Everything is awful; have a creampuff
A window into my battered psyche, as we all try to stay afloat.
I've been struggling to post here, you may have noticed. I've been jammed up by a particular post I want to write, I feel the need to write, but it refuses to take coherent shape in my head.
I have so many other things to post here, no shortage, but this one amorphous post is gumming up the works. It's about the state of the world right now, and specifically where Trump, the GOP, and the various agents desperately seeking to pretend there is a status quo (democrats, corporations, legacy media, [your favorite capitulating institution here]) have led us.
I feel off-kilter writing about food while the world is imploding. While people I know are literally fleeing the country to get to safety. While the things I love best about our country are being shattered. (Scientific research! Dear god!) While foundational civic principles like due process and checks & balances are turning out to only be bluffs to be called.
It's not a new feeling for me, the unease about baking my way through the apocalypse. I've been joking about how I'm making creampuffs at the end of the world for a few years now. Everything has just reached new heights of absurdity, I guess.
Which leads me to feeling like I have to stop to acknowledge it, somehow. But how? What is there to be said about this that is new? Or insightful? Or even interesting? You're already drowning in others' grotesque attempts to make sense of the nonsensical. You don't need me to pile on.
But still it bangs around in my head, daily: we knew he was a complete bozo all the way back in the 1980s. Me, forty years ago, a preteen, in Seattle, 3,000 miles away from New York, knew perfectly well that he was a) outrageously self-centered, b) cruel, c) a terrible businessman, and d) warped by his deep insecurities. He was a joke! The Apprentice was an absurdity, and everything past that has only descended deeper into weirder and weirder distortions of reality that are hard to stomach.
We've now had a decade of trying to make sense1 of him, and more importantly, his abettors. We don't have much to show for it. I'm not terribly interested in the supposed reasons anyone had for voting for him; his transgressions are crowed about by him. There's no excusing the cruelty being wrought.
So please, as I'm posting about creampuffs or whatever, know that I'm also somewhere on my personal internal select-o-matic wheel between incensed, terrified, boggled, despondent, screaming, [#&!!@*?%], and whatever horrific novel feelings are thrashing across my brain. I am a constant whirligig of "I have to say something!/There is nothing to say!/There is too much to say!/I have to say something!"
But I may not let it show, because you're probably in a similar state, and I think we're better off if we lift each other out of the horror freeze rather than getting mired deeper in it. I'm not turning a blind eye, I'm staying on top of the news2, I'm going to protests and doing the little bits of action I can, and I'm VERY EAGERLY awaiting the day we all take to the streets in one big ol' general strike, like they do in France.