The last couple days have been rough. Rough enough that I’ve not only failed to fix my post buffer but let it entirely disappear. Sure, I’ve got drafts aplenty, but most of them are ideas from a week ago or from earlier this week, back when the world looked different. More anxiety-inducing, sure, but better. I’ve never handled uncertainty well because there’s really not much you can do about that, you know? Once you know, once the many possibilities have collapsed into a single reality, at least then you know what you’re dealing with. Today, though, as I’m wearily writing this post after a couple long nights of not sleeping very much, I miss the way I felt on Monday, as I went to bed before the day of the election. Sometimes uncertainty is better than reality. Not yet knowing is better than knowing. I’d rather go back to before I knew that the majority of US voters wanted fascism. Or at least were stupid enough to fall for the fascist con-man’s spiel. Because that’s the thing, you know? It is literally only one or the other at this point. There’s literally no excuse for choosing to vote for Trump other than wanting authoritarianism, fascism, bigotry, and hate to win, OR being too stupid to tell that the giant orange doofus is lying to you when he says that he’s not going to do all the things the people who are going to be in his administration say he’s going to do. Sure, he SAID he’s not going to ban abortion care, but he literally spent part of his presidency setting it up and is a part of the whole goddamn political party who has been relentlessly trying to do that ever since Roe v Wade. What the fuck did you think was going to happen?

Lest you think I’m summoning up a strawman to yell at, all you’ve got to do is look around the internet for thirty seconds to find some interview of some asinine child on a college campus talking about voting for Trump because he said he wouldn’t ban abortions. He’s literally the head of the forced-birth party! How the hell do you think that he won’t ban abortions when he’s literally ON THE RECORD saying he will because he’ll say whatever idea pops into his head if it’ll get him the attention he craves! There is literally no world in which the republicans gain total control of the government, which is where this election is headed as we wait for the final results for the US House on Thursday the 7th as I’m writing it, since The Republicans already got the presidency and the senate and the Supreme Court (also, while I’m thinking of it, an extra “Fuck You” to Mitch McConnell, without whom none of this would have happened). And once full reproductive care is banned, what’s next? Birth control? Porn? Women’s right to vote? Marriage protection for non-heterosexual couples? Marriage protection for interracial couples? They’re all on the chopping block and, this time, all the people who would pump the brakes on this bullshit are gone. They literally have a plan for this process! They told us what they wanted to do and people refused to believe they’d ACTUALLY do it! It’s called goddamn Project 2025! What the hell did anyone think it was other than an operating manual?? All I can hope is the staggering incompetency of everyone involved will be enough to prevent them from getting anything done. That’s literally the only thing standing in their way at this point, now that they’ve got a Supreme Court that seems determined to make Trump a king and a legislature bound and determined to do as much harm to as many people who aren’t rich and white as they can before they all croak from old age.

None of that brings me any comfort, though, because that’s not what I’m really upset about. Don’t get me wrong, all of that is terrible and it is going to take a lot of work from a lot of people to combat the harm coming for all marginalized people once this new administration takes power. I’ve been preparing for that for the last nine months, when literally every single check and balance that is supposed to reign in the government from doing this kind of shit decided to just shrug its shoulders and tell the US that its on us to vote away this absolutely criminal enterprise masquerading as a political campaign. What really gets my goat is that the country I live in chose this. More than fifty percent of those who chose to vote in this latest election CHOSE to vote for fascism or were stupid enough that they were tricked into it by what amounts to a man with bloody hands who is credibly accused of murder, up to and including literal video evidence, saying that no he didn’t do it. I get that I’m more online than most people. I understand that I’m position to more easily follow this stuff as it happens. I understand that most of the major media sources in this country are complicit in that they did their level best to make Trump look like a sane, even-keeled person rather than a rambling, mindless asshole. I understand that there’s definitely some extenuating circumstances about why people might be unaware of what is going on. But we literally had Trump as president four years ago and that is too soon to have forgotten how bad things were. THERE WERE REFRIGERATOR TRUCKS FULL OF DEAD PEOPLE BECAUSE HE FAILED TO DO SHIT ABOUT THE PANDEMIC! What the actual FUCK do any of you who voted for him but claim that he won’t be as bad as HE SAYS HE WILL BE mean???

In a fit of levity, attempting to interject some mirth into my day, a friend told me about someone they know who is planning to change up their acne routine. As someone who has taken a year out of their life to hopefully clear up their systemic acne, I can relate to wanting to find a solution that will work in the longer term, especially when there’s a lot of negative side-effects of using topical creams and shorter-term interventions for too long. That said, I went to my doctor to talk about my options and this person has decided to give beef tallow a shot. I was incredulous as my friend relayed this story and absolutely unwilling to react with any of the conscientiousness I normally display. After all, who the fuck, in their right mind, would think that spreading animal fat on their skin would clear up their acne? I mean, sure, a lot of soap is made from animal fat, but no amount of fat-based cleanser is going to be more effective than the stuff your doctor has prescribed to treat your skin! I even did a little internet research, to make sure I wasn’t entirely off base, and while there’s definitely plenty of products out there claiming to help with acne, the actual science seems to indicate it with have no, to negative, impact on your acne and general skin health. The core of my incredulity is that this tale came from a friend who is working on a doctorate and involved a coworker. Not, to my knowledge, another doctoral candidate, but someone who works in science. Someone whose job requires a decent amount of technical knowledge and understanding of the world. Someone who should ABSOLUTELY know enough to trust the ACTUAL SCIENCE. Which, coming on the tail-end of my thirty-second internet search that turned up college students voting for trump because he said he wouldn’t do something he has already been trying to do and is on record as saying he absolutely will do, felt just really indicative of how much the US’s penchant for anti-intellectualism has put us in the spot we’re at now. Better to follow a “charismatic” (I genuinely don’t see it, but some of these fuckwits must) leader than try to understand an increasingly complex world that said leader has told you is out to get you.

I don’t have any positivity today. No warm or hopeful notes to go out on. This is what the US is, now. This is what the majority of us who give a shit about the country’s present and future decided we want and now everyone’s stuck with it until this political era is over. And I say “era” because there’s no telling how bad this is going to go. How long this governmental disaster will last. How long recovery will take. After all, fascist turns around the world have shown that it usually takes decades to unseat them and even longer to recover from them. There will be plenty of work to do in the meantime but, for now, I’m just angry, upset, and exhausted. After all, it’s not every day that you wake up to the information that a huge portion of your country’s popular actually wants fascism, hatred, and bigotry.