If our clock wasn't cleaned, it was certainly reset. That makes twice in one week. I wasn't over Falling Back yet -- now, in mid-primal scream, I am Falling Forward, imagining many of us, holding our heads as we drop, by the battalions, parachuting in, chutes failing to open, each of us Edvard Munch, spying the ground racing up.
Somewhere around 3:00 a.m., as Eastern Shock Zone is calculated, I think it was, when it was certain -- when the curtain was pulled around the unsettling corpse of the election.
3:00 a.m. -- the time, you might remember from past messaging, when it was comforting to think someone alert, aware, and with lights-on-in-the-head, might take an emergency call for the nation, get up, get the lights on, and start working.
(Soon, of course, at 3:00 a.m., we can count on someone groggy, foggy, and with fused circuit breakers in the head, to take an emergency call for the nation, sit up, and start tweeting insults and partial-sentence rants.)
Like many, I was bleary-eyed, and maybe teary, too, and with the strong need for sleep at hand -- alas, another formerly safe refuge made impossible, another port denied.
So, I went back to old tricks, the equivalent of counting sheep: letting my mind wander, while sleep-typing, helping words do easy circus tricks on cheap wooden chairs, for no applause or treat -- just because the words were restless, flipping and flopping around on the seismically shattered floor of my skull, a gaggle of squishy, half-deflated, somewhat wounded concepts limping and lurching to and fro...
Later on, there would be time to attend to First Aid, for others. For now, the words would have to do their best, and try to swim on their own to the surface for air.
I now have a much better idea how it feels to recover from a stroke, and to try to learn how to speak again.
I now have a much deeper appreciation than before for the stunning brilliance of Al Pacino's closing scene in the Godfather trilogy -- SPOILER ALERT! -- when he is braced against the opera house's stone steps, after his daughter has been shot dead on those steps, her body crumpled on those same steps, nearby, his head craned backward and up toward the skies, eyes wide, mouth open -- and the gravity-suspending eternity of worlds upon worlds of time before any grieving sound can be strangled up, out of his tortured inner depths.
When air returns to our chests and lungs, we can talk more about First Aid, about The Steps of Grieving, about What to Do Next.
For now, in our far-flung and imaginary group therapy session with and for one another, we can only start with our startlement, with our stunned disbelief, with our wide-eyed pain and open mouths on the cold, stone steps of this Neo-Democracy.
- For this half of our whole: Wherever we thought we lived, we now know we were wrong -- dead wrong.
- No, a SPOILER ALERT! would not have helped for this election -- trust me.
So, for now: Take a chair. Tell your story. But, always realize, you will need to decide for yourself whether or not you will kiss the back of the hand that beat you, whether or not you will kiss the golden ring...
... and, if so, how, exactly, you will approach it. And what you will do next.
But, that will all be later. When we can breathe again. When the normal human reactions drain from our souls.
Now, it is time for us to take a chair, and share a beginning. Here and now -- this is the best I can do:
* * *
COMET STRIKE
(Or: Sampling the New History's Core at a Quarter to Four)
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