{"id":5640,"date":"2016-07-22T16:33:57","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T21:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=5640"},"modified":"2016-07-22T16:33:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T21:33:57","slug":"more-panic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2016\/07\/22\/more-panic.html","title":{"rendered":"More panic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tWalking around like a zombie today. Feel vulnerable. Almost infantile. No idea why, though I think that the apocalyptic reality of Donald Trump accepting the nomination for President of the United States might have something to do with it. I remembered how, when admitted to the emergency room last year, an orderly asked me to name the President. It&#8217;s a routine question they ask to see if you are sane. I don&#8217;t know the fundamental logic behind that question except to assume that if you answer &#8220;Martha Stewart&#8221; and not &#8220;Barack Obama&#8221; then they might think you are nuts, but they might also think you are just fucking with them. I can&#8217;t find any direct explanation for this custom on the WWW, but it&#8217;s a question they&#8217;ve asked for so long I guess it needs no explanation. It illustrates, I think, that the significance of the office of the President is expected to be in the fiber of every American. I believe that it is, whether people claim to be political or not.<\/p>\n<p>I had a wild panic attack at the post office. A UPS person was delivering some packages to the USPS post office. A woman asked the UPS how long they had been doing that (they never used to deliver UPS to PO Boxes). He said he&#8217;d been delivering UPS to USPS for a few years now.<\/p>\n<p>Something about his movements scared me. I felt threatened, though he was doing nothing wrong. What he was doing was stepping on to the spot where I stood in December, 2009, the moment my mother died. Or rather the moment I got word from my sister that she was gone. The call seemed to have come virtually as it happened. The news was hardly unexpected but still came through as a sorry surprise. I dropped some papers and stared at them sitting on that piece of floor for a few moments.<\/p>\n<p>Today I was waiting at the post office for a clerk to bring me a couple of packages with silly gadgets which should connect USB devices to this tablet or my phone. Needless purchases but cheap enough not to worry about the impulsiveness.<\/p>\n<p>I got a sandwich, thinking that would make me feel better. It tasted like dirt. I only got through two-thirds of it before dropping the rest into a trash can. $7.49 for that shit. I crossed 5th Avenue fearing all the stopped cars would casually move forward as I entered into their paths. They did not. I entered the Trump Tower, which is now surrounded by cameras and reporters seemingly all the time. I did not make it up to the Garden, my favorite place, but sat by the ice cream stand downstairs, with a police officer sitting nearby. I imagined this tower being targeted by terrorists. Security seems barely to exist at the place, which is surprising all things considered. You&#8217;d think they would go yard on the theater of security as needlessly practiced by security goons at countless other less targetable institutions. I thought of Trump promising &#8220;law and order&#8221;, and how that comment was one of many to which I responded &#8220;What are you talking about?&#8221; I remembered security crew at Citi Field a few weeks ago, confiscating my bottle of water and throwing it into a trash can. It felt like I was not even dealing with Americans. The America Trump has tapped into feels like nothing I have ever known.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how much of today&#8217;s feelings of dread were heat related. I felt like I did not want to exist, or rather I felt that I already did not exist. I could have been felled by the flick of a finger. I felt better after getting home and sitting on the couch, but needless to say I got nothing much done today. So far, at least.<\/p>\n<p>The arts funding meeting yesterday was terminally boring but necessary if I intend to go through the process. Actually they showed an example of an application that was approved, and that was actually useful for me. There&#8217;s a language to writing grant applications. But all in all I would rather have seen the therapist for our usual twice weekly meetings. I cancelled that because I wasn&#8217;t sure I&#8217;d be able to get from there to the arts meeting in time. I do feel a little lost without the two meetings per week.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Walking around like a zombie today. Feel vulnerable. Almost infantile. No idea why, though I think that the apocalyptic reality of Donald Trump accepting the nomination for President of the United States might have something to do with it. I remembered how, when admitted to the emergency room last year, an orderly asked me to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-1sY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}