The dumbest thing in my life: II

I spent a good deal of "Inauguration Day 2: The Revenge", trying to recall how I reacted to "Inauguration Day 1, The Bad Joke". I kept drawing a blank. Was I angry (likely), depressed (probably), disappointed (undoubtedly)?

Then I had a clever thought: Why not see what you wrote?

Turns out, I didn't. Write, that is. I didn't write anything on Jan. 20, 2017 or, for that matter, the whole month of January. (In fact, from Christmas Day, 2016, to Feb. 24, 2017, my pen was silent. My blog was blank.

Oh, right, I suddenly remembered. From Dec. 26, 2016 and most of January, 2017, I was a guest of Garnet Medical Center, just outside of Middletown, N.Y. Not by choice. By chance and another driver whose car wound up sliding on ice and hitting mine head-on. I guess you don't forget, but you don't rush to remember.

So, no, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the Trump pre-inauguration hoopla or the day itself. I had doctors dealing with a fractured right wrist, a detached left patella tendon, eight broken ribs, a deflated lung and a bump on the head. The car was in worse shape.

But the doctors did their jobs and I survived to get a second shot at a Trump inaugural. No, I didn't watch. Instead, I checked what I wrote on Christmas Day, 2016.

The first paragraph: "I have been in a funk since Nov. 9. That's the day I woke up with the realization that millions of Americans had lost their minds, if not their souls, and elected a man who is morally, psychologically, intellectually and spiritually unfit to be their president. The dumbest thing that has happened in my lifetime."

Well, turns out the 2016 election was only the second dumbest thing that has happened in my lifetime. The dumbest thing was electing him again.

But I did discover something interesting about myself in this research. That Christmas column was all about my not writing for a while, and, instead, returning to reading. Funny about that, but that's exactly what I did this time around.

One of the books mentioned in the 2016 column was "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," by Tom Wolfe. Before becoming a prolific author, Wolfe was a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune.

As serendipity would have it, one of the books I recently mentioned that I need to get back to and finish is "The Paper: The life and death of The New York Herald Tribune."

In that 2016 Christmas column I turned to sports to get me back in the writing groove by adapting the philosophy of former NBA star, Reggie Miller, who gave Knicks fans nightmares. Miller, a great shooter, said the only way to get out of a shooting funk was to keep shooting. Eventually, the shots start falling again.

Also coincidentally, the other book I recently said I need to finish, is sports-related: "Satchel", a biography of the legendary pitcher, Satchel Paige.

I've long ago discovered that this "coincidence" stuff happens all the time if you only pay attention.

So, here we are again. Shock and awe, lies and misdirection, bigotry and bluster and a profound display of cowardice and hypocrisy by the onetime party of Lincoln.

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