Sure, there are some disconcerting things going on in Washington, DC — but let me tell you about my car.

I drive a hardtop convertible that I like a lot. It’s a BMW 428i, with all sorts of fun and fancy features, including a little button that retracts the hard top into the trunk and lets in all the freshly rain-scrubbed splendor of the Southern California sky. I put this top down frequently because it’s one of the reasons I got the car, and because I can.

I also like how the car accelerates, how it syncs all the music from my phone, how it interacts with my phone, how it helps me find my way around (extremely helpful, because I can get lost from the kitchen to the bathroom), how the seat automatically adjusts for me, and all sorts of other things.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a sloshing sound, the sort that one might hear if one left a half-empty bottle of water on a rear floorboard. When coming to a fast stop, I’d hear this sloshing around. At some point, I pulled over and looked under the seat, but didn’t see a bottle of water, and then opened the trunk but didn’t see a bottle of water in there either, and then looked under the seat again, and then under the passenger seat front and back, and then back in the trunk again, but still found no half-empty bottle of water.

On Friday night, I took my daughter and her boyfriend to the Arclight in Hollywood to see “Split.” I asked my daughter if she could hear that sloshing sound, and she said she could, and so could the boyfriend. When we parked at the theatre, we got out of the car and looked under the seats and inside the trunk and everywhere else we could think to look, but couldn’t find a bottle of water.

On the way back, we all noticed that the sound was gone. Hey, no need to worry about it any more!

On Saturday, I drove down to Corona del Mar to stay over with some friends and although the weather was glorious, I didn’t put down the top. Yesterday, I drove back, unpacked and cleaned up a bit at home, then got back into the car to Moving Arts for the readings of two new plays by friends. I put the top down and reveled in the warm late afternoon sky. I parked in front of the theatre, lifted up  on the button to raise the hardtop — and nothing happened.

I tried again. And nothing happened.

Just as with looking for the elusive bottle of water, I tried it again. And again. With no change in result.

BMWs have warning lights and messages and ding-dongs for any possible thing that might happen. Well do I remember the time in a previous BMW when seemingly the entire dash lit up with alarm to let me know that it was snowing. (Which, you know, I could see by looking through the windshield.) So it’s understandable that I wondered what I was doing wrong because I was getting no such alarm. Finally, I decided to leave the car parked with the top down because it was either that, or just drive back home.

After the readings — and now we’re starting to get to the point of this stem-winding story — I drove home and parked the car in my gated back yard and went online to make a service appointment with the BMW dealer in Glendale, the car being under warranty. The online appointment booking software allowed me to walk through the whole process — but wouldn’t offer any appointments, ever. Not even for weeks again. I tried it on Safari. I tried it on Chrome. I tried it on Google. So I went to Live Chat. No one came on. So I called them. I worked my way through the phone tree to the service department, which asked me to leave a message — but which had a full voicemail box. Finally, I decided to just watch a movie with my family (the remake of “The Magnificent Seven,” which cheapened the meaning of the word “magnificent”).

I got up this morning and, again trying things that previously hadn’t worked, tried to book an appointment via Safari, then Chrome, then Google, then tried Live Chat, then called, and no one picked up, and there was no way to leave a message. (I now think that some surprisingly insecure part of my psyche must suspect that I’m always at fault.) So I just drove over to the BMW dealer, because barring smoke signals, there was no other way to make contact.

I told the service advisor the entire story above and said, “It must be the hydraulic system.” He looked at me and I explained that the sloshing sound was probably a cylinder that controls the top, and the liquid had leaked out, and so there was now no pressure. He duly wrote down what I said, took the car, and got me a “concierge” (a soon-to-be-banned-by-Trump immigrant who told me he’s worked for this dealer for 10 years, and whom I tipped five bucks out of sympathy) to drive me to my office. While they weren’t sure how long they’d have the car — “These convertible hard tops are complicated!” he said — they were out of loaners, and I figured I’d wait to see how long they’d have the car before I figured out what to do. In the meantime, I got to my office, and I arranged for a drop off to a lunch meeting I had, and a pick up after it.

Four hours after I left my car, the service advisor called to say it was ready.

“REALLY?” I asked. After all, “convertible hard tops are complicated!” But he assured me it was ready.

“The window lost its initialization, so we just reset it and it works perfect.” In other words, it’s all computerized and something wasn’t talking to something else.

“You’re sure, right?”

“Oh, yeah. They raised and lowered it five times. Works perfect.”

So I got someone to drop me back off in Glendale, I signed the car out, I shook hands with the service advisor, I got into the car, admired the nice wash and wax they had applied, the music I like got picked up automatically from my phone and started to play, and I buckled my seatbelt and pressed the button to lower the top… and nothing happened.

So, of course, I tried it again. And again.

Then I got out of the car, fuming, and called out “MARCO!!!!” because that’s the service advisor’s name.

