Sunshine Go Away Today
- Mike Dickey
- Jan 21
- 4 min read
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
-W.B. Yeats
Two below zero when, before dawn this morning, I discovered Peg's cellphone in the kitchen a few minutes after she left for work. I threw on my clothes from last night, shot her boss a text that I was on my way with the phone, and moved briskly across the yard to my truck.
All cold feels about the same from maybe thirty down to ten or so. Sometimes a little more unpleasant because of wind; dampness less of a problem because it just turns to snow at that point. But two below is different, your lungs struggling to process the frozen air, body quickly losing its heat beneath the best coat and digressing into an involuntary, almost panicked shiver. I arrived around that point as I crawled into the frozen cab of the truck.
As I drove down Pine I saw Peg's car in front of the house, door hanging open as she'd scampered through the front door looking for her phone. I could easily have driven past and missed her altogether. We exchanged brief niceties in the yard--too cold for a smooch--and soon she was on her way and I was back here in the warmth of Tara.
I settled into reading the paper online with my cup of weird coffee--something's gone wrong with the half-and-half, not spoiled by the smell but starting to separate, leaving a curdsy slick of yuck on top of the double espresso. I poured it out before I wrote this.
And by "settled into reading" I mean crawling back into bed, still fully clothed, to scan the highlights, if you'd call them that, of yesterday's DJT circus.
My sweater still reeks of last night's fire in the fireplace. The aroma took me back to Fairchild Air Force Base in December of 1987. Peg was somewhere on base, swimming in the big olympic pool when she wasn't riding in helicopters as a flight nurse. Issac turned five while I was there.
None of knew each other, Peg couldn't have known that the guy she'd marry thirty-odd years later was enduring three weeks of survival and POW resistance training just down the street.
The culmination of our three weeks at Fairchild came with a six day jaunt into the woods, first camping as a group around a collective shelter, then playing escape and evasion through the mountains for a couple days looking for checkpoints where "partisans" would take us to a safe house for the night. December in eastern Washington is damned cold, and we spent as much of those six days as possible huddled around the fire.
That's all a longer story for another day. What I do remember, and what drew me back this morning, was the smell in my VOQ room when I returned from the woods, piled my BDUs in one corner, and took my first shower in a week. When I walked out of the bathroom, now squeaky soapy clean, the whole room was filled with the aroma of wood smoke and sickly sweet BO from my uniform. My next task was to wash that all away down the hall in the laundry room. I recall it took more than one pass to deal with the smoke odor, which hung around the room for the balance of the TDY.
All of this serves as a welcome diversion from the news. It's happened; he's in.
Apparently an observant lip reader at the inauguration caught Obama asking the W what they could do to stop this.
Biden could have done something, of course. He was completely immune from prosecution, a king on royal property. He could've jammed a knitting needle in one orange ear and out the other, then pardoned himself to the extent the immunity didn't cover it. Then again, that would've made Musk president, which isn't much of an improvement.
Musk, for his part, invited the crowd afterward to join him in a "Sieg Heil!"
Twice.
The Spray On Sun King (I take full credit for that moniker), when it was his turn to speak, rattled off his usual combination of lies and direct insults to the incumbent president sitting next to him. A complete piece of shit. And almost three quarters of my neighbors in any one of the places we live support him. Unbelievable.
His latest is that the boy assassin's failed attempt to explode his melon head last July somehow equates to a mandate from God to do whatever the hell he wants. Seems consistent with the Evil Creator theology in the book I just finished, where the OT Yahweh delights in torturing friend and foe alike. And what could possible go wrong with a narcissistic man-baby holding the nuclear codes while convinced he's God's Chosen Snowflake?
It drives one to drink, which I'm far too busy to indulge today.
Tomorrow morning I leave Peg and Corning for Florida, with no clue when I'll be back. The thought just adds to the misery. Too busy to indulge that patch of melancholia, as well.
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