July 30, 2016

Good performance last night. The cast is attentive and looks out after one another. Simon the Zealot has been chasing me off stage the whole time and, as my back is turned, I haven’t noticed.  Waynesville has an inordinate number of fairs and street dances which oblige one to take all sorts of scary detours through unfamiliar streets in the dead of night. I was chased by a posse of middle aged women who were determined that I explain myself for having made a wrong turn. I dodged them inches away.
   
Hope the day makes good on its threat of rain.
   
The people who hate Hillary and the people who love Trump have one thing in common: they have invented the person who is the object of their emotion. Hillary has done nothing–objectively– to earn people’s mistrust, and Trump has said or done nothing that would make us think he would serve anything but his own vanity, and yet people say “I don’t trust Hillary” or “Trump tells it like it is” with religious conviction.  “Religious” may be the operative word: received, unexamined, probably wrong, often hysterical, irrational, above or beside all reasonable argument, superior to evidence, more enduring than truth.
  
Late afternoon: sweet rain with its various voices. Sore from gardening. Planted a clutch of acanthus, hart’s tongue fern, anemone for the shade, and a stand of milkweed for the butterflies.