I don’t want to move on from our feelings about this recent U.S. election and the probable impending collapse of democracy it portends, but also I have other things I want to talk about with you: pelvic-floor therapy; the results of a second ultrasound after an iffy mammogram (I’m not going to tease: the radiologist said the rogue lymph nodes have decreased in size and so I can come back for my usual annual mammogram) (though I have some uncertainties about this); Christmas shopping for a holiday “adopt a child” program, which is currently doing some heavy lifting in terms of preserving my sanity; co-worker holiday gifts; what we’re buying our impossible-to-buy-for grown children; my parents’ adoption of an Election-Stress-Reducing Cat, who spent his first week hiding in the ducts of their furnace.

This post is going to be politics-related, and then after that I am probably going to talk about something else, and I entirely understand if you are not ready to read about Something Else right now. It has only been a week and a day since we found out that we were going to be reliving a nightmare; there are daily horrifying previews for this nightmare (a Fox disinformation-television news host as the head of the Department of Defense!! sure why not!!! how could that go wrong?!?!?); it is not weird to prefer to nope-out of posts on lighter topics. You will not hurt my feelings if you skim and skip as needed. I have been drifting in and out, myself, and when I am not in the right headspace I have been skipping/skimming other people’s posts on lighter topics, and on political-ranty topics, depending. Sometimes I can think about things other than this country’s political catastrophe, and sometimes I need to drift in the abyss of horror, and sometimes I can’t spend one more minute hearing about the abyss of horror and I want to see pictures of someone’s dog/cat, and all of these are fine ways of being.

Heck if I can find it, but I am sure I recently mentioned that I finally purchased a one-line-a-day diary that’s been in my online cart for YEARS; there are tons of options, but I chose this one:

(image from Amazon.com)

I have liked this idea for so long, but struggled with When To Start It. New Year’s Day 2020? My 50th birthday? Some random day, to take the pressure off? I finally decided I would just buy it, and then if I were struck by the impulse to start it, I would have it ready to go. Four days after the election, I was lying awake simmering in nauseated horror, and I thought of a good start-date: Election Day. It would mean fudging several days’ worth of entries, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: this project gave me a flicker of interest, and that is something to be seized. And I was able to recreate the first four days pretty accurately using posts and emails.

I am going to record this presidency (the next five years of it, anyway), but only one line a day. (Would you like to do the same? Join me.) I am hoping this will help me to narrow things down, and condense. What is the MAIN THING that happened each day: be BRIEF. This will also give me room to record the happy surprises that are bound to happen even in this timeline: for example, today the satire/humor site The Onion purchased the disinformation site InfoWars, and plans to remake it in a better image. I have written it down for today.