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wake into the nightmare
Wednesday, November 9 2016
As one would imagine, I slept badly last night. I couldn't get to sleep at all until I took an ambien, but that's only good for three or four hours. Then I had to wake into the nightmare of what was almost certainly the case: Donald J. Trump had been elected President of the United States.
I didn't really want to know this for sure. Perhaps I thought I could live for a time in Schrödingerian uncertainty, but Gretchen collapsed reality down to a single state early this morning while checking her phone. Donald Trump had won the presidency, and Hillary Clinton had conceded. The stock futures markets had initially crashed but then they rebounded when Trump gave what (for him) seemed like a humble victory speech wherein he praised Clinton (and seemed to indicate he wasn't going to launch a massive campaign to arrest his many enemies). That was pretty much all I needed to know; I was pretty sure I was not going to be checking my usual news sites until I'd had a chance to absorb and internalize the enormity of what had happened. But unlike in 2004 (when I completely abandoned news and switched for months to listening to non-political evergreen podcasts — mostly the back catalog of This American Life), my shock hadn't been the result of epistemic closure. Nearly everyone (including Trump and most of his supporters) had been sure Clinton would win. That Trump had won had come as a huge shock to people across the political spectrum. How had the polls been so wrong? Had Sarah Palin been stopped-clock-correct when she'd said "Polls are for strippers!"?
We stayed in bed for an extended time after awaking, checking our various devices. I was avoiding news sites, but I was taking solace in the outpouring of horror happening on my Facebook feed. People were saying that now was the time to fight, and while I liked the idea in theory, I felt no fight in me whatsoever. I was depleted and listless. It was good to have dogs in the bed to cuddle with, and I suspect they could feel a disturbance in The Force. Gretchen thought it best to deal with the situation by sitting shiva, the traditional Jewish way of mourning. People could come by if they wanted, and we wouldn't brush our teeth or get out of our bed clothes (not that that is unusual).
To help me have the energy to face the day, I took one of Gretchen's celexas. I know SSRIs require days of use before they kick in as antidepressants, but I wasn't really hoping for that. Taken as a one-off, celexa has a mild stimulant effect while also providing a subtle difference to the way the body feels. This would be enough of a placebo for me to feel I'd done something to combat my misery.
Our friend Jeff couldn't make it to last night's election returns party, but he'd been at a bar with his partner Alana. The mood had grown increasingly somber until some asshole Trumpkin at the bar had shouted "Go Donald Trump!" and said he was ordering a round for everyone there. That was when he and Alana left, and he'd had drive Alana home, leaving her (separate) car there. He came back down from Saugerties this morning to return her to her car and came by our place for a time to commiserate. It was only then I learned that Hillary Clinton had actually won the popular vote but lost key midwestern states and Pennsylvania. Jeff ended up being our only shiva guest.
It was somber in the remote workplace. There wasn't much chatter in Slack aside from gallows humor. I had a video conference with Te in fundraising, and she said no work was happening at all in The Organization's home office. People were just huddled together, talking, like at a wake.
Soon thereafter, I had the daily video conference with the others on the IT team. We were all down in the dumps, though none of us had more reason to be than Ha, who is Hispanic. In addition to our usual reports on what we would be working on today, Da gave us some info from the department heads meeting he'd been to earlier. He said that if any of us needed to, we could take the day off as personal. When I said I wondered how The Organization's fundraising would fair in the new Trumpian world, what with its more urgent and existential battles than the one we fight, Da assured us that we personally would probably be okay since IT is a basic need for any organization. He then went on to say that, as a white male, he personally didn't have much to worry about in the new regime. That seemed a bit self-centered to me, particularly given the diversity on our very team (though Ni, our one female IT person, is out for the week). And besides, his concern shouldn't be for the IT team, it should be for The Organization itself and the cause it represents. At some point our meeting was interrupted by the news that one of Da's animal activist friends (and founder of a wildlife sanctuary) had committed suicide last night using a handgun. Her husband had recently left her, so the Trump news came on top of a weakened will to live, and it had apparently been enough for her to carry through on a desire to end it all. I could relate to this feeling; I'm not generally suicidal myself, but the idea of killing myself does occasionally occur to me in moments of extreme stress, and it had definitely crossed my mind in the long sleepless hours last night and at various times today when I contemplated the bleakness of the future.
Despite all this, I managed to get some work done in my remote workplace. Working on complicated set problems in MySQL is a good way to fill the brain with thoughts that aren't unpleasant. (At times they can even be marvelously pleasant in their logical beauty.)
The combination of celexa and depression destroyed my appetite today. I ate a banana while talking with Jeff early in the day and then didn't have anything until the afternoon, when I ate some pieces of pink grapefruit that didn't agree with me. Much later, I managed to eat some leftover spætzle with bratwurst.
All day I managed to avoid checking in on my ususal news sites, though Gretchen would occasionally give me updates, such as the heartening news that tens of thousands of people had taken to the streets all over the United State to protest Trump's electoral college victory. He might be a fascist with authoritarian impulses, but it was looking like America wasn't going to give up on pluralistic democracy quite so easily.
In dealing with depressing turns of events (and these can be at many different scales, right up to and including the global tragedy of an eminent Trump presidency), one of the things that seems to prolong the internalization of the new reality is the collection of objects in one's life that one keeps encountering that had last been encountered before the shattering news. This means that on a day like today, I kept stumbling upon things that recalled the better times that existed as recently as 15 hours before. There was that bay leaf that I pulled out of the chana masala early in our returns-watching party. I'd put it on the little table in the living room, and there it was still. There was the bathtub, where, the last time I'd taken a bath, the world contained considerably more hope. (Still, a bath always makes one feel better.) The day was full of such poignant encounters, especially the tabs left open on my Elitebook 2740p, which I closed with deliberately-unfocused eyes.
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