Osler's Razor

Everyone is reacting to this election differently. Some are jubilant. Some are protesting. Others are, unfortunately, inspired to do awful hateful things.

Some of us who feared a win by Donald Trump have been affected in ways we don't quite understand. I have talked to a number of people suffering from odd sleeplessness, an enduring restlessness. Others have periods of just forgetting things. Some people have a kind of aimless anger. Not many of those who supported (or actually are) Hillary Clinton are taking responsibility for mistakes made in the campaign and the primaries. For my own part, I'm just going to focus on doing what I can do in the next few months in my own little area of expertise.

The impact on me is kind of funny, and kind of not. I can't get the Bob Seger song "Night Moves" out of my head. I wake up in the morning, and there it is. Weird, huh?

Maybe. Maybe not. The song is on its face a light-rock take on sex, but that's not the part that rolls over and over in my head. There is something really unusual in the song, especially for its genre. It is this: The song contains about five seconds of silence, right in the middle of the song.  Then a stanza comes up with an entirely different mood and tone. In the video above, the silence begins at about 2:45, and it is the words following that silence-- and the sad, foreboding way they are sung-- that keep coming to me:

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
How far off I sat and wondered
Started humming a song from 1962
Ain't it funny how the night moves
When you just don't seem to have as much to lose
Strange how the night moves
With autumn closing in.

Has it been summer, with autumn closing in? People from Michigan (like me and Bob Seger) know exactly that feeling, when the cool air is a promise of the harsh and bitter season to come. It's not a thought or a conclusion; it is something you feel in your skin, as certain as a cut and the blood that flows.