The Dead Ball Era

At first, during the night of the election, there was shock. But then things just got shock-ier, especially as people on TV kept insisting on saying outlandish things like "President-elect Donald Trump."

Then there was the panic, but things kept getting panicky-er as Trump not only started talking about things like "transition" but actually started hiring people and appointing people to positions they would actually fill in such a thing as a Donald Trump presidential administration.

Then there was a weird numbness, which of course bled-out into a surprising soul-bruise of less and less feeling, when we all started openly talking about "self-care" and nobody would shut the fuck up about how much wine they were drinking.

Then there was rage, born out of the previous coldness, but matching it in inverted intensity, blooming into sustained flash fires of mass action on an unprecedented scale.

From there we've mostly been horrified. Then we say to ourselves "my god, I can't believe that just happened. At least it can't get any worse than this," right before it totally fucking does. Think about all the iterations of this we've gone through, starting with lying about the size of the inauguration crowd right up through making people fight in public over how much Donald Trump loves their dead children. We ran out of basement before we hit February. I can't tell if we're digging or collapsing, but either way, the direction is inexorably down. Every time we think we hit bedrock, we find another fissure and down we go. Or, more accurately, the fissure finds us.

The bleakness colors everything the same shade of twilight gray. Just this week, scientists used the only-recently-confirmed phenomena of gravitational waves--literal ripples in spacetime, right out of goddamned Star Trek--to measure an event that happened 130 million years ago: a kilonova, a massive space explosion caused by the collision and mutual obliteration of two neutron stars. And as I read the stories online about this unprecedented revolution in astronomy and astrophysics, with implications all across every branch of science and metaphysics, all I could really think was how jealous I was of the destroyed neutron stars since they had the luxury of never having had to experience any of this Trump bullshit.

There are no breaks in the cloud canopy and everything tastes of ash. Despair is a mortal sin, I know. I learned this from Tolkien, where all evil is fear and all fear is the absence or abandonment of hope. It's our jobs as citizens, as Americans, as humans to find the sparks of glitter, cup them captured in the palms of our hands and wait as they in their minuscule thousands coalesce into something approximating light, to warm, to illuminate, to follow.

But I don't know, man, it's getting harder and harder to do. Even the US men's national soccer team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, their first absence in 28 years. The goddamned Dodgers are in the World Series for the first time in 29 years. I've been buffeted about a bit, but I've been more or less whole; if the Yankees get in tomorrow, I can't guarantee anything. Don't fret, I'm not going to hurt myself or anyone else, partially because who has the energy and partially because I can't think of a more redundant act if Yankees-Dodgers comes to pass. Nobody wins in that scenario. Well, except I guess eventually either all of the Yankees or all of the Dodgers. Existentially, though, any outcome is a net loss, which we obviously can't afford.

No pressure, Houston Astros, but it's you or the void for all of us.