Dear God, the nightmare – at least one of the nightmares – will be over in a week: the US election, even if it’ll drag on while the orange blowhole makes trouble with his criminal friends. I’m terrified in the next few days the Reprehensibles will pull something out of the hat – or out of Putin’s hat: a war, perhaps. A huge terrorist event to scare people that will turn out, later, to have been engineered by them. Like Hillary’s emails last time, a false alarm sounding the knell of doom for our planet.

Those people are so evil, it’s hard to believe they are flourishing in our world. And yet they are. I think of my friend, my former friend, who wrote to me that his bottom line looks good these days so he’s voting for Trump. And I thought, of all the hideous things this man has done, pick ONE. For me, children in cages. Ripping children from their parents’ arms, putting them in cages, and then losing track of who goes where. That’s enough to send this man and his team to the burning pits of hell forever, let alone everything else, the hundreds of other appalling, unforgivable, inhuman things.

Since I did not, unlike my parents, live through a world war and did not myself experience the massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia or other places, this election is the clearest battle of good versus evil that has touched my own reality in my lifetime. Staring at evil evil evil evil and more evil. Mitch McConnell’s repulsive face. And that new woman, I won’t even be able to look at her. How did these people without the tiniest speck of conscience or decency or honour come to hold so many millions in thrall? 

It’s dark and chilly and raining, perhaps that’s why I’m feeling apocalyptic. It’s so dark in the mornings when I wake, I’m not sure if it’s morning or the middle of the night. I was up at 7 Sunday, 9.30 yesterday. Today, taught a class at noon and now need to get myself back to work. But I find myself dragged back into frantic updates on FB and Twitter and the NYT – what’s happening now? How will our planet be destroyed today? 

Go Joe go. I beg you – save us. 

Even if he’s elected with a landslide, even if the country gets through all the obstructions the Reps will throw at them – how will he ever dig out from the heaping piles of steaming shit Trump has created and is creating right now? 

Take a breath. Friends are helping. JM appeared at my door with Sunday’s NYT – he brings me his, neatly folded, when he’s finished. John appeared with chocolate cake and crabapple jelly from Sylvie. Gretchen brought me the most delicious dark chocolate biscotti that vanished in seconds. But now those gifts, too, are problematic: the Y is closed, all I do all day is sit with the new book, and people are bringing me chocolate treats! 

Ah well. Life is short and there’s horrible stuff out there. Another slice, please.