Up this morning in the reading room with coffee, Christine doing her newspaper reviews for the counties she’s responsible, Keeper lying to my right purring contentment after his breakfast, and I’m Saturday morning newsing. It didn’t take long to catch up with the DVR’d shows and some updates from the wire services, so I stopped because essentially the story is the same: We live in the times of a very personality disordered President who continues in office with 35% of the country thinking “it’s okay.” For many years of my life, daily routines revolved around political intrigue and necessary contemplation over pending legislation, now there is nothing but a ruse shadowing our democracy. I’m so glad I’m out of the business, as scarred as I am, but the reality is painful to watch without a voice, yet saving my life at the same time. The forces of our political world create an addictive stew of Machiavellian marvel hard to contain when the synapses of the brain become tickled. I believe that is why our narcissistic, ego-maniacal President probably only sleeps a couple of hours a night, can’t have a relationship with his wife and youngest son, and shows infinitely less empathy than even normal personality disordered people show – which in my 42 years of practice based evidence, the total lack of empathy, is the hallmark of the worst of the worst personality disorders. My worry is the same as all of the pundits on TV and radio and the community at large, so I don’t own the rights of privilege when I say our United States is in dire straits. Where the issues of interest in the news hit home is during the course of normal interactions with neighbors and friends. Time and time again I hear how people are guarded when they talk in public. Certain groups have partitioned themselves off from others at coffee shops. Again, a word often spoken on NPR and the rest, tribalism, is alive and well in every corner of the country. I never thought I would actually witness an authoritarian romp through our world, but with PRAVDA and TASS newly minted as the FOX News channel and concurrent radio heads of conservative talk radio, we truly are threatened with a complete takeover of one group literally screaming for their libertarian, right-winged rights as they only hope we all fall under some Christianized, biblical, evangelical, robotic life of whiteness while everyone else loses their rights. The behaviors remind me of the patients in a psychiatric hospital, prisoners in prison, and addicts in treatment when, just before discharge, they act-out because they’re scared to death of their reality: Facing the world that has changed, is changing, and they’re not ready. As I continued the newsing with the morning coffee, I smiled in hope that the Millennial’s finally come out and vote in a midterm, and we can regain some semblance of life together without fear mongering, Presidential profiteering, and normalized relations with rational people. Not that we live in a utopia, but a one day or a one year deep exhalation from our current product of a bad vote would be life-giving. Keeper sneezed and Christine is done and so am I. Think I’ll take a nice walk in the woods and have a chat with Thoreau and Twain.