As For Me, I’ve Welcomed the Dark

 

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

 

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

Without Comment

 

There IS No Bottom

 Every day, you think, “He cannot go any lower…”

…and then he does.

WHO Is The Pig?

In 2017, I published a post on “Better Terms,” trying to wrap my head around the fact that Americans had voted for a man who would stand at a podium during a campaign for president and mock a disabled reporter. American voters had chosen a man who had so little respect for other human beings, that he could proudly display middle-school-level debasement of a disabled person, gambling that it would appeal to his base. And it did. And they chose to elevate him to the position of Leader of the Free World. 

Fast forward to 2025. Because American voters COULD NOT bring themselves to vote for a woman for president, regardless that the other choice was a twice-impeached convicted felon racist/rapist, we have once again handed the keys of the kingdom to a man with no respect for anyone or anything, who continues to showcase his sixth-grade-level mental capabilities. Being the card-carrying misogynist he is—the man cannot abide any human with double x chromosomes who does not fuck him, want to fuck him, or act as if they want to fuck him—women are his favorite targets for his juvenile name-calling and schoolyard bullying. His go-to insults have up til now been words like “stupid“ and “terrible”. If he wants to be particularly articulate, he uses “low IQ” and “awful,” and most female reporters he chooses to bully work for “fake news” (How I wish to god that no one had ever popped the lid off THAT Pandora’s box…!) Last week, in a clear demonstration of his cognitive collapse, he admonished a female journalist on Air Force One to “ Quiet, Piggy.”  Piggy. Really? Now he sounds like a five-year-old. 

I have repeatedly found myself wondering, how in the HELL has he managed to get away with this for almost 2 decades? Why does nobody call him on this? But it just occurred to me: Trump rose to power on the ladder of social media. And what dominates the culture of social media? Insults, bullying, snarky comments, even threats of violence.  Too, think of the culture of right-wing media.  Very much the same, but throw in stacks of bold-faced lies and...dare I say it...fake news.  Of course Trump struck a chord with his sixth-grade bullying and name-calling (not to mention the lies that pour out of his face every time he opens his mouth) in the run up to his first administration. There are legions of folks out there who have been steeped in that crap for half, if not all, of their lives. No mystery, I suppose, that they would see Trump as a perfect example of themselves helming the nation.  

Granted, during his first administration, there were still one or two Republicans who realized what a disaster an unfettered Trump would be to the nation and the world.  There was a string of advisors,  chiefs of staff, cabinet members and ambassadors who made vain attempts to be "the adults in the room."  Trump shook off every one of them with impunity, while his "base" raised their fists and cheered.  They wanted Trump unfiltered.  If it hadn't been for COVID, I'm pretty sure we would have seen that in his first administration. 

Now, in Trump 2.0, the GOP has completely capitulated to the Trumpian persona.  Heck, it got him re-nominated and re-elected.  It MUST be the key to gaining and retaining power in 21st-century America, so anyone within spitting distance of Mango Mussolini has piled into the clown car right behind him.  Not only do they not call him on his boorish, moronic behavior, they do their damnedest to emulate it, because they believe it will get them what they desperately crave: power, riches, and the license to do whatever the hell they want with zero consequences.  

So, yeah…I can see why the  battalion of sycophants that comprise Trump’s inner circle would turn a deaf ear to his vocally adolescent diatribes and disrespect for…everything. But what the hell is wrong with the rest of us, particularly the White House press corps?  What could possibly be the reasoning behind letting the overgrown toddler-cum-leader of the free world verbally abuse and disrespect their colleagues? Why in the world would the female journalists themselves put up with it? Please do NOT tell me it’s “out of respect for the office.” Respect is earned, not commanded by those with power. Trump has repeatedly shown that HE has as much respect for the office of POTUS as he does for anything or anyone else that isn’t HIM—which is zero. He deserves every bit as much in return.

I don’t know what misguided adherence to norms and traditions associated with the office of POTUS is keeping members of the press from calling Trump on the carpet and standing up for their profession and their personal dignity. They aren’t doing Trump, the American people or journalistic integrity any favors by letting him act as no adult human being, much less the President of the United States, should act toward other people in a civilized society.  

Those of us who oppose the disaster that is Trump with every fiber of our beings are told to resist, to march, to be allies to our fellow citizens who are being endangered by Trump’s fascist policies.  But 99% of us will never get anywhere near the man himself. These journalists—the ones he bullies and flagrantly verbally abuses on a daily basis—THEY have the opportunity to hold their hands up to his face and say, “No. No more. You may not treat us like this. NO ONE may, but least of all the President of the United States.” 

The members of the press can be—should be—our first line of resistance against the monster that is Trump.  They need to realize this and stand up for themselves…and for US. I swear to god, if some moron told ME to “Quiet, piggy” while I was doing my very important  job, the absolute least they would get out of me is a very loud and pointed, “Excuse me? What did you just call me?”  

