As noted in an earlier post, I got control of my fight-or-flight reflex on Thursday afternoon, and that let me at least get some handle on the uncontrollable rage I've felt since the election. I remain deeply concerned for the fate of our country, and I remain personally disappointed in you, dear reader, in a highly individual manner. However, I'm finally starting to get to a place where I myself can at least move forward.
At this point, that is all I can do.
Warning: These posts are meant to be read in chronological order, so if you haven't read the earlier ones, this one might not make any sense. Read on or don't. I'm just telling you that if you want to actually understand, you might want to go back and start with the post about voting.
I'm not sharing these anywhere, so whatever the audience, it's miniscule. That's fine. I'm not trying to make any of this accessible. The idea here is just to let you know how I'm doing in case you've been wondering. Whether you do or don't care is entirely up to you.
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As you might imagine, I didn't sleep well this week. Uncontrollable rage does not make for peaceful nights. I got to sleep easily enough Thursday night -- we've talked about why -- but then I woke up at 3:30 in the morning and couldn't go back to sleep. So I got up and doom-scrolled.
This was not smart.
The same happened Friday, but that time, at least, I stayed in bed until I eventually got to something like sleep. Meditation, at any rate. I never fell dead away, but I did dream, and with that, I at least felt functional on Saturday.
I had a simple plan for Saturday: swim, clean up the yard, then drink to insensibility while watching college football. I badly wanted to unplug from my feelings for a few hours.
I put in 3000 yards of pure, rage-driven hate in the pool on Saturday morning. Legit let the Devil out. The guy next to me seemed sad that I'd lapped him so easily and put on fins to keep up. This let me push myself to a place of relentless aggression. I got my heart rate up to a sustained 145 BPM, smoked the living shit out of the guy, and felt immensely better afterwards. I didn't stop until I saw a kind of breaking existential sadness in that dude's eyes. That felt glorious.
Got home, made some eggs, cleaned up the back deck and the back yard, and then sat down to watch some football. Buncha beers. You already know that Army won. My thoughts on it are over on As For Football. I then expected to wake up a million times during the night. Instead, I slept like a dead man for eight solid hours, and now I feel like I'm almost fully back to myself.
I still really don't see what people want in our once and future president, nor do I think his voters -- all 70+ million of them! -- mostly realize what they've signed up for. But as noted, there's literally nothing to do about it now. There will be no "resistance" this time. The president will enact whatever policies he wants, completely unfettered from the traditional checks and balances of government, which he and his cronies have spent the last ten years dismantling. They did an impressive job with that.
Folks want to "Drain the Swamp." We can disagree on what that means. What I'm expecting is a Hell of a lot of layoffs throughout the government bureaucracy to a bunch of mostly important departments that you didn't realize you needed. That plus a slow roll-out of state-sponsored quasi-religious indoctrination ought to end the America we thought we had for good. Say goodbye to evolution, for example. I also expect that the fundamental meaning of "patriotism" will change, as will the basic purpose of government. Both of those things will be tied closer to specific people and ideologies and less to the Republic, such as it is, as a whole. To put that another way, the space between the state, the evangelical Christian worldview, and multinational corporate America should get a lot smaller.
But I guess that's only a problem if you're not Christian and/or if you're trying to compete in the marketplace with new or different ideas. So industrial barriers to entry might matter a whole Hell of a lot in the next year or so, and the price of labor should go way up. Prices of imported goods and services should go up a lot as well. This is all good or bad depending on how you choose winners and losers.
If you want a piece of personal advice, I strongly suggest that you start eating organic. Else you'll be consuming a LOT of technically edible industrial non-foodstuffs. Food industry regulations are going bye-bye.
But like I said, we'll see. If I'm wrong, no one will be happier about it than me. I guess we'll find out.
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