Feeling Empty

I'm sitting in my office typing this thing.  I am surrounded by photographs, the kind that people of my age tend to put up in their offices.  There's a picture of Katherine when I first knew her, coiffed in her Barbra Streisand curls, sitting on her desk, regaling her students all gathered around her.  There is a picture of me when I was a young teacher at Marycrest that looks a lot like Kathie's photo.  I'm sitting on my desk; my hair is almost curlier than Kathie's; a crowd of adoring students stand by.  There's a picture of Chris in Stax of Wax at Elitch's, his first gig.  There's another picture of Chris dancing at The Cherry Creek Art Festival years ago.  It's just Chris and two girls plus some drummers.  It chronicles the beginning of his businesses.  I look at it a lot.  There is a picture of Nate and Kathie hugging after he married Ashley.  There are a bunch of pictures of Franny and her daughters hanging next to an ancient photo of me getting my one year old nose licked by my mother's cocker spaniel.  There are, of course, lots of pictures of Jenny Lake Lodge and the trails leading up into the mountains from there.  And there are numbers of photos of Michelle Obama when she was Franny's boss:  FLOTUS and Franny sitting on Air Force One cracking up over a joke; a picture of Franny, Kathie, and me with FLOTUS at South High School; another photo of all of us, plus F's grandmother, with FLOTUS in the Rockies' locker room at Coors Field.

Franny is taking Willa to Washington in a few days to reune with the Obamas and all the staffers over the past eight years.  It will be their last Christmas party at the White House.  I'm so happy and proud that my daughter played a big role in getting Barack Obama into the White House.  I've spent a lot of time in the last eight years living vicariously through  her engagement with politics and governing.

That brings me to the title of this post.  I've been lost since the election.  My day used to be defined by the hours of reading I spent trying to learn the truth.  I tried to read stuff on both sides of each issue.  I actually waded through the drab headlines and blurbs of The Drudge Report.  I looked at stuff from FoxNews.  Of course, I spent most of my time looking at The Daily Beast and The New York Times, but I still attempted to be fair and balanced.  I looked daily at the election projections  on FiveThirtyEight.  I even look at Morning Joe from time to time.  I argued politics with friends and people who were not my friends.  And when I argued, I was able to bring an impressive arsenal of facts and figures and logic to the table.

But since we are now living in a post-truth world, I don't do that anymore.  Nowadays I can get all my newspaper and website reading done in no time.  Since every column inch is devoted to the latest thing Trump has tweeted and every legitimate news event is only interesting because of what some prominent politico has to say about it, I find there is nothing to read outside of the sports pages.  And since the Broncos seem destined to miss the playoffs, I've even lost interest in that.

So what do I do?  I don't know yet.  We started back to the Y this week.  That uses up a couple of hours.  We come back home and I make myself a bloody mary or two.  That uses up some more time.  I keep rereading the stuff I've been writing and making minor little changes and that takes up another hour or two.  Then we decide if we are going to make a dinner, or eat out.  Lately, we've been eating out.  Then it's back home where the only thing on television I can stand watching is old movies.  Then it is off to bed where I spend another fitful night arguing with people in my head.

This is the first thing I have written since I got back from Belize.  That's the biggest emptiness I'm feeling.  For years, I've been regularly producing a thousand good words (well, good to me at any rate) every day.  This little blurb is a start on my road to recovery.

I've got to wrap this up now.  It's time to go to the Y.  I'll let you know how it goes.