Tim Coe

The President’s Mess

“Senator Hasbro, we have a problem,” Senator Jill Hasbro heard on the line. It was the President’s Chief of Staff, Gil Severson

“The President is going insane. Literally insane!” Severson exclaimed. “The Cabinet and Vice President are considering our options. We’re debating invoking the 25th amendment and we need the Hill’s support.”

The 25th amendment had never been used before, and it was risky. Especially with a President like this one.

“Congress is not going to like this,” Senator Hasbro said, disapprovingly.

Congress was in the tank for this President to the point of sycophancy. Many wanted a spot in his administration, yet once they got there, very few of them stayed.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Hasbro said.

“Damn it, I said I wanted coke, not the diet stuff! You’re fired. Leave immediately!”

“Mr. President, as your Attorney General, I’m not sure my job is to be your servant.” Yasmin Keller had been attorney general for about six months by this point. A former congresswoman from North Carolina, she had a distinguished law career. Feeling an adult was needed advising the President, she successfully brownnosed her way into the President’s good graces.

“I said leave,” The President said.

“Mr. President, if I cou…”

“No. Leave.”

“Okay, but.

“No.”

It was a lost cause tonight. But Yasmin knew by morning the President wouldn’t even remember he fired her, so she went on with her business.

That night, the gates of hell opened up and everything was revealed. The news reports were damning.

The President had used his authority to try and put a large social media company out of business because they decided to removed his account for what they described as hate speech.

The next morning, top congressmen and women met to decide what to to do. Impeachment and conviction were an all but certainty.

“Mr. President, you need to resign. If you do not, Congress will impeach you,” Yasmin stated.

“What? You can’t tell me what to do. You’re fired. Leave now.” It was near repeat of what happened the night before. “Mr. President, you fired me last night.”

“No, why would I do that? You’re doing a terrific job!”

Terrific. Yasmin knew she was working for a man who couldn’t even remember what foot was in front of the other. She knew the President needed to be impeached and fast.

Articles of impeachment were brought to a vote immediately, with a slim majority voting to impeach.

No one expected the President would be convicted in the senate and removed from office and within weeks, the senate acquitted him.

“I need to make a speech. From the oval,” The President told Gil.

“I’ll alert the media.”

The President sat down at the resolute desk, took a deep breath and began his address to the nation.

“My fellow Americans, today the Senate has spoken. Today I was acquitted of all wrongdoing. I know this sounds strange, but I hate this job. I can’t post things on social media without you all going into a frenzy and getting my accounts removed. I resign.”

The entire staff was stunned. Did he really just do that?

The President walked out of the Oval Office, and out of the White House. It was obvious to everyone that the Vice President was now taking over.

The next day, as the Vice President was getting ready to be officially sworn in, The President walled into the Oval Office, sat down, called his attorney general and simply said “Yasmin, get me a coke. It’s gonna be a long three and a half more years.”

The Hero Who I’ve Never Met

There’s been many people throughout my life who’ve influenced almost everything about me. My personality, my looks, my sense of humor, my interests.

But there‘s one man whom I have never met and never will who has given me more to look forward to every day, has given me immeasurable inspiration to fight adversary, and to not take people’s scoffs to heart.

He could be an ass at times, even manipulative and mean. A couple things which I am not, but for some reason, the allure of this man has continued to draw me in, even eight years after his death. His reality distortion field is strong. His name is Steve Jobs.

I first learned about Steve Jobs soon after I got my first iPod in 2005. It wouldn’t be long before I discovered his annual Keynote addresses, where he’d show off the latest products.

I remember watching him in early 2007 when he unveiled the iPhone for the first time. I knew then that it would change everything.

The crazy ones

I’ve always been someone who marches to the off-beat of his own drum, and Jobs made me feel unique.

The story goes that back in the late 90’s, Apple was on its deathbed, and as a last Hail Mary, Steve Jobs, who was forced out of the company over ten years earlier, came back as CEO.

To rally the troops, he commissioned an ad campaign that still to this day speaks directly to me. There were no new products in the ad, just a message. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

I was too young to remember it when it first aired, only seeing the ad for the first time over a decade later. Nonetheless, I fell in love with its message. It celebrated being different, and I was different. It was the first time someone gave me permission to be me.

