I don’t have much time to write yet my fingers slide across the keyboard like butter on toast.  A howling wind whips around the house outside my windows.  I can’t turn the radio on anymore.  My stomach lurches.  It’s not fair to the first person whom I will see later; too risky, I might heap complaints on them, burning coals of failure.

Today’s disappointment? The Oxford Dictionary people picking a hyphenated advertising slogan as word-of-the-year.  The writer in me cringes, but I steel myself, taking this blog by the throat and dragging it into the kitchen.  I throw it down on a chair and say, Behave yourself! and pour another cup of coffee.  The blog smirks and shifts, ducking when I swing at it.  Post-truth?  I’ll give you post-truth.  I smack the coffee pot down on the counter and wince.

Then I’m laughing.  I tell myself it’s just a word, not to be angry at the rotten roots of society which gave birth to it or those Brits who called it naked.  Just a word:  and when words fail, you stick a dash between two of them and make a new one.  Never mind that bile rises to my throat when I ask why we need this particular odious compound phrase.  We’re getting to the heart of the matter.  The circumstances about which I need to strain not to complain have gotten serious.  We’re no longer talking who done me wrong.  We’re talking little girls getting bullied in the school yard by kids who think that bigotry will become the new normal.

The wind rises; the lamps flickered out just then.  The gods must be appeased.  I’ll take my shower and turn into a barrister and go to court.  I’ll try not to smirk, or snarl.  I’ll be nice to the guardian ad litem with an ax to grind.  Then I’ll slink back to the office with my plastic smile and close the browser with its offending announcement.  Word are not enough these days.  We need a hyphen to hold us together.

It’s the seventeenth day of the thirty-fifth month of My [Trembling] Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.