Joe Biden doesn’t have to be your dream date.

People need to quit the hand wringing and get on the damn bus.

Look, I like Joe Biden a lot, confessedly, I like him more than a lot of people who like him like him. And even I don’t think he’s perfect.

I don’t drift off to sleep imagining some scene out of Anne of Green Gables, where a fresh-faced Joe dressed in a Seersucker suit meets me at our favorite bridge and we finally, after years and years of “plutonic” friendship, confess our undying love for one another (that’s long since been Ewan McGregor’s lane, sorry Joe).

I’ve never daydreamed about a shirtless Joe kicking in my door in a fire and rescuing me from my bed while I’m seemingly surrounded by flames and out of options (ok, I may be revealing a tad too much about my fantasies, but I digress…)

I don’t think he’s the most interesting man in the world, I don’t think he’s the funniest or most clever. And look, I think we can agree that Joe Biden circa 1979 was hot as fuck, but let’s be real, that ship sailed decades ago, and it’s never mattered. It doesn’t matter now. He’s never BEEN exciting, he’s never kept us guessing, he’s never done anything or said anything where any one of us walked away thinking ‘Wow, who WAS that man?!! I’ve never seen that side of him.’

He’s a consistent guy. He’s the guy who does and says the things you expect him to do and say. He’s been around. He’s done pretty much all the things there is to do. And through all of it, he’s still been… well — Joe.

He’s not the Beatles or Elvis. He’s not JFK, Bill Clinton or Obama. I’ve met him (humble brag) and when asked what he “smelled like”, I described him as smelling like hot chocolate on a snowstorm night. (And I got rightfully destroyed for it). But here’s the thing, that is pretty fucking accurate (even though I was more than a bit tipsy on “holy shit I just met the president” bubbly at the time).

When I ask you to think of drinks that are “sexy”, you’re giving me whiskey, wine, champagne, cognac and Tequila. No one person on the PLANET is like “what’s hotter than some hot chocolate” (unless they literally mean the temperature, which, let’s be honest, the surface of the sun is like, ‘yeah, that’s all you high school football game concession stand hot chocolate.’

He’s soothing. He’s familiar. He’s warm and welcoming. He’s sane. He’s safe. He’s steady. He has experience. He cares about the people, and he KNOWS what he’s doing.

Isn’t THAT what we want in a President?

Ok, maybe not always. Maybe we’ve needed to shake things up from time to time. We’ve needed to test the status quo. We’ve needed “Yes we can” and “Ask not what your country can do for you”, and those presidents have been who we needed when we needed them.

But that isn’t right now.

Right now, especially right now, we still need steady. We still need safe. We need someone who knows the path and carries the light so we can all follow behind. No fanfare. No hi jinx. No malarkey if you will.

We’ve seen 4 years of “exciting” with Trump. And by exciting, I mean waking up every morning reeling from the insanity of the night before and bracing for the craziness of the day ahead. What would this unhinged madman using OUR taxpayer dollars do next? What would he say next? Who would he offend next? What autocrat would he defend next? What human rights granted to tens of millions of us for DECADES would be stripped away next?

What weather map would he sharpie next (ok, that one didn’t keep me up at night, actually it cracked me the fuck up, even though when you really think about it — it should be seen as pretty terrifying given the fact that this was a person who could launch a nuclear war if left to wait too long for his 87th Diet Coke).

He mocked reporters, demeaned military widows, trafficked in racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, the guy did everything he could to make windmillaphobia a thing for fuck’s sake.

And he whipped the base into an absolute fucking frenzy doing all of it. All of that “Lib owning” by pulling us out of the Paris accord and rolling back the nutritional guidelines on school lunches, and how dare I forget the thing they loved him for most — getting rid of those “brown people.”

Now that’s excitement.

And what did it get us — a one term, twice-impeached election denying, insurrection inciting, adjudicated rapist traitor who has been saying he’ll be a “dictator on day one” and that he’ll not only let Putin attack our NATO allies, he’ll encourage him to. Unless of course, they “pay up”, which is just “nice little country you’ve got here, be a real shame for something to happen to it” mob talk. Because he’s not going to stop Putin from grabbing any part of Europe he wants.

He also, coincidentally, maintains that he could, as president, order a member of SEAL Team 6 to murder his political rival, ya know — like you’re at the Wendy’s drive thru and they ask if you want to add fries to your meal, and you’re like, ‘I wasn’t gonna get fries, but you know what - let’s do it’ only with the assassination of someone who makes fun of your teeny weeny Vienna sausage fingers. And that it’s totally legal, totally cool, because when you’re president you have TOTAL AND COMPLETE ALL POWERFUL IMMUNITY FROM ALL THINGS ALWAYS, just so long as those lickspittling MAGA lackeys in the Senate lapping up the fromunda cheese down there at your diapered under-ball nether region won’t find you guilty in an impeachment hearing.

So, it’s like, do we really need exciting?

Do we really need the douchey guy screaming “SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!” while smacking the ass of every woman in the bar, or wouldn’t the guy quietly winning his 15th game of darts in a row be the better bet?

Especially since one of those two options would burn down the whole damn bar if someone paid him enough to do it.

I admit, I can make mixed metaphors all day long, I’m really good at that, just ask my junior year honors English teacher who must have been ready to murder me because I was too stubborn and too undisciplined to ever listen.

But for real, let’s just say you’re someone who takes the bus, and on this particular day, you’d like to take the bus to the mall. So, the first bus arrives. It’s a bus you’ve been on a thousand times. It runs slow. It’s paint job has lost its shine. The fabric on the seats is worn out in patches, and it can mutter and sputter on occasion, but it always gets you to the mall. You never ever wonder if you’re gonna get to the mall. And it’s safer than just about any other vehicle out there. And then the second bus arrives, screeching as it slows just enough to allow you to climb aboard without ever fully stopping, because it’s the bus from the movie Speed and it like, can’t stop. The tires are smoking, the driver is sweating buckets, Ronny Jackson is handing out fentanyl like it’s Pez, someone who looks a helluva lot like Putin appears to be buying nuclear secrets back by the bathroom, and there’s a really, really good chance you won’t survive at all, let alone get to the mall. But the ride will be exciting as fuck.

Which bus do you choose?

Would you wait around for another bus? A mystery bus? The “best” bus? A bus you saw once and thought, “That’s a nice bus. That should be the mall bus.” Without knowing if it even had the capacity to get TO the mall at all.