The Morning After

"Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." 

– Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

Awakened unwell for the second straight day. I could feel a cough and a scratchy throat coming on at a talk we attended at the Penn Club on Monday evening, as an impressive young author talked up his new book about the history of attempts to simplify the spelling of the English language. Lots of fun anecdotes, and me sitting there feeling like rising hell.

Yesterday driving back from the City I wasn't feeling great at all, with a bad sniffle and some chills to go with the lower respiratory symptoms. But I felt grateful it seemed to be a mild illness, and by bedtime thought I was on the mend.

Not so. Peg pushed me out of bed at 2 because the congestion led to snoring, and she had to work this morning. So I spent the last four hours sniffling and coughing in-and-out of sleep on the couch. Maybe I'll rally later, but I sort of doubt it.

'Tis the season for dead flies here at the Corning condo.

For a couple years now, we've observed that when the air starts to cool outside, our window sills and the floors below them begin to fill with deceased black flies, with a few ladybugs thrown in for diversity. We sweep them up, and within a day or so a new array of corpses takes their place. Their exact origin is a mystery, but my theory is that the same hole somewhere in the duct system that lets the occasional bat in here provides a portal from a cold attic to our warm space. Between the bats living up there, and the birds we see flying in-and-out of the eaves that have supposedly been repaired to prevent bird entry, you have to figure that attic is full of bat guano and bird poop. That means lots of flies, and hence this annual pilgrimage to die on our window sills.

So, about last night. Was it good for you?

At a national level, it was a great outcome, a watershed for this country. I've seen estimates of an 80+ seat D majority in the House, and either a six or seven seat majority in the Senate. Not enough to impeach and completely end the nightmare, or to overturn the vetoes the Mad King is promising, but we'll likely be spared any more MAGA federal judges, and it's enough of a margin to ensure the fascists are on the defensive rather than engaging in state sanctioned murder and kleptocracy with impunity.

But Florida . . . really? It looks like even Mississippi is about to show their MAGA senator the door. But the party of Trump ran the table in the Sunshine State, meaning most of my neighbosrs voted for a continuation of this nightmare.

How did this happen? How did Florida, the home of palm trees, Jimmy Buffett, and shuffleboard, seize the mantel from Texas as the worst major state in the Union (to get there, one has to dismiss Alabama and Tennessee as not "major" states, or we'd have to acknowledge Governor-elect Tuberville or that awful female senator from the Volunteer State)?

Fun fact: Florida had more registered Democrats that Republicans from the beginning of time until it flipped in 2021. Now there are nearly half-again as many Rs as Ds. Not coincidentally, this began in the age of the mass migration to Florida in the post-Covid era in search of "freedom", not in the Bobby McGee sense, but in the sense that no one could make these people get the vaccine. Besides a relatively small, wealthy enclave drawn by low taxes and the ability to live in whole neighborhoods filled with assholes like themselves (I'm looking at you, 30A), most of these people were from places like here in upstate New York: white, not particularly well-heeled or well-educated, and seething with resentment at a society that seemed to be leaving them behind. So they moved down there to live in what demographers are saying has become a majority-minority state, which really must frost their backsides.

And just like that, a perfectly pleasant assembly of retirees and misfits from all over the planet becomes a vast MAGA rally, where the RPOF stokes their fears with tales of brown criminals and trans surgery at the middle school over lunch. It's simply unliveable.

But we'll have to bear it a while longer, I guess. Too much alimony left to pay, and too much debt that went from 3% to 8% thanks to the policies of our incredibly successful businessman in the White House. That said, today is a better day, and perhaps a milestone toward our national nightmare finally coming to an end.