We can take it

Reassuring Architecture, with Comfort Food in the Basement: The Flint Masonic Temple, Built in 1911

Here's my solution this morning: listening to the Best of Warren Zevon, RIP ("Ain't that Pretty at All" is especially cathartic) and keeping the TV on mute while the invisible, slippery, wussy world of global finance goes crazy. Now Bush is talking and I'm not bothering to mute Warren...it's great to listen to Dubya's voice and Zevon's simultaneously. Later maybe I'll go have lunch at the Temple Dining Room in the basement of the Masonic Temple, an eccentric gray hunk of early Twentieth Century architecture in downtown Flint. I like everything about the Temple dining room -- that it's in the basement, that juries eat there, circles of twelve diverse Americans sipping coffee from cups with actual saucers, that old ladies who put on makeup eat there at tables alone, that the menu has comfort food like liver and onions, grilled cheese sandwiches and macaroni and cheese, that there's always a pile of chocolate chip cookies at the cash register when you pay on the way out.

So maybe it's a day for comfort food in downtown Flint, which has already gotten about as bad as it can get and is already used to Big Busts and is even, contrary to reputation and in defiance of expectations for ourselves about as low as Sarah Palin at the VP debate, showing some signs of transformation.

The sun's out and my morning tea tastes good. We're going to have a new president soon. Hang on, my fellow Americans.