I Have No Recollection

We went through four years of "why is every day a lot?", rising to a screeching, bleeding-ears crescendo over the last twelve months in particular, a sustained held-note, dissonant and resonant at the same time with an effect you can feel as much as hear. Like we found the mythical brown note, except we all shit each others' pants.

But I really do feel better! I wasn't lying to you last week when I said as much. With a whole second impeachment trial in full effect, though, this week has been a lot again. We rely on the dog-brain parts of our emotional makeup as mammals to process, normalize and forget any level of horribleness, even ones that persist over a quadrennial. Your pups are only chastened while you're actively shouting about the couch cushions and why their stuffing innards were separated from their casing and spread lovingly across the living room in preparation for your return from wherever it is you had the audacity to go without your Best Pal. Once the doggos go through the hard emotional work of reconciliation consisting of resting their chin on your thigh until you relent with a scritch across the bridge of the nose, it's not only that everything is OK again, it's that, for them, nothing was ever wrong. The curse of being a human is your ability to have your upsets become traumas and your traumas lingering, but that capacity for active forgetting is there. It exists for the same reason it exists for dogs and meth addicts: we just gotta get through a regular Thursday, man. Somehow. The weight of the whole narrative is too much to contemplate.

It's fucking tough to pretend there never was a Trump if we have to re-live the worst part of it with real-time video during the trial presentation. It's been such a shock to the system, I even found myself feeling empathy for Mitt Romney and Mike Pence, both of whom are ironically featureless Ambition-Bots from model years before a recognizable human emotional empathy matrix was even an optional feature.

It's even harder when we realize the ground-work that made Trumpism possible left a lot of fundamentals in place all around us, still actively, acidly eating through the weld-points that used to hold families and the society together. It's tough to move on when your mom genuinely believes the new president eats babies and the only answer she'll accept from you is total agreement. Although I guess that makes sense: what's the compromise position when the opening offer is "the president eats babies?" What does meeting half way look like there? The irony is a counteroffer of "maybe he only eats kittens" would be dismissed as not taking the discussion seriously.

It's upsetting to think about the Trump years as a thing that actually happened, but there's no getting around the reality that, at least from a political and social-media perspective, those days are firmly behind us. And the continuing payoff of being one of the people who are swayed by the actual facts of the non-baby-eating-president reality is that you're accustomed to accepting facts as they are. Eventually. It's not always easy, but at least it's an option.