Wednesday, December 28, 2016

I'm Back and WTF 2016!



Yes, I've been gone, doing that thing called Life Undocumented.

Life got intense. Intensely good. Intensely bad. Intensely weird. Intensely intense.

And suddenly the rest of the world...or at least AMERICA...caught up to me.

Okay, so we are all now in that WTF moment.

As the Chinese or Yiddish curse has it, we are living in interesting times.

First, all the deaths. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Patty Duke. Prince. Elie Wiesel. Leonard Cohen. George Michael?? And Carrie Fisher!!! (and all the wonderful others I simply cannot remember at this late hour.)

And then the impossible.

The unthinkable.

President Trump.

Think back to last year at this time. Who would have imagined that that big-mouthed bully would win the White House?

Or, as HOBB* commented just tonight, "How did Hillary NOT win??"

It is like a recurring nightmare. Reality, that is.

As for me, I keep reliving the hideous moment I awoke from my depressed slumber on the living room couch to see the CNN banner announcing Trump's win. 

And since that time I've vacillated between disbelief, anger, fear, despair, sadness and...hope.

Condensing countless hours of contemplation, therapy, soul-searching, meditation and conversation with people wiser than myself, I've arrived at the following:

I can resist. I can fight the good fight. I am a born warrior.

Trump's victory pushed me hard into existential mode, forcing me to leave a respectable, well-paying office job in favor of the insecure life of the freelance journalist.

There was a particularly intriguing multi-platform project kicking around in my brain for the past year that I had researched, developed, polished, vetted and then shelved.

But November 8th made me sit up straight, grab it off the shelf and get to work. 

Now I'm about to launch a crowd-funding campaign to help put me on the road, going city to city speaking to Americans in the Public Square of the 21st century: the humble, local, democratic karaoke bar.

It is called I Hear America Singing. After the great Walt Whitman Poem. 

The next post will have further deets. 

For now, it is great to be back.

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*Husband of Bungalow Babe