December 31, 2016

Pale blue through the upstairs study window. I have slept wondrous late. Baked cheesecake, have the two main dishes to prepare today, and to set the rooms for festivities. And to sleep, so to make it through to midnight. Defections already through sickness and making other plans at the last minute. I might once again be throwing away a couple hundred dollars worth of food.

Last night my father was a sinister ghost shaped, now that I think of it, like a spine. He came whispering terrible things into the room of the dream.

Odd, instant sickness, nausea and chills. I took a vitamin C pill, an iron pill, and an antacid all at one time. A mistake? Passing–

Facebook entries ask, “What was the most beautiful thing you saw this year?” “What was the best thing that happened this year?’ The best thing that happened is that I managed a truce in the war with God that’s been waged at least since I came to the South. The most beautiful thing? Moonlight on Saint Istvan? The Rijksmuseum? The two men in the café with hawks on their arms? Sam smiling?  Something I will remember hours from now and forget before I get it written down? The worst of course is the Fall of America, represented by the mixture of fear, cynicism, and drop-dead ignorance that got Trump elected President. Fear, cynicism, and drop-dead ignorance look to be the catchwords of the months to come, and those of good will must resist every move, every statement, every nano-second. Nor can there be any patience, any honeymoon period, any impulse of “wait and see,” for the lineaments of the enemy are fully known, and re-asserted by every public move. But to our power, hostility and hate,  Untamed reluctance, and revenge, tho' slow, Yet ever plotting . . . .Odd that his minions– who were the bugbears of times past–seem positively moderate in comparison.  We were not prepared. In our defense, it’s something out of comic opera that one could not credit ever coming to pass.  It is some other America never fully comprehended by the reasonable before.

If public fury must end one year, private lovingkindness must begin the next. And so--