I've heard many on social media criticize the men of the press corp for not standing up to Trump's continued harassment of the women.  But we actually need the women themselves to...grow a set...?  Let’s hear it, ladies of the White House press corps.  We need YOU to draw the line in the sand.

 

Please?

 

Not that we had anything even approaching a functional government before the shutdown…

What A Mess!

 

For more than a decade, I’ve been spitting out posts now and again about how lonely it is here in the blogoverse, and how maybe I should just wrap things up here on “Coming to Terms…”  But every one of those posts has ended up with the same answer:

No.

I’m not ready to say goodbye to my lonely little corner of the social media universe.

This year, with my measly 8 posts since January, it seems like I could be letting “Coming to Terms…” die a natural death.  My writing muse has all but dried up, and my connection to social media—even at Instagram, where I can be found if I’m not here—has been tenuous at best.   

I’m going to blame the ghastly dumpster fire that has engulfed the nation since the Wankmaggot stepped foot into the Oval office to begin his second reign of terror.  Only this time, things have been exponentially worse than they ever were the first time.  Which is saying a lot.

Since day 1 of Trump 2.0, there’s been a nonstop barrage of horror emanating from Washington—from masked goons in unmarked vans abducting people off the streets and sending them to prison camps, to Trump’s unfathomable, deeply destructive tariff program,  to ordering the military to attack “crime” in blue states cities (a thinly veiled effort to punish criticism of the Trump regime), to the worst, most fascist, oligarchic, totalitarian actions one could ever possibly imagine taking place in the United states of America (or not.)

While Congress cheers, applauds, aids and abets…or wrings its hands (when it’s not sitting on them) and offers up righteously indignant speechifying, depending on what side of the aisle is in focus at any given time.

Congress has become a millstone around the neck of our drowning democracy, carrying it deeper and deeper and faster and faster to the depths of fascist dictatorship.

One can hardly stand to watch, much less screw up the moxie to DO anything…  The “Resistance” has no leadership.  It’s merely a fractured collection of groups of people, large and small, milling around trying to think of SOMETHING to do to stop the fall.  Our elected officials who theoretically oppose the right wing agenda are MIA. There’s no organized rebellion.  No one gathering We The People and directing us in a concerted, effective effort to meaningfully “resist.”  Everybody parks their asses on social media and cranks out posts about getting out there and…doing WHAT, exactly?  Please…give me a clue and a sizable group of like-minded folks and I’ll be happy to show up and do the work. 

Right now, we are all just…spinning our wheels.

And a corollary to why I can’t write with all this madness going on, is that EVERYBODY and their pup seems to be doing exactly that—constructing long, angst-laden epistles about the shocking state of the nation, and what we all might be/should be doing about it.  It's a de facto demonstration that all these millions and millions of words are having absolutely NO EFFECT.  Words, words, words and more words, and things only continue to get worse.  I feel like anything I could put together would be tantamount to screaming into a hurricane. ..nothing but a fruitless, and possibly risky, waste of breath.  At my age, you really don’t want to be wasting breath. (Actually, I wouldn’t mind taking the risk if there was any hope of my words making an atomic particle’s worth of difference.)

And if I make up my mind to write about something else, I feel like I’m endorsing ignoring what’s going on in our rapidly deteriorating world.  The guilt casts a pall on anything light or “day in the life” that I try to put out there.  I hate the thought of becoming bound to either the doom-scroll contingent, or the "ignore it and it will go away" crowd.  If there is a middle ground I could feel comfortable in, I haven't figured it out yet.  So it’s been easier to just…not. 

But I don’t feel good about THAT, either.

The overriding question for the continuation of “Coming to Terms…” is,

“Where do we go from here?”

I want to write...but I feel like I don't know how any more.  

At 22 years old, it's high time for "Coming to Terms..." to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.

But what is that, exactly?

 

Maybe some rainbows will nudge me in the right direction.  

 

 

Another Empty Place, Another Goodbye

Eight years ago...I guess...it's hard to remember, sometimes, exactly when our "walk-ons" walked into our lives...a tiny, frightened, starving black mite showed up in our back yard in Scappoose.  She mostly hid/lived under the deck we had put in front of our greenhouse.  We somehow managed to coax her out from her dark, damp safe space with bowls of food and water.  But there was no petting her...no touching her.  Just...trying against stacked odds to nourish and house her.

We fed her, we sheltered her, to the best of our abilities (she was petrified of going inside any place and having the doors shut behind her, so we couldn't even keep her safe in the greenhouse at night.) She would huddle in our eight-foot-diameter open gazebo, through heat and cold and rain and snow.  We wrapped it in plastic as best we could, trying to give her some shelter from the wind and cold.  And we put soft beds and food dishes in that inadequate living space. 

 

And she stayed. But never warmed to us past the relationship of a very frightened feral cat dependent upon the food and best shelter we could give her.  

