The Year of Living Despondently

For one thing, Trump has caused me to feel that I'm living my life as a spectator. I feel disenfranchised, powerless and alienated. How do you say to yourself--so what if he destroys the world?--and not care? Metaphysically, so much is already destroyed. 

Metaphysically, we are already destroyed. All that awaits us is the catching up. What form will that, the physical destruction, take? It's a question that can keep you up at night. Spiritually we are already living in a wasteland, among ashes and ruins and decay. 

Formerly heartfelt concerns fall away. There's a swirling, vertiginous sense and a telescoping awareness--of being both closer to beginnings and ends. I feel both closer to childhood and death. I feel closer to the beginnings of civilization and its end, and all because of some feckless fop and bone-spurred draft-dodger. 

No, but it's more than that and I know it. This is a reckoning that has been coming for decades and not an undeserved one. It's tempting to make Trump a romantic figure from hell, a King Arthur of the Knights of the Apocalypse. I know this isn't true but it's hard not to feel it. Bathos sets in. The swirling sets in. Despair sets in.

We have been tempting fate and failing in our ideals for years and the time has come for our reckoning. Did it have to be Trump? He's such an insult to life and everything and it suggests that our gods were always made from the same mud and clay as ourselves, that everything was always dirt and shit and devoid of meaning.