Here’s What I Think You Do Today, January 20th, 2025

It’s gonna be a stupid, horrible day. We all know that. It’s going to be full of what passes for pomp and circumstance amongst the set of rich tacky dickheads that are about to take full control of the country (they had most of the control anyway, to be fair), and then there will be a bunch of shock and awe, except I dunno how shocked we’ll be, and we definitely won’t be in awe, and many of us will want to break our Dry January streak to drink vodka from our toilets, only coming up for air long enough to shovel more ice cream into our mouths. It’s the first day of our new kakistocracy slash oligarchy, the kakistoligarchracy. It’s going to be like if William Gibson wrote Idiocracy. It’s going to be a stupid, horrible day.

But I think there are things you can do.

None of these things are revolutionary.

I don’t think today is the day for revolutionary.

I think today is the day you do the best you can do.

I think first thing you do is you donate to a charity, maybe a few charities, especially one who are going to have to do some heavy lifting in the years to come. And it’s MLK Jr. Day, too, so maybe factor that into your giving efforts. Some options could include: Southern Poverty Law Center, National Black Woman’s Justice Initiative, RAICES, ACLU, Center for Reproductive Rights, Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, Arbor Day Foundation, Woodwell Climate Research Center, World Central Kitchen, and so forth.

Charity Navigator is a good place to find and vet charities, btw.

Giving directly to folks in need too is good, via GoFundMes — no links here because those are populous and fast-moving, but I’m sure you’ll see ’em on social media today and in the days that follow.

Reading books is wonderful. Read a book. Reading any book — from a bookstore, from the library (which to be fair are not open today), from your own shelves? Yeah. Books are good food. Doubly so if you take the time to read a book by, you know, anybody who will be hurt by today’s chaos. Author Jessica Conwell has a list over at Bluesky, for instance, of trans authors — it’s a fount of books to be bought and read, including Jessica’s own Ghost Flower. Go read some Hailey Piper, Eric LaRocca, Colson Whitehead, Charlie Jane Anders, Kosoko Jackson, V Castro, Cassandra Khaw, Cynthia Pelayo, the river of reads that awaits you is wide and it is deep. Here’s a good list of Black Authors, too. Shit, you want a great book to read today that’ll be fast and ferocious? Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark. Go find that, read it. If you’ve read it, re-read it. Memorize it.

Look away from the news if you gotta, or stare dead at it if you feel so inclined. (You gotta look eventually. Apathy will serve no one in the years ahead.) You don’t have to do it all today. You don’t have to do anything today. You can just try to be happy today, or calm, or whatever you need to be. Nobody’s asking you to spend it all and burn it up and out.

Look out for your heart and help others with theirs.

Reach out to folks. Accept others reaching out to you if you can.

Check in with your communities, with whoever comprises them.

Take a walk, if it’s not too cold where you are (and it probabably is, shit). Do a little exercise. Breathe in and breathe out. Think about something you wanna do, something good, something nice. Plan a little vacation. Write a little poem. I don’t know. Distract yourself with small pulses of love and light.

Listen. It’s gonna be a weird bad day.

It’s just the first of the weird bad days.

And if we’re being honest, it’s not even the first of them, it’s just another in a long line of weird bad days where the weird part and the bad part are spiking simultaneously, like an outbreak of a particular kind of illness. It’s not just turbulence on a flight, it’s a turbulent flight, from start to finish, snout to tail.

But we can get through it, we can land the plane.

This country is a mess, it’s always been a mess, always will be a mess, but it’s our mess. We’re with it, in it, and have often helped to make it, and that’s not defeatist, that’s not apathetic, it’s just realist to see that we’re a fucking goofy nation that has stumbled and staggered up and down some big hills and into some mucky fucking ditches. Just try to remember we need to climb the hills to see the beautiful views, you know? And first we gotta get up and out of the damn ditch. Beyond that? I think at the end of the day the people we’re with, that we surround ourselves with — that matters. It’s the people we love and care about and who care about us in return. I think it helps me to remember that it’s not like we’re some shining castle in the clouds. We’re a messy place full of messy people and I think it’s good to recognize that, and to see that we can still make motions to make it better than it is, even when it fights us like a bucking, sweat-foamed horse.

Then again, I don’t know shit about shit and might feel different tomorrow. Don’t let anyone chastise you for feeling sad or upset. Toxic optimism isn’t going get us through shit. We feel how we feel and those worries, those concerns, they’re valid. It’s okay to see that shit’s gonna be hard.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of others. Be taken care of when needed.

We’ll need your fight soon. The fight continues. The fight always continues.

Good luck. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Thanks for being here.

(As a postscript, I took that photo of the frozen flag back in 2009 — and I looked at the date, and the date was Jan 20th. Who knew.)

(Anyway, here’s a final photo I took of a squirrel doing a bump of Nature’s Cocaine. May it bring you some measure of joy.)