I showed him that it didn’t work, and he got in and tested it himself and said again, “They raised and lowered it five times….” which means either he was lying to me, or “they” lied to him.

I said, “This time I get a loaner.” Which he made happen.

And then, as he was filling out new paperwork to reopen the case, I said, “You’ve got a QA problem. Because this is not the first time I’ve been told a car was fixed here, and I’ve picked it up, and it wasn’t.” He agreed. What else was he going to say?

A nice young woman came and got me out of the lounge area, where I was filling the room with smoke coming out of my head from watching some Trump defender getting grilled by Anderson Cooper, and told me that the loaner was ready. It’s a nice, brand-new 2017 black 430i, larger inside than mine. I got in and went to set the navigation — but there isn’t any in this car. And it isn’t synced with my phone. And I can’t field phone calls in it. And it doesn’t know me or my ways at all.

So that’s the really big thing.

Yes, there have been other things going on in the nation today, a day when the president fired the acting attorney general because she had the audacity to uphold the law she had sworn to uphold, but how can any of that compare to our creature comforts? As a friend of mine keeps noting sanguinely on Facebook, he keeps looking out his window and doesn’t see any rubble anywhere.

What is there to say about the past eight days that hasn’t already been said elsewhere and better? Nothing, except to say that I’m honestly terrified — by what has already happened to my country, and what the immediate future undoubtedly holds.

Every day I’ve been taking some sort of action in opposition. I marched in the women’s march (and, yes, there were 750,000 of us crammed into downtown Los Angeles in a remarkably friendly, peaceful, thoughtful, considerate protest). I’ve been doing emails and phone calls (and we’ll see if they have any impact). I agreed to help out with the endorsement meeting for Congressman Xavier Becerra’s replacement next Sunday. (Becerra is our new state attorney general, so there’s an opening.) I signed up to help swing a district near me from red to blue.

And, importantly, every day I’m looking for some comfort that, maybe, the reign of terror won’t be permanent. Here are some that I’ve found:

• On Thursday, I went to a local Democratic club meeting. Normally, it’s hard to get eight people out for this thing. Thirty-eight people showed up — the vast majority of them new to political engagement, and eager to take on Trump.
• I have many Republican friends — conservative, patriotic, Republican friends who consider Trump a radical and not a conservative, and also a traitor. Some of my well-connected Republican friends have reassured me that we haven’t lost the Republic (yet?) and that we’ll bounce back from this. This piece in The Atlantic, from an actual conservative Republican, supports this line of thought.
• The ACLU won some victories against the immigration ban.
• Three million people showed up to march against Trump last Saturday. That’s a lot of people. Assuming that we have elections in two years, that could make quite a difference.
• Finally, even Dick Cheney says Trump’s immigration ban is un-American: “Well, I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from.”

I have no idea what’s going to happen with all this, and neither does anyone else. Except I’m sure it’s going to get worse. In the meantime, we need to do our best to enjoy the day, be grateful for what we’ve got, and fight for what we believe in.

• It rained again in Los Angeles, and we need the rain. And when the clouds parted around 3 o’clock, the sky was beautiful and clean and the air was fresh and crisp.
• I had a pretty good lunch at Pickup Stix, a fresh Asian place, and a nice time with my friend and business partner during it.
• A kind lady came to my office and gave me an EKG (I’m buying more life insurance) and I aced that yet again.
• I had an extremely enjoyable discussion about values with good people in Pasadena.
• Someone who works for me unexpectedly thanked us for how he’s been able to learn and grow under our mentorship over the past three years, and then he left early to go buy a new car. That really felt good.
• And shortly I’m going home to enjoy my wife and family and play a game or watch a movie and have a little wine and maybe read a comic book or two.

Some of us are going to need this sort of positive reinforcement for a while.

Don’t hope for the best.

Work for the best.

It’s not where you think.

Need some writing or video production? I have an extremely talented friend who needs more work. He’s one of the best writers I know — for corporate and for creative — and has decades of experience producing corporate video. Now that he’s in his late 50’s, it looks like he has aged out of the hiring pool. (!!!) He’s been job-hunting for two years now with absolutely no luck, and his unemployment ran out a long time ago. If you need a reliable, talented, professional writer or video producer — either to hire or to contract, to work part-time, or full-time, or even on individual projects of any size — please email me and I’ll put you in touch. I completely endorse the work of this friend of mine (I have hired him many times), and I’d really like to help him out. You will be glad you hired him.

I went to a party tonight co-hosted by an actress friend who I’ve been doing theatre with for almost 15 years now. She’s been in a few of my plays, we actually acted in a play together (yes, I’ve acted in two plays in the past 30 years), she’s done readings from my workshop and the private dramaturgy I do sometimes, and she’s my friend. (None of that is in order of importance. I think I’d put “friend” first.) Incredibly, over that 15 years she’s somehow gotten more youthful and even more beautiful. How that’s possible I don’t know, but she should bottle it and sell it.

