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happy to be going extinct
Wednesday, November 6 2024
I'd been awake for hours when Gretchen finally awoke from her xanax-assisted sleep to check the messages and news on her phone. She let out an exclamation that told me all I needed to know. Trump had indeed won and a horror was on its way. Gretchen's big concern is climate change, and the fact that our country was now going to be actively working to make the coming disaster as bad as possible devastated her. It was, for her, something akin to a death sentence. All the other horrors could eventually be reversed, but not that one. (I'm a little less pessimistic about the climate disaster than she is, but she's not wrong.) Then, of course, are all the terrible things likely to done to women's reproductive rights, especially if a nation-wide ban on abortion reaches Donald Trump's desk. The ways Donald Trump can now destroy America are too numerous to mention, and they became intrusive thoughts that tortured me for the rest of the day no matter what I did to try to keep them at bay.
Unlike me, Gretchen has a robust social network, and this morning they were all sending her messages to express their horror at what had just happened. A, our friend next door, sent a message saying her daughter was devastated by the news of Kamala's defeat and she wanted us to come over with the dogs to commiserate. So we put on our clothes and encouraged our dogs to follow. At the time Gretchen was on the phone with her childhood friend Dina over in Tel Aviv talking about what it all meant. Neville was a little confused, since he doesn't normally go on morning walks. We kept telling him where we were going (he loves A), but he wasn't quite getting it. So I carried him about half way there so it was start making sense.
Over at A's house, we all sat on the kitchen floor while the dogs ran around with delight, Charlotte making a dog toy that looked like broccoli squeak repeatedly. Then Neville starting ripping the stuffing out of another toy the way he likes to do. A's daughter had been crying, but she cheered up when we arrived and was soon showing us a tiny for or five page picture book she'd made and illustrated about a broccoli with a red tongue. She then started doing handstands. By that point we'd moved out to the backyard, where temperatures were freakishly balmy as the rising sun shown directly into our eyes any time we looked east (back towards our house). Gretchen and I haven't had kids partly because of the horrifying trajectory the world is on. Trump's election to another term confirmed our worst fears, and we're happy (as I put it) to be "going extinct." But A says she cannot think this way because of her daughter. She must have hope. And so she does.
At some point Charlotte became obsessed with a "ground hog" under the shed that A referred to as "the G-hog shed." "Wait... Jihad shed?" I asked, having heard that word. A laughed and explained that she was saying "G. hog." Then Gretchen told her about how we use the term "jihad" to refer to any concentrated effort, particularly ones involving the cleaning of a space.
After A took her daughter off to school, Gretchen and I strolled most of the way up the Farm Road and back, our arms around each others' shoulders as we walked. When we first put our arms around each other, it was so poignant that we both momentarily let out a sob.
Back at the house, Gretchen immediately returned to her New York Abortion Fund work, talking to desperate women, many of them in Florida, who were planning trips to New York to get abortions. A constitutional amendment that had been on the ballot in Florida had gotten 57% of the vote, but that was shy of the 60% supermajority needed.
Gretchen would be working at the bookstore today, which she thought would be good for her mental health. Her plan was to take Neville with her and put the sandwich sign out in front with the message "ELECTION THERAPY DOG ON SITE" for all the crushed lefties who would be coming by today. So I put Neville in the Bolt, making Charlotte almost as miserable as me. She ended up being nicer to me than she usually is when Neville isn't around. She even let me lie next to her a few times without immediately getting up and going somewhere else.
Eventually I went to my computer to do some necessary tasks and to engage in a few diversions. One thing I didn't want to do was read any of the news sites I'd obsessively checked prior to the election. My pattern in the past after a bad election is to give up news entirely for my mental health. To do that today, I closed my the web browser on all my computers as I opened them, letting all their dozens of tabs vanish into the ether. I'd them start anew, with just tabs for email, my ESP8266 Remote Control, my version of Spelling Bee, my GitHub page, LinkedIn, and the New York Unemployment page. I didn't even open Facebook, but since I used Facebook direct messages for most of my text communication, I opened up Messenger.com (which is just Facebook direct messages, without the newsfeed).
At some point I thought I'd feel better if I took a bath, though it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. While in the tub, I decided that part of my problem must've been a hangover. I hadn't been too drunk when I'd gone to bed last night, but I'd been drinking on and off since before 2:00pm. Normally I take a Chromebook into the bath with me, but today I decided to just take a book, a form of media I barely consume at all these days. The book in question was a random one I found on Gretchen's nightstand: Women's Hotel, about long-term lodging for single women of modest means in New York City in the 1960s. It was well-written and surprisingly interesting.
It took awhile to overcome my lack of initiative, but eventually I took advantage of the perfect weather and resumed work on my solar panel rejuvenation project. Today I used the Rotozip blade in a Dremel (it doesn't fit in a router) to cut the cracked & twisted top plank into two pieces, exercising extreme caution as the blade approached the glass (which still rested on that plank along most of its length. Once I had the plank in two pieces and cut through the caulk and spray foam holding it in place, it was a simple matter to pull it up and wrench it from the attachments on either end. Then I cut away the foam so that new two by six could take its place. But actually installing that big heavy piece would take more preparation and considerable wrangling, and darkness was descending. So I prioritized making the panel so it would survive overnight if a wind storm kicked up.
All I'd eaten all day was smoothie Gretchen had made this morning. Later I ate a banana. When Gretchen came home, she suggested I at least eat some crackers, so I crunched through some Triscuits. I also drank a glass of oatmilk, something I almost never crave unless I've just taken a bath.
After watching another Jeopardy! and another English Teacher, we discussed some news Gretchen had learned about the election. This time, she told me, Trump had somehow even won the popular vote, apparently propelled by low-information voters who hadn't been following the campaigns too closely but were upset about inflation. Trump the rapist and revoker of reproductive freedom had somehow managed to get 45% of the women's vote. And Trump, the candidate who had had a digusting "comic" headline his fascist Madison Square Garden rally with "jokes" about Hispanic sexual practices and coming from islands that are "floating piles of trash" had somehow managed to get 45% of the Hispanic vote. I was happy to grunt along with this sort of conversation, but later when Gretchen decided to watch a pep talk by an advocate of women's reproductive freedom, I asked Gretchen if she could please watch such things elsewhere, that I was trying, for my mental health, to keep out intrusive thoughts about Donald Trump, something that wasn't easy when Gretchen was watching such things beside me in bed. She agreed not to do it any more.
Gretchen sent me a picture of the sandwich sign in front of the Golden Notebook today. A number of people came into the store after seeing this sign. One woman who lives in Hunter (a very red part of New York) drove to Woodstock today specifically to be around like-minded people on this terrible day.
Click to enlarge.
Neville was a big hit today at the bookstore, where his therapy skills were in high demand. He even met another pit bull named Emerald.
Click to enlarge.
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