pain and despair

Yesterday afternoon my left knee started giving me trouble. That is, the one that I hadn’t scraped a bunch of skin off of a few days ago, aka my “good” knee. Probably arthritis — it’s been raining a LOT lately, and it started as that sort of “doesn’t quite hurt, but doesn’t want to support weight” thing (moving gradually into actual pain).

We’d already called off dinner plans since my wife had a rough night with cold symptoms and I had too little sleep. We’d have had to anyway with this knee, I think.

I recorded the 8th track. It’s not as soothing and calm as some of its predecessors, it wound up expressing that anxiety and discomfort more than I’d originally intended.

I played Abzu last night, mostly ignoring election coverage and doomscrolling. It’s a beautiful game, with actual fish species (and prehistoric ones) to gawk at and an unusual SF/fantasy story that omits all narration or explanation and leaves a lot to the player’s imagination.

But that only occupied me for a while; it’s a short game. I had a quick glance at very early election results, winced and put it aside. Read myself to sleep in the comfy recliner downstairs.

Woke at about 3:30 AM and looked for news, knowing if I didn’t I was just going to sit there worrying instead of sleeping anyway. Have not been able to sleep since. It took about 2.5 hours before the crying began.


I’m deeply disappointed in American voters, and humanity in general.

A department store mannequin should have defeated Trump. The fact that Harris — a competent candidate, who ran a pretty good campaign at least by conventional wisdom — did not, is really telling.

The most depressing thing is that it looks like he probably won the popular vote this time. Not all the votes are counted yet and I won’t rule out some sort of shenanigans. This is despite being demonstrably less coherent than he was then (which wasn’t very), having a track record of doing basically nothing useful in his first 4 years in office, and threatening all kinds of horrible things for a second term. It looks like Harris had significantly fewer votes than Biden did 4 years ago.

I’m not a political analyst, and I don’t really trust political analysts. But my take is this:

  • Harris did not inspire people enough. Her take on Israel/Palestine drove some voters away. She didn’t do anything to excite the left either. That doesn’t begin to account for a gap of 20 million, but IMHO, when a candidate loses what SHOULD have been an easy victory, you do have to ask what they could have done better.
  • Plain old sexism. A lot of people willing to vote for Biden were not willing to vote for a woman. Sigh.
  • As someone else eloquently pointed out, it’s the bully thing. Trump is a bully. A weak and ineffectual bully, but then many of them are. Some people are willing to make the world a worse place just to stick it to someone else to demonstrate their own “power.” Trump supporters like him because he is terrible; it’s the equivalent of buying a huge gas-guzzling SUV and modding it to “roll coll” just to trigger the libs, contributing to the poisoning of the air that they have to breathe themselves and wasting fuel that they have to pay for themselves. It’s an irrational, mean-spirited and short-sighted “I don’t take no shit from nobody” gesture. So of course, if his opponent is a woman, they just have to bully all the harder.

Not sure yet how to cope with this. Poorly, so far.

In elementary/middle school my method of dealing with bullies was not super healthy psychologically. I was paranoid about the motives of everyone who interacted with me, and especially of friendly overtures. I walked close to walls in the hallway to make it harder to be surprised, shoved, tripped etc. I tried to ignore every other child around me as much as possible, while also avoiding them, and being aware every time someone laughed (because they might be laughing at me). Like I said, it wasn’t healthy and I’m sure I tormented myself with that more than any bullies ever did. The only real success came from moving from middle into high school, and then from high school into college.

But more abstract bullying is all around (capitalism for one) and there are certainly assholes on the road and online who engage in bullying behavior. And in politics… I really don’t know how one can stop them.

This is hardly a uniquely American problem either. Moving to Canada wouldn’t really help in general. I guess if the whole ugly Project 2025 thing starts up, there are large numbers of people who might be safer in another country. I didn’t think we’d have refugees from America in my lifetime…

I found this article surprisingly good for the most part:

10 ways to be prepared and grounded if Trump wins

Particularly “Trust Yourself” and “Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor.”

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