“We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor….I was feeling kind of seasick, and the crowd called out for more….”

I have taken the election results harder than anyone in my extended family, anyone I know at work and even in my favorite coffee shop. I have taken the pain silently in wonder. Is it that I can see so much more clearly into an unclear future or is it that I simply can’t see at all? I could not see Trump coming. I could not go there into that hard cold place that so prejudiced my opinion of my fellow Americans. But it did and I can’t come back from it. Am I alone and does it matter if I am.

I have been alone before. It’s not so bad but it’s to some place anyone ever wants to stay.

A giddy celebrating mass of humanity surrounds me, all doing tangos and polkas as if Jesus has come back, repackaged as a stripe suited circus creature with a grand entertaining style of attraction, drawing everyone around into the tent, into the seats to view the three rings of coming performance. Maybe the elephants will trumpet, the horses carry lovely female loads and the trapeze will be filled with lithe gorgeous humans, all doing successful triples. But I am here, sitting in this metaphorical open lonely field, waiting for the giant tent to go up and somehow knowing I’ll be sitting here by myself again when the tent comes down and the show is gone.

And I will be alone again, having known all along…or maybe not at all.

“And so it was that later, as the miller told his tale, that her face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale.”

Procol Horum 1967

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