, from that "It's a Dunderheaded Life" movie they always play this time of year?

Sorry, I know what it's really called, it's just that life has pretty weird lately, and you know how we always joked around about movie titles, like the...

What? Yeah, Bedford Falls and Jimmie Stewart -- always such a great story.  My favorite actor, too.  Did you ever see him in "Harvey," about that big rabbit -- or "Arsenic and Old Lace" either?

The original Twilight Zone series had a timely episode involving a kind of a stopwatch:  Click the stem, and all time stops.  Except you.  Maybe you're already hearing the tell-tale series music and its four-note loop.

40-year-old Patrick McNulty realized the stopwatch offered many intriguing possibilities, if its secrets could be unwound.  In the teleplay by series creator Rod Serling, the [spoiler alert] watch is dropped and broken -- forever stranding McNulty in time.

Except for that being-stranded-in-time part, I could have long used a stopwatch like that.  (You too?)  It sure would have shrunk down those 75-hour weeks to size.