HALLOWEEN AND DIVALI fall on the same weekend and Trinis don’t know whether to light deyas or play the ass; but not even the Festival of Light can dispel the dark thoughts made-to-order to occupy my psyche this horror-story weekend.

It’s when things are bleakest that you reach for God – but what is a body supposed to do when he keeps coming up empty-handed? If there is a God – and God knows I wish there could be – how could He or She allow children to be slaughtered in Aleppo and Donald Trump to even look at the White House. Shouldn’t either of those facts by itself disprove the remotest notion of a loving, omnipotent God capable of intervention in our lives?

THIS WEEK, the current two biggest firetruckeries in the world ought to have been stopped dead in their tracks: (1) Donald Trump spectacularly lost the third debate and, with it, his last chance of avoiding an electoral college rout in the US presidential election next month; and (2) the insane murdering clown posse that styles itself as a caliphate – but which I refer to as only, “the Shaitanic State” or “I-Sissies”, just to annoy them, because I just know it will – lost control of Dabiq, the ancient city on which its entire modern raison d’etre is founded; and the only thing more amusing than the wholesale cut-ass booked for both (1) and (2) in the very near future is that neither will be affected in the least by their respective catastrophes.

NOTHING LIKE an early morning flight to prime my annoyance levels and, with only a few minutes of sleep garnered from hours of struggling for it, I’m prepared to be annoyed by everything about Caribbean Airlines Flight 456, but the gorgeous Jamaican accent on an even more gorgeous Jamaican flight attendant at the front door instantly brings my mood back to the positive side.

Four strides later, at seat, 5A, I’m annoyed again: no seat in front of me, only the bulkhead, so my bag must go into the locker above, where the flight crew stores their black pilot leather bags filled with plastic Wal-Mart plastic ones; but, somehow, there is room, in-between the purser’s new crockpot and the co-pilot’s cappuccino machine, for my bag and my mood swings back to “good” – until I see two Jamaican men in long-sleeved white shirts and ties, chattering excitedly about the Jamaican economy, morons contemplating an oxymoron.

WITH THE second US presidential debate this Sunday, everyone, apart from his idiotic supporters, is getting brain-strain trying to come up with new reasons not to vote for the Donald: he thinks soldiers who get PTSD are weak; he ignores running for the world’s most powerful political office to start a whiny little Twitter bitch-fight with a former beauty queen; his grasp of Russia is so poor, he thinks Vladimir Putin is a great leader who would never invade a peninsula he’s already annexed; he not only refuses to apologise for, but resolutely declares pride in, the “birther” campaign he waged against President Obama singlehandedly for years – but, long before he became the Republican nominee, there was a single paramount and compelling reason not to make Donald Drumpf president of the United States:

He’s a jackass.