Not long after I moved to California (in truth it was about a week…)
…I came out of my new apt to find that my brand new car had been broken into during the night and the tape deck (it was the 80’s) and everything else in the car (including my new sunglasses) had been stolen. The door was badly damaged as they had used some kind of pry-bar to break in. Half of the dashboard had been ripped to pieces and the car wouldn’t start because the wiring had been so badly damaged when they ripped out the stereo. A whole new ignition had to be installed. The door had to be replaced and the new paint never matched the rest of the car after the repair.
I was shocked and sickened. I felt violated and scared. I was full of rage that someone who I didn’t know, whom I had never met and to whom I had never done anything, would do this to me.
I grew paranoid and mistrustful and I was filled with a vague unease for years after that experience. It shook me and it changed the way that I looked at the world in a very fundamental way.
I feel that way now.
I feel like some evil motherfucker has broken into my country and stolen something from me. I feel angry, helpless, mistrustful and paranoid.
And once again I feel changed in a way that I have never felt before. I have been violated. I fear that everything in my world has changed in a way that can never be put right.
I spent the night pacing and nauseous. I had to take a Valium and an Ambien just to knock myself out last night to get any sleep at all. I woke up today praying that I had just woken from some horrible nightmare and that none of it had really happened. The truth is that the nightmare is only just beginning.
I take some solace in the fact that I live in a state that voted overwhelmingly for the qualified candidate. We are a spot of blue in an ocean of red. I feel like a survivor from the Titanic and now our little lifeboat is cast upon a sea of hatred and ignorance.
It seems that I finally have one thing in common with Donald J. Trump. I think that we need to build a wall…