I am an early riser due to my work schedule, and in this case it worked to my benefit. I went to bed at 8:30 last night, and I am so glad that I did because that is the only reason I got what sleep that I did. At that time, all was still right with the world. Ohio and North Carolina were blue by at least 5 points, Florida was too close to call but I had read somewhere (I’ll let you guess where) that things were tracking better than 2012 and that we had solid blue counties yet to report. South Carolina had even briefly been a glimmer of hope, although it had already turned red by that point, but hey, that was a pipe dream anyway. The only thing that was troubling at that point was Virginia, a predicted blue state, that was looking pretty red, but I didn’t worry too much about it because the battlegrounds were looking good. Ironically, it turned out to be the one that I actually didn’t have to worry about.
Then, like an idiot, when I was awake briefly at 1:30 (two hours before I would have had to get up), I decided to flip open my laptop and see just how “yuge “ the Trump thrashing had been, and along with that decision went all chances of any sleep for the rest of the night. I don’t remember exactly what I said when I saw the map, but I think it might have started with the words “what” and “the”. The score at that time was something like 244-215, and my first thought was to look at the remaining states and see if maybe there was still hope, maybe the states left were friendly ones. But no, there would be no miracle comeback, and it was obvious pretty quickly. I fired up my desktop and came here first and the despairing headlines told me all I needed to know.
I’ll be honest. I have no idea how every single battleground state except maybe one or two could flip and flip convincingly in that time, not to mention quite a few that were supposed to be “safe”, all this in complete defiance of pretty much every poll out there. Naturally, I wanted to believe the fix really was in, just in the opposite direction, but unfortunately the exit polls seem to confirm this as the real deal. Everyone just thought there was no good choice so they made whatever choice they felt like.
Boy this was a rough day to get started, and not just because of the unexpected loss of sleep. I’m not an extremely emotional person, and I can put aside a lot of negative things and hide my emotions. But there’s no way for this to be easy. I did get a nice pick-me-up when I got in my car to drive in to work, as the first song to pop up on my MP3 player was Cat Stevens' Matthew and Son, almost like it knew I was down in the dumps. (OK that is quite silly but do check out the song—it is my favorite of his by far and it never fails to make me feel good to hear it, at least a little bit.) And further on the bright side once I got to work and got into the routine I was able to mostly forget about things and not dwell on something I can’t control at this point.
I’ve read a lot of comments here from people who are sad, fearful, and worse about what has happened and all I can say is I hope that their worst fears don’t come to pass and I really hope that the people who have talked about taking extreme measures—things that can’t be taken back once done—don’t carry through with them.
I never imagined we’d be here, but here we are. We all have to carry on, somehow. I’m pretty sure I’ll be OK but I worry for people whose lives will be changed forever because of this.
Man, do I need a pootie diary right about now.