312 - The I-Ching Told Me To Suck It Up

It’s been an awful 24 hours.

On Tuesday night as I was watching the election disaster and getting progressively more and more horrified, I decided to ask the I-Ching a question.

For those of you unfamiliar with the I-Ching oracle, It’s a divination method that, for me anyway, as been so exceedingly accurate that I never ask a question for which it could potentially give me an answer that would be devastating.

It uses three coins to work, it can also be done with yarrow sticks, but I’ve never messed with that. John Cage used it as a compositional tool.

It cannot give yes or no answers, but as I was getting nervous I asked “How am I going to feel about the election by the end of the day tomorrow?” That would, essentially, give me the information I was looking for.

It gave me hexagram 36 changing to 55. Look it up if you care to (the 4th line changes to move the hex’s from 36 to 55). It contains the interesting observation “here a man of dark nature is in a position of authority and brings harm to the wise and able man.”

After reading both hex’s and the changing line, at first I thought perhaps it was saying “it’s always darkest before the dawn,” and things will work out for the best after all, but nope, what it was it was telling me was, “shit’s gonna get dark pal, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so suck it up, chump.”

I’ve come to the conclusion I’m likely living thru the end of democracy in America, and probably the beginning of the end of habitability of the planet too as the last thing global warming needs right now is more “drill baby drill” attitudes. This will be an historically astonishing period of history, so I might as well sit back and watch it implode because there’s precious little I can do about it. It’s like the ancient curse May you live in interesting times! Indeed!

It’s helped me to cope. I’ve also sworn off news and social media for the foreseeable future. Being informed of the minutia of the day by day machinations of a man that pied-piper’d away a mass of fellow citizens to undo centuries of democracy because “immigrants” in order to stay out of prison has little in the way of potential to bring happiness, so, as they say, ignorance is bliss. On the upside, I found yesterday to be way more productive in terms of projects I’ve had on the back burner for a while, so there’s a silver lining of sorts.

Rarely do I know the title of a piece before I write it but I did today. You could literally sing the title along with the first couple of measures. I wanted to use a minor mode but todays mode was destined to be major and in E so I stuck with it, even though it sounds more like the key of B most of the time - it’s been one of those days.

And like a cherry on top my reluctantly made first order from Temu arrived today smashed to pieces