August 7, 2020

Not just because he has won, not just because so many chose differently from us (that they would choose to live in his world; not hers, not ours.)

But because of how unprepared we are to live in a tomorrow that is this. In any other election we’d have said, ‘if A wins, then… ; if B wins, then…’ But we never let ourselves believe this could happen; right up till the revelation itself it had not seemed possible. I wrote to C. last night, Good luck America!  — ‘I have a good feeling about today’, was this morning’s reply; I wrote to S. in the morning, who was knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, ‘confident’ was his word, coming home in the afternoon. In the evening writing to S: “All the polls and forecasts and the Nate Silvers didn’t prepare us for this, the predictions so wildly off in a time we’ve come to put faith in the number crunchers, to say that that his support is but sound and fury but when it comes to the voting the data prevails. It never seemed to merit discussion as a real possibility — more a bogeyman in the migration to Canada jokes — so we never thought about what comes ‘next’.” And we don’t know how to live in the next which is now.

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treemasonry You must think the mason didn’t know his job, I said, showing Steve these photos. Oh, no, said Steve, a plant always prevails over masonry.

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trumpshock2 I seem to be going through the stages of grief backwards — on the night I accepted what had just happened, then the next day went into a kind of