Getting Through It

LifeScapes 14, November 2024

My friends—

I don’t know about you, but at our house, the past days—it’s been almost a week— have been bewildering. (If you’re on the other side and celebrating, please excuse us. We’re going to hang out together here for a while. You’re welcome to go away now and come back later, or hang out with us and listen. Whatever. Just don’t troll.)

Tuesday night. The questions, a blizzard of them. How did this happen? Why? Why does anybody, anywhere, of any income/education class or color or religious persuasion, vote for a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, self-confessed assaulter? In what crazy universe does this make a lick of sense? What’s going to happen next? How bad will it get?

Then the meltdown—angry tears, furious shrieks, the whole hysterical works. I’ve learned to handle my temper better since I turned 80, but I gave myself a hall pass for this one. We’d had four years of TFG already, plus a hellish four-year aftermath. And now we’re in for another four years of the same damned chaos, the inanities and irrationalities, the threats against insurance, Social Security, Medicare, women’s reproductive health.

Too much. Just too much. Bill had gone to bed but we live in a small house and I didn’t want him to hear me behaving like a four-year-old. So my tantrum and I went out into the back yard and roared. We have no neighbors out here in the Hill Country and nobody was within earshot of this crazy old lady cursing and banging things around. If the Sagittarius/Capricorn Moon noticed, she didn’t let on.

The tantrum helped a little. The double G&T helped a lot. I put on my headset and invited some tranquilizing music to put me to sleep.

Wednesday morning . . .