My apology. I'm off my game.

I confess to no new sins this past week, but I do beg forgiveness for displaying my rather severe disorientation, if that's the right word.

Since Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, America's lowest point in its history, my brain seems to have taken on a kind of zombie existence. You've probably sensed the same in your own beingness — there's at least some hope for my recovery; just now I could have written "ontological experience," but I didn't — our difference being, I've exhibited my brain's zombiedom online. Every damn day.

The thoughts I've posted here since Wednesday afternoon have seemed scrambled as I was writing them. I've read each post afterward — perhaps a mistake, for each reading confirmed what at first only seemed to be true: the thoughts contained therein were indeed bloody awful, mostly in terms of construction and thus incoherence, not intent.

Tuesday night — it's my authentic reason and yet cheap excuse for being so off my game. Every sentence has been a struggle to get out of my head and put down in print. Looking back on them, every sentence should have been put down all right, but in a merciful, veterinarian way. The etiology of my mental ailing is incontrovertible: election night's catastrophe, which oozed slightly into the morn.

Nothing since has come easily, swiftly or naturally — a condition quite foreign merely a week ago. Its immediate and likely effective treatment was to lie low for a while, to regroup, to just shut the fuck up for a week or two and let my synapses overcome the shock. In the appalling trauma's earliest stage, I believe I knew this intuitively. And I recall readers advising the same in the comment section.    

Via email, I have heard from several readers who are much more than that; they are personal friends dearly loved. And what they had to say was nearly as traumatizing to me as the election, for they too have been so deeply traumatized. One such friend is Kathy W. — you've seen her here in the comment section (not often enough, I'll add) — who was a close friend of my late wife and has been simply magnificent in her generosity toward daughter Ellie. 

Kathy has been political all her life. She still is, despite. In her letter to me, which included the truths that "we are a nation of idiots" and "we better find a way to fix stupid," she wrote some other words that really hit home. About November 5th: "It’s kind of like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination; you know in your gut that everything in life will change, but you don’t know how." Yet Kathy knew one thing: "I know that I will no longer be the person I was on Monday." The eeriness lies in the empathy.

Another close friend, John C., or "ren," you also know from the comment section. His letter was gut-wrenching. John himself is facing a personal crisis with ineffable courage, which, in its totality, defines him. But as far as providence was concerned, that suffering in this life wasn't enough. No, in another and most unique way, he must also suffer the extraordinary evil of Donald J. Trump — because of the also ineffably courageous woman to whom he is married. 

You guessed it. His wife is an immigrant. She's from the Philippines, and though 10 years ago she began working hard to learn English and then pass her U.S. citizenship test — of which she was immensely proud (as John noted and I agree, most Trumpers would flunk it) — today, "she is not welcome" where they live, he wrote. "She's hated in fact." 

John recalled in his letter the day that his wife became a United States citizen. She emerged from the federal building that housed the testing center yelping "'Hala!" (wow), it's so clean here and you are so free." Added John: "And now America has come to this." The contrast, today, must be indescribable for them both. I myself cannot imagine the depth of the obscenity they face because of one little man of even smaller mind.  

John asked if I'm "serious" about expatriation, and if so, "where were you thinking? We're serious about moving on as well." America is no longer America, again, because of that one little man. She is hated here. From that comes the sick, the very sickest of ironies. She emigrated from her country of birth in part because she detested its dictator, Rodrigo Duterte (whom DJT admired). Now she and John must emigrate from America — and yet another dictator.

With their permission, I have passed along the stories of these three dear friends — stories that come because of this one annus horribilus, yet horribilis x 10 or 1,000 for we cannot know how many may follow. And as Kathy noted, You know in your gut that everything in life will change, but you don’t know how. Everything indeed. And, it seems, most everything has already changed — changed monstrously for America, for my friends, for you, and for me.

This may perhaps have been too lengthy of a way to explain what I called in the post's first sentence my rather severe disorientation. It's not that for which I apologize; it's the much lesser job — strike that, the remarkably poor job — of writing I have done since Tuesday, the explosive, apocalyptic onset of what most likely is America's death. 

If I am to write about it, to cover it and comment on it, I swear to you, I make this promise: My writing shall be far, far better from tomorrow on.