Welcome to the weekend, fellow shell-shock victims:

Thank you for choosing Doctor Dogooder's Philanthropic Trauma Hospital and No-Host, Hospitality Fern Bar.

We'll be triaging everyone according to depth of political dismay and by visible, physical symptoms -- such as foaming at the mouth, inability to control reflexes, sudden bursts of cursing, throbbing temple veins, fur-coated tongue, repeated yelling-while-pointing, and so on.

If anyone is having trouble breathing, please take a seat and wait your turn, as we are ALL having trouble breathing this political season.

Anyone suspecting psychic bleeding or other related injury should please report to the duty clinician in the Purple Wing -- just follow the purple arrows and pale green vapors, to the inpatient receiving area.

If you are not sure about the nature of your state of things, please also go to the Purple Wing -- it is huge, and can accommodate almost everyone in the entire country.

However, if you feel yourself overheating, or otherwise experiencing a meltdown of some sort, related to anyone with orange hair, with a last name starting with the letter "T," as in "toodle-oo," please report to the Bright Red Wing, where our crack staff of delusional counter-programmers and certified therapists can help in your transition back to reality.

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.)