She makes her living in acting-related work:  production work and video and so forth.

Her boyfriend — a great guy who is an audiophile — is a partner in a start-up company that offers test prepping.

I also saw a friend who is a voiceover actress who I’m not sure I ever actually met before — neither of us was sure — but we know each other through Facebook.

I saw the husband and wife who run a long-running (20 years!) improv troupe.

And my adored good friend who is a nurse. And her new husband who is a teacher.

And others.

And I went there not — not — wanting to discuss politics or the horror that faces us starting next Friday — but it was there instantly. I was the second guest to arrive, and immediately the discussion veered onto Trump. Donald J. Trump. Soon to be President Donald J. Trump.

This is a low moment for America. Or perhaps the nadir. And maybe the sunset, or the total eclipse.

The discussion went on for hours, and no matter where someone tried to steer it — it came back to Trump. Which I know would just make him more gleeful. He loves being discussed, and part of him even loves being attacked. To quote Oscar Wilde, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Trump personifies this ideal. The majority of we who voted aren’t upset because we “lost” an election; we’re upset because a knave and a scoundrel, a person who personifies the lowest of the low, a person completely devoid of integrity or character, is now going to be occupying our highest office and representing us to the nation and the world.

Let me point out that while everyone admitted and agreed that we couldn’t personally relate to the economic plight of unemployed or underemployed people in Ohio, or Minnesota, or Pennsylvania — we’re all nevertheless middle class. No one at the party was in the 1%, or the 1/10 of 1% — nobody, in other words, would have been eligible for service in the Trump cabinet — but we were appalled, outraged, saddened by the idea that this mendacious sociopath is going to become the president of the United States next Friday.

In the face of this, there was really nothing else to talk about. The reality of it was like the dead body in the room. In the Ionesco play “Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It,” a married couple  try to ignore  a continually growing corpse in the other room. Finally, as it sprouts mushrooms and begins to exhaust their living space (Act Two begins with just two giant legs thrust onstage, the corpse having grown to Brobdignagian size), they resolve to deal with it. This giant dead body, like the presence of death, has taken over their lives — much like the looming threat of Trump is occupying all the space around us.

Much as I didn’t want to address politics — much, in fact, as I hadn’t wanted to address it this same morning in my playwriting workshop — it’s everywhere. It’s unavoidable. It keeps coming up because it’s always there. Somehow we’ve awoken in the banana republic predicted by Wallace Shawn in “The Dedicated Mourner” — a scenario I’d previously rejected as too outlandish, but which now seems all too possible. (One hallmark of banana republics:  the installation of near relatives in senior positions — as we’re seeing with Trump’s two sons, his daughter, and his son-in-law.) I find myself wondering if I’m witnessing the death of America.

Faced with the nightmare of an incalculably ill-suited president elected partly through the ministrations of a foreign government, I’ve done a little something every day to register my opposition and arm my fellows. After a two-decade lapse, I’ve rejoined the ACLU. At least, my thinking goes, maybe they can tie some of this up in court. I’ve participated in very local elections that resulted in whole skeins of activist youth joining the state Democratic Party. On Thursday, I’ll be participating with my theatre company Moving Arts in The Ghostlight Poject, a national event where theatre artists publicly commit themselves to what most of us would recognize as the ideals of the nation. And given that I’ve spent the last 12 years volunteering, serving as a delegate, knocking on doors, raising money, making calls, and canvassing in-state and out-of state, I’m sure I’ll be doing even more with my anger and my upset. Because I’ll have to, or I’ll feel complicit by default.

But what felt best tonight, and this morning, was being surrounded with people who share in my alarm, and just getting to vent my very real fears and voice my desperate uncertainty about how we’ve lost our nation, and so suddenly, and how we might be able to get it back.

I would have voted for Dr. Doom. As one wag noted, he’s the only political leader here who is legitimately concerned with the well-being of his country.

One benefit of safe, secure service in academia is that it removes you from any accountability, while enabling you to pursue your career in the game of entertainment outrage. Hence Cornel West (and Newt Gingrich) and hence West’s latest ludicrous tissue of fabrication, which you can find here. What we have here is, once again, West’s litany of unhappiness with Obama, newly stapled onto the baseless accusation that Obama’s faults led to Trump’s election. To many of us, this would more properly serve as a reminder of Hillary Clinton’s faults, but that wouldn’t serve West’s prevailing need to debase and deny Obama, as he has done for nine years now.

Now that Obama has said farewell, I wonder what new target West will find to stay in the news. It can’t be Trump — that’s too obvious, given that everybody else in West’s camp is already aiming there.

This latest revelation lends new meaning to the term “news leak.”