I was, as one who would know informed me, in “rare form” last night. Whatever that means. “Rare form” is a drunkard’s term, one that non-alcoholics and non-barflies seem not to understand. In fact, I might not understand it myself.

Yesterday was certainly a day to drink. Donald John Trump somehow slithered in to the oval office, delivering a dry, even coarse manifesto of a speech that sounded straight from the campaign trail. I expect nothing other than the unexpected from the next 4-8 years.

I may be the only person I know who actually watched the Inaugural proceedings. I may also be the only person I know who ever actually watched Trump on the campaign trail and listened to some of his interviews on radio and television. The rallies really were contagious. I mean for a 70 year old man he held the stage like a rock star, stirring up real excitement, albeit among the already converted.

Anyway, no reason to flood the Internet with more droplets of noise in the ocean of words spilled over yesterday’s once unimaginable events. I felt something change as he said the words “so help me God.” I felt something real. Not a comfortable or reassuring real, but not an apocalyptic real, either. I don’t know what it was. Something about White America, I think, and the coming dismemberment of mainstream media.

I tried to listen to Obama’s exit speeches. I never trusted the guy, and I can tell you exactly why: his eloquence. I don’t trust eloquence from a politician any more than from a used car salesman. When he addresses issues of race as often as not I don’t know what he is talking about. He never seems to lay down solid historical precedent or insight like MLK did, though MLK could go a little heavy on the biblical and historical allusions. I remember O’s famous race speech before he was elected, a speech he quietly groused about being more or less forced to make. I might have listened to it three times. I had no idea what he was talking about. At the time I could not find anyone who could explain what was so great about that speech, except for the fact that it happened. It was as if he was a preacher, and it didn’t matter what he said so long as it was the word of God.

It may be inevitable, after all, that race relations are not only no better now than they were 8 years ago, but worse. The person I knew 8 years ago who showed me a photo of Obama with monkey doodles scribbled on top is the same guy who would show me that image today and expect me to get a laugh out of it. He is also among the most repugnant of the post-election backwash. He is a Gloater, one who calls those who exercise their right to protest a bunch of babies. People like that, white men from middle America who have never experienced race discrimination, did not change on account of an African-American being in the White House.

Hah, I say I’m not going to talk about this but then do exactly that for several sentences.

I am at a LIBARRY on 38th Avenue and 21st Street. The librarian here is cute. I think she’s a librarian.

Having had no booze for 3 weeks I guess I should have expected my tolerance to be down. I had an AM headache, but I slept it off. I had a dream that I was using a computer keyboard which, if you pressed Control-F10, became a “secret keyboard” that typed things different from what you thought you were typing. I think it should be easy enough to program a keyboard to mix up the keys. It’s a “Candid Camera” type of gag I think I saw once on TV. But in my dream the Secret Keyboard had some kind of magical element to it. Anything you typed was not what you thought you were typing but it was amazing nonetheless.

I thought it was funny how I remembered the exact key sequence of Control-F10. I wonder if that sequence does anything anywhere.

The first casualty of me drinking is usually the same thing: Food. Anything I eat tastes like dirt, though it is not as bad today as it was in December, or at other times when I drank heavily. I probably put on 5 or 6 pounds while not drinking. I just eat and eat and eat during those times.

The song I played most the last 3 weeks was “Rehab”, Amy Winehouse’s elegy for the futility of going to alcohol rehab. She nails it, and I swear I hear something different in that song every time. That’s my song. I didn’t get it as insistently as she did, I don’t guess, but I got enough to recognize the presumptuous superiority of social workers and their ilk who think they can make sending drunks to rehab mandatory. But the real message of the song is to question the merit of the rehab ritual itself. She goes away for 10 weeks and guess what, she comes back and she goes back to black. It’s like that saying I remember so well, which I thought was mean-spirited at first but now I see as perfectly adroit: Once you are an alcoholic you will always be. You can be on a desert island for 8 years but you’re still an alcoholic.

Why am I talking about this again? Oh, right. I drank last night. The goal is to make it like it was last night, drink socially among friends, once or twice a week, or maybe just on weekends. Normal-like. Whatever that means. Four beers and two gimlets is not most people’s “normal”, even once or twice a week. But whatever.

I think I will exit this LIBARRY and get myself some coffee.