"did I do thaaaaat?"

Yesterday, the realization caught me off guard: I had a column to sweep up and shape and the high-school test-taker's moan passed my mental lips: "I got nothing."

Nothing, of course, except the recent presidential election and I dislike getting on enthusiastic band wagons that then turn out to be less confounding or less elevating than the aroused throngs suggest. I was, in short, fucked. I did it anyway.

I cobbled and yanked something together, held my nose and sent it in ... same ol' same ol' ... Donald Trump will be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2017. My liberal friends are weeping. My conservative friends are cheering. A man who, at 70, is probably old enough to like to sleep in will take on a sleepless profession. He is unlikely to mimic predecessor Harry Truman whose oval office desk was adorned with a plaque that read "the buck stops here."

Lumpy, bumpy column, submitted to a small corner of the media that lionized what it claimed to abhor. I feel like a drunk who puked on his new shoes ... "did I do thaaaaat?" The trouble with Trump, at the moment, is not that he is insane. The problem is that he is just sane enough. There is darkness at the end of the tunnel.

If you say it's awful, that doesn't cover the bases. If you say it's wonderful, that doesn't cover them either. Third world America, here we come. Feudalism in the remaking.