And those marchers were not alone, either. It has been sickening to live here for the past eight months and witness the staggering amount of work that many newly emboldened white Americans have put into destroying people unlike them. I’ll happily write a 1,000-word hater’s guide to a retail catalog, but my hateful efforts are nothing compared to the work these men put in. Think of Mitch McConnell, working feverishly day and night to secure votes and secretly drafting bills and calling late night Congressional sessions, all so that he could take health care away from poor people. Think of how FRENZIED he was to do this. Obsessed. Think of the sense of urgency that led him to disregard all other work just to pass a bill that could potentially harm so many, and you know that urgency hasn't faded....

Think of the utter indefatigability of these men and their champions. It’s not simply that they hate, but that they have made hatred their life’s work.

And then think of all the effort needed simply to keep these men at bay, or to undo the evil works they’ve already secured. Trump is a miserable, awful man. And even though I have heard a million times that he secretly loathes being president, the man still endeavored to get the job and shows no sign of relinquishing it, not when he can take time every day to satisfy whatever hateful itch he needs to scratch. It is exhausting to deal with him, and what’s scary is that he’s not even close to being the hardest-working white supremacist in his own government. These are men who are counting on your fatigue. These are men who are hoping that their insatiable hunger for repression wears you down eventually, and that you resign yourself to the idea that inequality is both inevitable and irreversible. It will take GENERATIONS to undo the damage they’ve inflicted upon modern America, if it can be undone at all. It’s like cleaning up after a flood.

I discovered Magary through his novels. My wife got me The Hike awhile back, and I loved it so much I snatched up The Postmortal. Just finished it this week.

After reading both of those books, I can attest that Magary can imagine a whole lot of terrible shit. When a guy who writes dystopian science fiction and fantasy allegories full of dog-headed child killers is horrified by the stuff you've dreamed up, you've done something really special.

I awoke this morning and put on an old mechanical watch I hadn't worn in days. It had run down, so I needed to reset the calendar. That was how I realized that today was January 19th, 2017. The last day.

It felt like the last day, too, though I fought that. Today my professional life was filled with people discovering broken things that nobody knew how to fix. And I resisted it, I tried not to lapse into lazy cynicism and confirmation bias, but I could not help but think it a metaphor for what is to come.

The man who is to come is quite a piece of work. He is loud and brutish and vindictive. He is possessed of that particularly deadly strain of ignorance and intellectual laziness that is convinced of its own brilliance. He seems eager to sow conflict, a foie gras goose gavaged with hot takes and contempt, then pointed at the country and squeezed like a bagpipe. It is good that he does not drink, because he is the clearest, most shining example of alcoholic psychology run amok that I have ever witnessed. I am, in short, afraid of him.

The man who is leaving, he is also a piece of work. He is studied and careful. He listens. He is a scholar, but he is not content to cloister himself off with books. He made a life out of helping, and it appears he's just getting started.

Don't get me wrong, he's pissed me off plenty. He is not everything I could want in a leader. He has broken my heart a time or two.

But he did the job well. He did it with dignity and class and grace. He continued to reach across the aisle no matter how many times the Party of No slapped his hand away, no matter how many of us counseled him to stop what proved to be a mostly futile gesture. Futile, maybe, but he left the country better than he found it, and it is by their fruits that you shall know them.

People have tried to dismiss my current slurry of dread and sorrow as a loser's sour grapes. These people do not grasp that I am a Southern Liberal. Losing elections is common and familiar to me. It is practically my god damned raison d'être. So, no. This is different.

So I'm hammering this out before I end a very long day. I am pondering a very long four years in which a lot of people I love are going to get hurt while forty percent of my country cheers. This leaves me sad and angry a lot of the time.

I am told that that's a glimmer of what it's like to be black or gay or trans or Muslim in this country, but I don't dare believe it. I lose nothing tomorrow.

I am tempted to put a rather shiny bow of optimism on this, end with something hopeful about following the example of the one who is leaving. But I know that tomorrow I will likely not muster more than grim determination. I may snap at my coworkers or family. I will waste at least an hour's worth of minutes wondering what the first international incident will be (I'm not counting the two he's already managed).

But the children have school. I have work. I am needed. There are things to be done that I can control, in some small measure.

One of those things: I am pointing to the loud ones and asking my children, do you hear them? Do you hear God in that racket? Do you hear love? And they tell me no, and they appear to mean it. There's at least something to that.

This weekend we march.