I mentioned yesterday that I am visiting my Mom in Texas next week. I didn’t mention that I made a list of political demands to the Lone Star State’s and its citizens that, if not met, meant I wasn’t going. Fortunately, it appears all the demands have been met.

Seriously, I did tell my Mom I’d cancel my visit if she didn’t vote for Talarico. She then informed me she mistakenly thought she’d finished her voter registration because Texas is deliberately confusing about such things, so I just convinced her to give Talarico money instead. I walked her through the process of donating via her tablet. She is 82.

I don’t know if Antifa is back, if woke is back, if DEI is back, and what’s to come, but I do know this: Being old, I’ve got quite a few old friends and acquaintances. Several of them have been, in all seriousness, trying to live long enough to outlive the current President. While not literally dead, he’s beyond “lame duck.” He’s now the Norwegian Blue with the “beautiful plumage” (okay, he’s actually just a very old ugly fat man). There will be stirrings of the dead bird, and sightings of it perhaps trying to flap its wings, but he’s politically “ceased to be.” Good fucking riddance.

For ten years, really, ever since that horrible night when we didn’t get our first female President in 2016, many of us have, apparently, simultaneously been thinking we must be nearly alone in not understanding how our country could prefer a President so cruel, selfish, racist, lacking in empathy, proudly uneducated, misogynist…I could go on and on. For ten years we’ve been figurately and literally shaking our heads, willing the nightmare and our political loneliness to end.

Turns out we weren’t alone.

It took about ten goddamn years longer than it should have, but we can now, at least a little, come out of the dark mental bunker we’ve lived in for a decade and look around knowing that there’s really always been an electoral majority of others who have felt the same way. They just needed the dying Norwegian Blue to do enough racism, misogyny, etc. to get them pissed off enough to climb out of that mental hole and vote the fucker into insignificance.

It feels good to have a look around this morning. Finally.