I Refuse To Read This Incredibly Long Profile of Beto O'Rourke Driving a Van

It’s a long weekend in America, three full days of rest and relaxation for many, and what better way to spend the holiday than by reading an incredibly long profile of Beto O’Rourke? Well. Let me tell you. There are many better ways to spend this holiday.

In the latest issue of the New Yorker, this article appears:

Damn. What could this article be about, I wondered. I began to read.

He vowed to visit all two hundred and fifty-four counties in Texas, and he did, usually driving himself.

Beto. Driving? He is on the road.

O’Rourke, unfazed, carries on with his upbeat, heavily scheduled, literally hard-driving run. By mid-May, according to his staff, he had driven more than six thousand miles, through fourteen states, held more than a hundred and fifty town-hall meetings, visited thirty-two college campuses, and answered more than a thousand questions.

That’s a lot of driving. Who did most of the driving? Beto.

We were driving—that is, he was driving—in a rented minivan from Sioux City, Iowa, to Storm Lake, seventy miles east.

Wait. How long is this thing? I copy+pasted all of the text into a Google Doc and did word count.

Man. Ok. Gonna put my head down and keep on truckin. It’s what Beto would have wanted. Drive on, Beto.

An animal flashed in the fog, startlingly close. “Raccoon,” O’Rourke said. “Had a ring tail.” With the weather, we had slowed to a crawl, but O’Rourke was done for the day, so it didn’t matter—no me importa, as he would say, in the pocho border mix that he habitually speaks. Starting that morning, he had appeared at a tavern in Carroll, a diner in Denison, and a college in Sioux City, met hundreds of Iowans, answered dozens of questions, grinned for hundreds of selfies, thanked everybody for coming out, for welcoming a West Texan and teaching him so much about Iowa.

Nope. I’m sorry. I’m done. We’re out. Not falling for this one again. I got better things to do today.