It’s a couple weeks into the developments of the second coup attempt (successful?). Who knows success any more, and what it might signify?

I make myself tap my feet and move the hips for a little longer to the music that isn’t my favorite. But it’s good to dance with a man who looks like Sam Smith, a man who wears a corset, and it’s good to dance down the street as one of the annual Mardi Gras strolls makes its way. I stay close to the drummers, where I like it.

I have spent Sundays tired and trying to rest, but with so much adrenaline pounding I check CNN and the New York Times website again, again. Trump lets Musk take over USAID. Trump nominates anti-vaxxer, lets Musk have social security numbers, fires FBI and justice department workers who had done their honest jobs in pursuing him after the first coup.

Monday before yoga I’m gripped with anxiety. So much when yoga finally begins (on zoom), I put on chanting music. Usually it is silent for my yoga, and I like that. I need something else to anchor. After we downward dog and plank and upward dog, I lie still and the chanting goes on, and I fall into it.

Afterward I think, I’ve got this.

At school, I face these moments of discouragement: mocking from higher ups, random demands, and the difficulties of the students, who may make animal noises, fart aggressively, yell out “Fuck-tard,” loudly insist they cannot sit down, or proclaim, “Leave me alone!”

A student who yells “Fuck you!” and threatens to slug you. A student who, across the hall, is restrained and kicks the door until its frame is destroyed. It won’t shut.

But also a student who valiantly defends healthy relationship patterns, the student who stops punching the brick wall to go for a walk, who is soothed, in the usual circle of the building.

We don’t know what to do.

I threw a party. I’m better, now, at letting the victories and shortcomings of the party go. Did it happen? Yes. People came. Still, the day after the party my hangover is primarily anxiety-based. I review everything I said to everyone at the party. I weigh the ways I have not made the party the best party every thrown for everyone who attended, as well as the ways people have disappointed me related to the party.

And waking up after the party, I no longer have the focus of the party to distract from the earthquakes of the federal government being eaten up by coup.

I lean on my anxiety medications.

I make a special trip to pick up more. I write in my doctor’s portal, please I need more I’m freaking out. Of my non-addictive anxiety med.

I gather with friends, family, and we all say, I don’t know what to do. What can we do? We live in red states on blue islands. Our representatives aren’t us, don’t care to be. Anyway we eat and drink together, and that is the thing.

There is not enough video. There are not enough TV shows. The only one is “The Pitt,” where the doctor from “E.R.” is now the grownest of grown-ups and he shows someone doing a good job at a hard job and proves such a person could exist. He counsels people and can’t go to the bathroom, and though no one is actually facing death at my workplace, I relate to the endless patience required and the lack of chance to go to the bathroom.

TV shows about fraud (usually winners) are upsetting. TV shows about politics aren’t going to work. (“West Wing” now impossibly misogynistic and false-feeling.)

I sit at my favorite coffee and listen to two twentysomethings discuss things my friends never discuss anymore: what it’s like to travel overseas, what the standard bars in the city are like (dark or not dark, music or not music), how Kansas City is a good sized city, though a place you plan to leave (many people plan to leave… I did).

Driving to a dinner with Trump voters, feeling a spiral of fear which includes did they know, do they know, do they care. Sucking it up. Serving yourself food and eating and enjoying company, anyway.

Putting on my makeup for Mardi Gras parties, basing my work on some internet picture, and looking at my face and seeing a tired 48-year-old, STOP, erase, try again. We will be different.

I vow never to serve punch at my home again. I haven’t had a hangover in ages, and this is punch’s fault. Punch indeed.

I see a car ahead of me with the license plate that says DEATH, then realize it doesn’t say DEATH, it says something like D8NTH. I think about a story where someone goes to a hotel even though their home is next door, and they stay at the hotel for no reason. And after a week, I’m at school, and I’m exhausted, and my last class of the day is one kid listening to an audio book and I’m pretending I have any idea what has happening because I’ve already planned and acted out advisory, college and career prep, remedial English, consumer math, English 9, 10, and 11.

I open a document and write about the person who goes to the hotel and sees a car with the license plate DEATH.