five p.m. election night

Monique is coming over at 8 "avec du champagne," she says, so she's pretty sure we'll have someone to toast. Richard, the expert in all things political - who just did a CTV commentary on Prince Harry's very stern plea to the media to leave his new girlfriend alone - says we won't know what way the wind is blowing until after 9. Jon Stewart gladdened our hearts by appearing on the Colbert show last night, goof that he is. Thank the good lord for all the brilliant comedians, for Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon on SNL, for the wonderful Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Trevor Noah and all the others, on the air and on the net, trying to get some of us to pay attention, and to help the rest of us get through.

I have faith. I declare this at 5 p.m. on election night; it's already pitch black outside, but still mild and very beautiful. I have faith.

In the meantime, more disintegration, not of the house, for once, but of me - my right eye is bright neon blinding red, absolutely hideous. I turned of course to Dr. Google, who told me it's a broken blood vessel, nothing to be done. A student at Ryerson last night said about my eye, It's Trump, isn't it? Yes, yes it is, it is Trump's fault, as is almost everything bad on earth right now. It's as if he has unleashed the forces of hell, the hidden cesspit of racism, sexism and general vileness dormant in us all. And all this is manifest in my eye.

Ah well, Monique is coming over at 8 with a bottle of champagne. Let's pray we have reason to drink it.

In the meantime, here are some beautiful fall colours for you to enjoy, to take your mind off what's going on in the world right now, to stop you from chewing your nails:

 The corner of Spruce and Sackville, just up the street,

 and just around the corner.

 The last of my tomatoes.

You know where, not looking too bad considering that everything is beginning to fade.

And here, to show the forces of tolerance at work, are pictures I took in the Ryerson women's bathroom last night:

Isn't it amazing how malleable language is? Would we have understood some of these terms five or even two years ago? Humanity marches onward, even if there are some determined to drag us back to the Dark Ages. But we won't let them.

Bring on the champagne. Hooray for President Hillary Clinton!

However. If ever there was a time for this poem, it's now, when a monster with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is loose and powerful in the world:

THE SECOND COMING, William Butler Yeats

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?