 

Then in 2019, we made the move.  Back to Eugene.  Away from the yard she called her own.  

I wrote a letter to the people who bought the house, begging them to care for the little black cat who was attached to the property.

 

They declined.

 

And so, days before we packed up and left the house for good, I managed to grab her and drop her into a cat carrier.

 

She was coming to Eugene with us, by god.

 

And she was going to be an indoor cat.

 

No more of this bare subsistence crap that had served as a life for her up til then.

 

And she who had had no name beyond "little black kitty" would be henceforth known as "Princess."   

  

Princess' last "Fort Princess." A cozy chair in the corner of the family room.

Her metamorphosis to "indoor cat" was a challenge, and it was slow, and it was not without its bumps and boogers.  But she did it.  

 

She never became a lap cat.  Never tolerated being picked up and held.  Her sharp claws would stick to any surface upon which she stood, and picking her up invariably brought along a pillow or a quilt or some part of her perch.

 

But she did eventually learn to enjoy pets.  In fact, she demanded them.  From the back of the chair when I came out to the family room to feed the livestock in the morning.  From behind my head as I sat and watched tv.

She had a tendency to choose a place and make it her "favorite" for a few weeks or months.  We got to calling each of these places her "Fort Princess-es"--the nooks and crannies she chose as her safe places as time went on.  

 

Eventually, all of her safe places ended up being in the family room.  She hardly ever left that room.  She became the quiet, soft, warm black presence.  Always there.  Always content to be there and nowhere else.

 

For the past five years, she has been our Family Room Princess.

 

 

Unfortunately, we have at times chosen to introduce other cats into her space...some of whom she didn't particularly like.  One miscreant--Apollo, the light orange cat from across the street--she really didn't like.  As Apollo spent more time in the house, Princess got smaller and smaller.  The stress made her start pulling her hair out. By the time I figured out what was going on, and what was stressing her, she was almost bald from the neck down.

 

I quickly decided to keep Apollo out of the house...and in a couple of weeks, Princess' fur grew back.

 

But we also realized there was something more sinister going on with her.

 

She lost a ton of weight.  She had trouble eating, couldn't swallow dry food, then choked on wet food, and just kept getting worse.  

 

We took her to the vet.  Spent $500 on the requisite diagnostic blood tests.  And they found nothing.  

 

The vet said she had been over-grooming because she had fleas.

 

The day after our useless vet visit, I picked up the Princess and discovered a tumor on one of her nipples.  Mammary cancer.  And she was dying of it.  In fact, was very close to death.

 

And so, we called the mobile vet to help her to her final rest.  Quietly.  Peacefully.  In her favorite chair.

 

The next morning, a hummingbird landed on a wire just outside the sliding door to the patio.  He looked inside, cocking his head.  Looking for...something.  I had never seen one of these little guys do that before.

 

And I just felt in my heart that this little messenger had come to call Princess' spirit.  To show her the way back to the stars. 

     

The Pretty Pretty Princess has left the house.  We will miss her.  So much.

 

Play among the stars, pretty girl!

Should We Be Proud?

 

Right Advice for the Wrong Reason

 

So, immediately after I give out my sage advice to "resist" by buying less stuff, the Trump organization comes up with this theory about Americans being "too materialistic," and that Susie doesn't need thirty dolls, so maybe Americans should just suck it up and GET the idea that they are not going not be able to buy so much stuff due to Trump's bonkers tariffs.  Because, 'Murrica.

The part about Americans being too materialistic, and addicted to buying stuff, is not wrong.  We can and should try to start reining in our buying habits.  

But the problem with Trump's argument is twofold.

First, we are currently a consumer economy.  And it took decades to send our ability to make our own stuff overseas to cheaper labor markets.  All very well to say we should stop buying imported stuff, but factories aren't going to magically re-appear on these shores overnight.  It will take decades to rebuild our manufacturing infrastructure, and people with money willing to invest in it.  And I don't see the likes of the monied class we have now, the ones mostly responsible for selling away our manufacturing capability to begin with, queuing up to rescue the American middle class.  We are here to serve them.  They don't waste dollars or energy thinking about the way we live.

Secondly, Trump isn't suggesting that the rich do anything, or pay their fair share, or that, god forbid, he lead by example and cut out some of the ostentatious demonstrations of wealth that are his stock in trade. No. While he's admonishing ordinary Americans to tighten their belts, he's redecorating the Oval Office with enough gold bling to rival the priciest Las Vegas bordello, and planning multi-million dollar military parades to celebrate his birthday.  

You can't make this stuff up. 

When, oh when, will his willfully stupid, blind sheep wise up to the sheer blatant Trump-serving hypocrisy? 

Government of the people, by Trump and for Trump, leaving "the people" completely out of the rest of the quote.  

Yeah.  We're a nation of consumers.  And unfortunately, this appears to have made a significant portion of the American electorate predisposed to buy into Trump's crap.    

On Student Loan Forgiveness