Here comes the sun

I try to imagine what it must be like for people who don't have the privileged life I do, as a self-employed person with flexible hours. When they're sick, like this, what happens? They must do their best to get to work, aching bones and all, or else they lose pay. And then they get sicker. I'm in bed for the third day in a row, still not well though marginally better each day, but this bug is a tank, a giant tanker that smashed into my body and head, taking away energy, appetite, sleep. How lucky that I do not have to get up and do anything. I can work from bed. My mortgage is paid.

But I want it to be over; the house, my life, everything is falling apart. This is enough. I'm speaking sternly to my body, but the Thing is taking its bloody time to depart. I'm even not interested in food or wine, that's how bad it is. That's how you know Kaplan is REALLY sick, if she doesn't care one bit about meals or drink, except lemon-honey tea for the cough.

And in the meantime, the news is so dire, so mind-blowingly horrendous, that I wonder if perhaps we should all just stay in bed for the next four years, or at least until he and his people go away forever. How will this end - in nuclear war? In global economic meltdown? In the kind of authoritarian dystopia painted by George Orwell and Margaret Atwood? Terrifying. Definitely not helping this small person get over the flu.

BUT - there's Elizabeth Warren, battling like Joan of Arc. There's Bernie, there are great American thinkers and journalists rising to the occasion - Robert Reich, Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, bravo, gentlemen. I just watched two of my favourite men on earth, John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, together, on the case. Oliver's show returns Sunday night, be still my beating heart. These superb human beings are the voice of sanity in a time of sheer criminal lunacy. When you think of what needs to be done in the world, and the time, energy and money wasted hurtling backwards into hell because of that hideous human being, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

I am actually sitting up as I type this, in my ratty bathrobe, swaddled in blankets and shawls, but in my office where the sun is struggling to shine through the clouds. And where there's even a trace of sun, there's hope. There's life.

Onward.