Hug In the Face Of One Of Our Nation's Ugliest Weeks

This has been a very bad week. All of us fortunate to have loving, supportive, decent partners and friends, need to hold each other more than usual, hold each other closer than usual, kiss each other more often than usual, tell each other what a good people we are, and how glad we are to have us in our lives.
Judging just by the street* women are deeply upset by this week, hurt and depressed, on the behalf of our daughters, sisters, mothers ourselves.  Everyone here is talking about it.  Of course we who lived long in this city have known this man (and his father before him) was the most creepy and disgusting of creatures for all his life, thanks to his always being in the news one way or another, but he's now thrown the shyte that is himself all over the world, pretending he is our country.

Beyond that though, this has been a horrible week for decent males everywhere. When I think I'm ashamed for our country, it's nothing to how el V, for instance feels.  And I'm hearing good, decent men all over the street talking about this too, though fairly quietly, almost with embarrassment.  With real sadness.  They are depressed too.

But we can help each other.  So hug and kiss and express our respect and affection for each other in every way that works.

I am so grateful for all the wonderful, decent, brilliant, honest, talented, funny people in my life -- whichever gender, whichever skin tone, whichever religion, whichever language.

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*   Here, "street' means conversations participated in and overheard while buying ingredients for pasta at Raffetto's (est. 1906!), walking to the dry cleaners, checking out library materials, sitting in the Bistro for a nightcap, riding the subway to Lincoln Center Jazz** looking at greens in the Morton Williams produce section, overhearing the guys at the deli talking with the punters, etc. It doesn't mean media of any kind.  It means face-to-face real life personal contact and experience.

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**  Lincoln Center's Jazz Club is located in the Time Warner Building on one of the slices of pie that makes up Columbus Circle -- right across the avenue where is located one of the towers branded with the name of the king of narcissism and abuse. This was Wednesday night, and the whole place all the way to the top dead dark, except for a few lights in a few windows on the bottom three floors. No action going on there at all. Nor was there any at the branded with his name hotel down the street in my own neighborhood. This is not the same as 'his' tower, though, where women had been protesting this week.  The orange stalin has splattered many a very ugly NYC building with his name.