Everything else is secondary

One of the greatest impacts Steve Jobs left with me was a commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005. Again, I only discovered it years later, this time shortly after his death in 2011. In the speech, there’s a line that‘s become one of my favorite quotes of all time.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
― Steve Jobs

The Funniest Video Online Today

The last thing you probably need today is another dose of what’s happened in the Washington, D.C area these last few years. But here we are anyway.

Saturday Night Live’s “Sean Spicer Press Conference” is one of the show’s best skits ever. It’s still relevant today, for what I assume to many are obvious reasons.

But is it the funniest video on the internet? It is, in fact, the funniest video online today. However, by “today” I mean it’s the funniest video that came up in my YouTube recommendations section this evening.

It’s important to say that may all change by tomorrow. Only time and YouTube’s algorithms will ultimately tell.

My College Journey – Why I’m Still Committed

My college journey has been a long one. One with many interesting twists, wrong turns, dead ends, and a breakdown or two along the way. Through it all, however, I’m still committed – maybe more so than ever before – to getting this right and finding what truly makes my heart beat.

I graduated high school in 2012. The school I graduated from was a local Christian school, one that was incredibly insular to the point many of us started referring to it as “the bubble.” I remember stepping foot on the campus of Rock Valley for the first time that fall and it might as well have been like stepping foot onto another planet. At the time, I was also suffering from severe anxiety and depression, two ailments only made worse by what was perhaps the most jarring transition of my life. That story is one I could write a novel on. In fact, I basically did on my other blog, if you’re interested. (There’s a Crack in Everything: 1.24.13).

Without going into much detail here on what happened, I was forced by my ailing heath to take the spring semester off and give myself time to heal. At the time, this was needed for me to get back on my feet, however, when coming back that fall, I became discouraged again by a math class I was spending over twenty hours a week on. After that, college was shot for me for quite some time. I decided to just go into the workforce and ended up getting a job, a job I loved, at that.

About a year into this job, people in my life began pushing me to make my next move. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, in fact, I felt more lost about what I wanted to do with my life than at any other point. I ended up making a rash choice and signed up for a CNA class. Being a creative mind, I should’ve known this wasn’t right for me, however, I fell in love with the class, but the class is where the love ended. Getting my first job as a CNA was a nightmare. I worked at a local assisted living home that was incredibly toxic, with everything from my coworkers taking trash back out of the dumpster after I had thrown it away, just to tell me I wasn’t cleaning up messes, to them calling the residents vulgar names behind their backs, to a coworker using wildly racist language to describe another coworker. It was awful, and by July of 2016, I was done. I knew that night when I went into work I was going to swallow my pride and quit. I didn’t know what was next for me, I just had to trust that the dots would somehow connect in my future.

After quitting that job, I started coming to terms with a part of myself that I’d kept hidden for years. I was gay. Discovering this about myself and being able to be open about it made that fall one of the most beautiful times of my life. I was still between jobs and not going to school at the time, but I was fulfilled. That fulfillment only got better that night in early November when the Cubs won the World Series. That win taught me just how much hometown pride I had and I decided wherever I went, career or school-wise, living in Rockford had to be in the equation.

For the sake of time, let’s fast forward to the spring of 2018, I had just gotten a new job back in retail, a job that was better than any of the ones I had previously. I was now feeling as if I could take on the world. Throughout my life, there have been two hobbies of mine that I always dreamed of turning into a career – video editing and writing.

I had always loved watching the news growing up, going so far as to turn our living room into a de facto news studio. I would even create the graphics that the news team would use. I loved it and I still love it. In fact, my love for writing, video editing, and production has only gotten better with age. It’s never been something I’ve had to groan about doing. It was around this time I discovered Rock Valley’s Mass Communications program and I decided to give it a chance come that fall. I instantly fell in love, and still after three semesters, none of it has gotten old.

To answer the question, why the heck am I going to college? Why, after so many setbacks, failures, and wrong turns do I come back? For me, it’s easy. I’ve learned throughout my life that you’re going to fall down about a billion times. The trick is, though, to get back up each time. If something doesn’t work out, try something else. Failure is a part of life. Even though getting the wind knocked out of me so many times has hurt, it continually teaches me something. Also, I’ve finally found what I love. Sometimes, you just know when something’s right, kind of like a hand in a glove.

That’s what this is for me, and I’ll be damned if I give this up.