Last night I lay in bed, my head bursting with words. I wrote essays, letters, an entire book! I couldn’t sleep for all the words.

And all the peeing. Yes, my overactive and underperforming bladder got into the act too. I don’t think it’s her fault–my bladder I mean. She must be squished from all the baby-growing and child-birth I put her through.

Point is–it’s hard to sleep with words in your head and a bladder that will not quit.

Does anyone else out write in her head? If only I had all the essays and books and letters I’ve written at night while trying to sleep. The words in my head are always so clear, so brave, so brilliantly bound–each one a stepping stone across a wide roiling river.

And then I wake up and they have dissipated into the ether of a morning come too soon.

Point is–this blog post was much better when I wrote it in my head last night.

***

Two days ago, I visited my local liberal florist and ordered a bouquet of flowers for my oldest friend who’s always been a speak-the-truth-until-your-voice-shakes sort of gal. She’d recently (again!) spoken out when swigging her beer would have been simpler. I won’t go into the details except to say that she referred to our president as a pussy-grabbing asshole who made her fucking sick. This wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been on my back porch with that beer, but she wasn’t. She was at her mother-in-law’s house, and her mother-in-law voted for and supports the president.

I don’t write here as often as I once did because I’m a wee bit angry, and I do not live in a community where trump support is an anomaly. It’s the norm. This is a problem if you are a wee-bit angry, usually out-spoken, leftist 50-year-old trying like hell to be authentic and honest.

I believe in love. I really do. But it’s a lot harder if I say something that incites someone I love or like or hell, even know, to espouse support for the orange monster in the white house. I want to continue to love, like, and know people.

It’s why I’ve been so quiet. I’m stunned.

Kind of like that bird who thuds against the front porch window thinking she would check out that shiny bottle of water on the coffee table–stunned.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  Most of the time, I’m able to pull this off with a little work–okay a lot of work.

Here’s where I’m having trouble. How can a person both be good and have voted for and still support donald trump? It’s the still supports part that hangs me up. I can accept that good people voted for the guy, but I don’t get it, don’t understand how any good person can still support him, can still defend him.

And I know A LOT of good people who do.

I LOVE a lot of good people who do.

Maybe the problem is me. Maybe donald trump is only a window into a world that existed all along–a world that because of my whiteness, my middle-classedness, my small-townedness I’d only visited off and on as a woman.

I imagine there are lots of folks who have been thinking these past 7 months, “welcome to my world, lady.”

***

When I began this blog, the 49th year, I was pretty certain that Hillary Clinton would be the next President of the United States, but I intended to live in the questions. I just had no idea how big and elusive would be the answers.

All this to say–I’m done. Done with the quiet act. Done worrying. Done pretending. Done half-heartedly laughing about our differences. I won’t avoid a tough conversation, but I will no longer deny that the cavern between us is deep.

Like my old friend, who loved the flowers by the way, it makes me fucking sick that our president said he could grab pussies at will because he was a superstar.

It’s that simple.