It's been two months since he took office. Dear god, it's been two whole months. I feel as if I've aged at least five years, if not more. Watching chaos unfold in my home country every time I look at my social media feeds has been more emotionally draining than… well, literally anything I’ve ever experienced. If my Twitter feed is any indication, many others have fallen victim to the same bone-deep malaise, have stared in the mirror at the bags under their eyes and wondered how are we going to make it through the next four years?

I'm so tired. I'm so tired.

How are we going to make it?

~~~

There are two books in my bedroom that I’m scared to read. One is Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. I read it as a sophomore in high school, for my AP US History class. It’s about the people of Australia in an alternate 1963. The world has already ended, gone up in nuclear flames, but the inexorable march of radiation hasn’t reached Australia’s shores yet. I claimed not to like it back then, but really I just think it scared me. For as long as I can remember, really, I’ve always had this bizarre, underlying fear of the future. The day we invaded Iraq, back in 2003, I sat curled up in a ball on the couch beside my mother and thought oh god, this is it, we’re at war. I was nine and I was filled with foreboding. A few years later when I was in middle school, my father and sister and I were talking about palm reading. My father glanced at my palm as a joke and said, “Oh, your lifeline is kind of short.” I yanked my hand away, or closed my fist, or something like that. Even at that age I at least made pretensions to being a logically-minded person, but in that moment, some primal fear seized me. I didn’t want to know anything else.

The other book is Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. I bought it at a feminist bookstore in Chicago while on vacation, started reading it on my plane back to Toronto, and haven’t picked it up since then. In part, this is because life has been hellishly busy, but that’s not the whole story. What haunts me about the fifty or so pages I read is that people saw the story’s horrors coming. The main character, Doremus Jessup, says before Berzelius Windrip is even elected that the country is headed for trouble. People see trouble on the horizon, they point it out, and it happens anyway.

Maybe they can’t do a thing about it, or maybe they just don’t. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter.

~~~

I watch and rewatch Star Wars.This should be cathartic, I think. The Empire loses in the end, right?

The good guys don’t always win. That’s the most important thing I learned last year. Hillary Clinton’s victory would have been the textbook happily-ever-after in a lot of ways; no screenwriter in their right mind would have ended their script by handing a victory to such cartoonish evil. But even when the good guys win, it’s at a cost. Yes, the Empire loses, but not before they destroy Alderaan and all its inhabitants. Not before oodles of X-wings get shot down, not before scores of rebels and Ewoks die.

There is no such thing as a Hollywood ending. There can’t be, not when the Hollywood middle involves such suffering.

~~~

I listen to punk music on a Thursday evening. I put a playlist on shuffle, and the first tune to come up is the Sex Pistols, of course. God save the Queen, Johnny Rotten howls, the fascist regime. Of course, I think, shaking my head. I don't listen to any more of the lyrics. I can't. Next up is “In a Rut” by The Ruts. Where did I hear this before? I must have heard it, I'm the one who added it to this playlist, but I don't remember it at all.

I can't concentrate, I'm in a state
I don't feel straight, I can't love or hate
I can't feel nothing, can't feel no sting
Only just learning, I ain't a king

No, I ain't. And of course, about fifteen minutes later, “London Calling” starts playing, filling my apartment with visions of disaster, the kind of flood where Noah and his ark don’t save a blessed thing. This isn't making me feel any better.

In the past, it's been comforting to listen to punk, but all I can muster this time is resentment. The hell were they mad about? I catch myself thinking at one point. They had no idea what horrors the world was in for -- but of course, I wasn't alive for the heyday of the Sex Pistols or The Clash, so that's a childishly myopic reaction.

Maybe the world was always on fire, as per that Billy Joel song. Maybe everything has been awful since time immemorial, or at least people have continually felt that way. James Wierzbicki, at the University of Sydney, has written a whole book about the music of the Doomsday-Clock-driven 1950s -- “music in the age of anxiety,” he calls it, but for the Sex Pistols and The Clash and so many others, the 1970s must have seemed like an age of anxiety as well. They saw a world staggering towards collapse, they were scared, and they made music.

They made music.

~~~

I crack open a Kurt Vonnegut book. My favorite, A Man Without a Country. I read this the week before the inauguration. Before that, the last time I’d read it was 2011. I remembered laughing my head off at it all those years ago, I had recommended it to several friends (in fact, my copy had spent the last several years in my mother’s bedroom because I’d begged her to read it), but somehow, over two months ago, it found new ways to slap me in the face. To surprise me.

(The arts are not a way of making a living, Vonnegut says on page 24. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.)

He published this book in 2004 and died in 2007. He rakes the Bush Administration over the coals and warns again and again about the dangers of fossil fuels. He paraphrases Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: “...in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.” In the world according to Kurt Vonnegut, almost everything sucks, and not acknowledging that simple fact is silly, if not cowardly.

(Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.)

I wonder if he could have predicted Donald Trump. Or, for that matter, everything that came before him -- Citizens United, Republican obstructionism, Peter Thiel versus Gawker, but-her-emails, election night. I know I’ve liked to think that this world is so absurd that nobody could have predicted the sheer scope of its absurdity. We’re literally living in the South Park timeline, I told a friend recently.

But then again, America’s favorite cantankerous uncle really did have his finger on the pulse of the nation -- before, I think, many others did. “There is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable,” he said (turn to page 71 in your books, kids). “Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power.” He said this in 2004. The nation en masse (by which, to be clear, I mean otherwise privileged white people who previously had no reason to believe everything was already going to hell) is only now catching up.

If anybody could have predicted all this, it would have been him. Of course it would have been him.

(You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.)

~~~

It’s 3:27 PM on March 24, and I’m refreshing Twitter. The AHCA is up for a vote in the House any minute now. I called my rep yesterday, a staunch conservative who is one of those rare Republican doubters for a change, to encourage him to vote no. I’m terrified for everybody who stands to lose health insurance under this bill, yes, but I’m also terrified on a more existential level. Will this be a Sinclair Lewis moment, I wonder? Will I watch disaster strike from afar yet again?

Then the tweets start rolling in. The bill isn’t going up for a vote. The ACA lives to fight another day, and 24 million Americans are safe for now.

I’ve got a deadline in a few hours for this piece, and I’ve only barely started writing. But for the first time in a while, I’m hopeful.