Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The First Day (1870-1876)

"I intend this series to serve as a ring-side seat for witnessing the upcoming EndDays."

Another new beginning, if that image isn’t too redundant to hold its intended meaning, or even if it might be. Even EndDays need a decent beginning. Not even they can survive on nothing but endings. I begin this series, my thirty-sixth by my count, since I began writing series on June 21, 2017. I sought a new beginning then, after months of professional discouragement. My courage at a historical low, I mustered my foolhardiness and committed to a practice I’ve continued since. I declared myself a writer that morning, though I insisted that I produce clear, unambiguous evidence. I proposed that acceptable evidence might appear in the form of writing, a story every morning, because writers write. If I were insistent upon being so outrageous as to declare myself a writer, I would henceforth hold myself to actually writing rather than merely thinking or talking about it. I would just need to do what I intended.

And so I have continued through thirty-five series of ninety-some installments each. I began each precisely like this one on the first day of a calendar quarter, and each ended on the eve of the following solstice or equinox. I have not yet faltered. I haven’t really altered my approach yet, either. I have begun without an ending in mind, for I intended each series to be an exploration rather than just an explication of stuff I already understood. I never knew beforehand what I was pursuing with my writing, if, indeed, I was ever pursuing anything at all. I was certainly not seeking enlightenment or trying to teach anyone how to improve, or to correct some error. Neither was I evangelical, having no desire to convert anybody to my way of thinking. I also rejected the notion of deliberately plotting, since real life, or at least the real life I’ve led, never relied upon an author’s clever plotlines to create coherence. I wanted my writing to produce emergent properties: experiences, explanations, and insights happened upon in passing, the way life has always delivered mine.

Why this series now? Not a day dawns now but what some wise commentator doesn’t wonder how much longer the sorry term of our present incumbent can last. He’s seemingly been on his final swollen legs since the day he swore to uphold the office he clearly never had any intention of upholding. He’s committed something on the order of at least one impeachable offense each day since, leaving a Bill of Particulars which will very likely prove to be his sole legacy. His lawless un-presidency will truly prove to be one for the ages. The transformation he’d apparently hoped to make on this country will succeed in the opposite way he intended, permanently sealing our insistence that we will henceforth live up to the promises upon which we were founded. We will become the liberal democracy we should have strived for and embodied all along, an ever more perfect union. We won’t ever forget what we came so close to losing, either.

If that sounds like an impending new beginning, whether or not that term sounds too redundant, it also hints at a great collapsing. The conservative ideal that metastasized into its Nazi eigenvalue has utterly disgraced itself. It has shown its cards. It plays on borrowed time, its line of credit precariously overdrawn. As gasoline prices race toward a new baseline of five dollars and natural gas becomes functionally unaffordable, renewables will resurge, but not immediately. We are looking at many decades of struggle to recover from a few short months of this clown’s non-administration, and I believe those decades will make us tougher and more compassionate. We should properly end them feeling as if we actually belong together, having survived the worst disasters in recorded history by then. I will not be accompanying my great-grandchildren across that finish line. Neither will you.

I enter this period hopefully, understanding that EndDays bring the promise of cessation of many long-standing insults visited upon humanity by what the Iranians refer to as The Great Satan. In my youth, I believed not in ‘my country right or wrong,’ but that my country was always on the side of right. My rites of passage into adulthood involved coming to grips with the painful contradiction that my country was more than capable of doing wrong in this world, even continuing egregious wrongs. I aligned myself with the forces I believed to be right and have never wavered, even though some friends and acquaintances inexplicably swerved into the dark lane. I have often felt afraid, like an alien in my own country, but I have never seriously wavered. I’ve successfully failed to become a conservative. I look forward.

Our leader is a dedicated self-saboteur. He never engages without undermining his intentions in the ensuing process. It’s a gift, and one his supporters apparently underestimated. They’re the ones with enormous gas-guzzling pickups that cost two hundred bucks to fill up. My Subaru gets by for only seventy, which still seems like way too much to me. During his first term, his insanity was somewhat contained. Through his second so far, we’ve seen little evidence of there being brakes on his clown car. The courts have largely found against him, though, as always, they have ridden terribly slow horses. But I now see a convergence. I sense that his house of cards is finally near collapse. He’s beset on more fronts than the entire catalogue of Shakespeare’s most tragic characters, except it will be one Hell of a celebration when his administration finally collapses. He will be impeached. He must be impeached if we are ever to be known as anything other than The Great Satan again. I intend this series to serve as a ringside seat for witnessing the upcoming EndDays. Welcome!

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz