a cold spell has lingered way longer than i would think though it is december, and what cold and snow together that we get, we generally get in december, they say. by january it all gets very dry and though it is still cold, maybe even colder, there's generally less snow.

i have to be up, now, at three in the morning, to take these laxatives to prepare for a colonoscopy at eight in the morning. it has been like fifteen years since my last one. it's not a pleasant thought or a pleasant time sitting here as the laxative does its thing on my insides, in the dark and the cold, as i await the early hours of the morning when we will drive the hour down to alamogordo for the procedure. such is life though, i'll survive.

so in the dark and the cold i read the news, sometimes several stories about the same thing, on and on about trump trying to deny a few million people's votes here or there, arguing that you shouldn't let people vote by mail, or you shouldn't let black people vote, or women either for that matter, since they always vote the wrong way. only angry white men should be allowed to vote, and you should be able to prove you're an angry white man when you get up the ballot box by wearing a red hat. all other votes are to be deemed invalid.

or the situation in tigray, which i read about when i'm so sick of the shit show i can't carry on with the US supreme court anymore. in tigray you have this leader who has lost control of one of his state. there were enough soldiers up there who had kind of gone in their own direction that they started taking the government guns and such, to set up an independent state. so this leader had to move in and clean them out. but the problem is there's a kind of ethnic strife there, so some people are going to die just because they're in the wrong ethnic group. and there are millions of people, and no press, and a blackout on information in general. so there's the potential for big trouble.

which brings me back to trump. trump has let what three hundred thousand die, without worrying too much about what could be done or could have been done, and covering up his own mistakes like declining thousands of vaccines that could have helped. but he never started a war - he tried to use police covertly but didn't get away with it - and, as opposed to say bush, he actually tried to get soldiers out of places where he didn't understand why they were there int he first place. like previous presidents the military cozied up to him and said look, your economy depends on these soldiers, and they were right to some degree - now that cigarettes are gone weapons are our main export, and we rely on ongoing strife to keep it coming. but still that's no excuse, he figured, and he began pulling them out. he even pulled them out of somalia.

so i'll hand that to him, and say i have no such confidence in biden. biden will be careful - that's about all we know - but that's not always so effective either. buden will have someone in there that knows what they're doing - unlike say betty devos, who didn't belong in charge of any education whatsoever - or these goons who are there to take apart the epa. biden will have an "expert." but trump got millions of votes for a reason - people aren't crazy about those experts. people didn't want more of hillary for example. they were begging for trump. so we'll have to see if biden can stake a different plan and not come out looking a lot more like hillary.

the problem is, the whole appeal of trump is his giving the finger to the system. the finger to the schools. the finger to regulation. the finger to the irs and the tax code. the finger to political correctness and polite discourse. the finger to the #metoo. the finger to masks and the health profession. the finger to science and climate change. his whole approach is, f- you. and that's what people love. if the election shows that he clearly lost, then f- the election results. he will make up his own reality.

i've read the news too much. what i need now is blood pressure medicine, or some other kind of distraction so i don't think about it too much.