Nothing’s gonna be alright.

In the past seven days, as “How are you doing?” has undergone its stunning transformation from empty pleasantry to imperative concern, I’ve had more recourse than usual to share with friends this performance of the Mose Allison classic “I Don’t Worry About A Thing,” which has been a longtime personal anthem.

Allison, who died yesterday in South Carolina, was one of the last living links to a world in which traditional jazz and blues forms were still a central part of popular culture. As the passage of time and the emergence of new styles caused that world to be eclipsed Allison’s star necessarily faded, but everything he did still sounds fresh and part of a personal project. Even his instrumental work retains his singular voice.

Mose Allison was 89.

★★★★ The sycamores were withered and bare; the maples still were thick with yellow and green, softly drooping. Light traced the chainlink fencing of the schoolyard and the ironwork on the townhouses across from the school and a vine in the ironwork. Far down a tunnel of shadow on a cross street was a glipse of the colors of the Park. The changes in the clouds through the day were subtle when looked at directly, but they sent the day swinging wildly between brightness and gloom before settling, early and definitely, into gloom.

It’s hardly sleep at all.

In December, we head south. My family of heathen Soviet Jews has no interest in Christmas, so we go see my in-laws, who live beyond the Mason-Dixon line, perched on blue lily pads in vast red swamps.

Wherever I go, I can’t sleep. I once read that only half of your brain goes to sleep the first night you spend in a place that isn’t home. It’s some evolutionary adaptation to keep you safe on the open savannah. My brain needs even longer. I lie in bed listening to the sounds of the house, reviewing what I know of the universe. Fact: There are so many guns in America. What happens in the aftermath of this election? Suburban houses are so isolated, with hedgerows and yards. We are all so far away from each other, aren’t we? After that, it’s time for a pep talk. Why am I terrible person? Oh, let me count the ways. I watch the sky change from inky black to bruisy purple.

The birds start singing and I fall asleep just as people in other parts of the house are beginning to stir. I’ve never been a morning person; in my mind, the hours between 5 and 11am are for sleeping. If I’ve spent the better part of the night writing a letter to my college self then I’d like to sleep as late as I can, please and thanks. The letter says, he will never leave his girlfriend, over and over again, Jack Torrance style.

But the holidays are different. There’s an expectation of togetherness or at least some crazy notion that everyone will have breakfast at the same time. As I drift into my morning sleep, I can feel the house awaken. Toilets flush, feet shuffle. Somehow without discussing it, they’ve all decided to wake up at 8, and gather in the kitchen, yawning and making coffee. The bed pulls me in deep; consciousness is not an option. Then, at 11am, Kenan comes into the room, gently pats me on the rump, and delivers the bad news. “Everyone is awake,” and even worse, “it’s time to get up.”

Feelings of shame and chagrin momentarily overpower my fatigue. I am so tired; if I were home, I would just stay in bed. But, no. My absence from breakfast has been noted. I’m late and out of step and they’ve already gone for a walk and played hide and seek and now they’re ready to leave the house if I could just get out of bed. This feels terrible. It’s like I’m the one giant weirdo in a house full of normals, and every morning, the distance between them and me grows longer and longer. I don’t belong here, or anywhere. I also want to go back to sleep.

Of course, I can see that this is all a vicious cycle of interconnectedness, with words like “anxiety” and “depression” swirling nearby. If my brain weren’t slightly broken, I wouldn’t mind being different. Everyone has their own internal clock, and mine is set to “sleep late.” At the same time, if my brain weren’t slightly broken, I probably wouldn’t spend hours in the middle of the night having one-sided conversations with a friend who I’ve had a falling out with. Or maybe I wouldn’t have had the falling out in the first place.

“And so this is Christmas. And what have you done?” I think to myself, accusingly. Being the last person to get up is like showing up drunk to a baby shower. I am disheveled and unsteady, while everyone else is freshly showered. “Is there coffee?” I have to ask sheepishly, because I don’t know where anything is, or how to operate the contraptions. I eat lunch, instead of breakfast, because it’s midday and the window for eggs and pancakes has closed. As the day goes on, I catch up. I throw myself into activities with extra zeal to compensate for sleeping through the morning shift.

A steady intake of sugar and alcohol makes the day bearable until it’s finally time for sleep. At bed time, I am transformed into the greatest optimist. I observe my sleep hygiene rules with the precision of an astronaut. No screens. Write in my journal. Read a book on paper. By the third or fourth day, my over-vigilant brain stands down its guard, and I sleep through the night, axe murderers be damned. Just as I start to catch up, running now to breakfast when everyone is still at the table, lingering over crusts of their bagels, it’s time to go home. I miss my bed like it’s a person, and she welcomes me home without judgment.

Katia Bachko is an editor in New York.

Holiday Dread is The Awl’s series dedicated to the season of joy and other emotions. Previously:

Holiday Dread: “When Are You Having Kids?”

Sure, why the hell not.

Today, People magazine named Dwayne “The Rock“ Johnson 2016’s Sexiest Man Alive, and currently, #SexiestManAlive is trending in the United States. Every time someone tweets using that hashtag, a little emoji autopopulates next to it:

Hm. That view’s a little small. Siri: enhance.

Still pretty small. I guess that illustrates my point, though, which is: this image requires too much detail to be scaled so teenie tiny. Is a biceps curl emblematic of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Of course! And I bet this illustration looked amazing when it was 1,000% bigger and someone was animating it on a tablet in a cafe wearing a gem tone in front of an exposed-brick wall But at this size, this emoji could also be:

• a coat hook
• a coconut shrimp
• a fetus
• a scorpion
• Cape Cod
• someone waving hello

When you think about it, winning the title of “most sexual penis haver” is kind of like beating the final boss of masculine power. It announces that 1) you are desirable; 2) more so than your peers, whose dicks are much less in demand, and; 3) you are not dead. The big three. The large trois. Twitter could’ve gone for something simple and elegant like a heart or a trophy, but they didn’t. They went big. They went a little overboard, tbh. And maybe even realized they’d gone overboard at some point during the design process, but figured, “It’s too late to stop now,” which is actually a historically masculine tradition. So maybe that ability to make you frown and say, “What’s that?” is actually this emoji’s greatest asset, and it’s a perfect visual representation of #SexiestManAlive. Hm.

Never mind.

Good emoji, Twitter.

Stuff yourself stupid with McRib, it’s the only thing that makes sense anymore

Every year, McDonald’s releases the McRib sandwich. A limited-time offer, the menu item is only available for a few weeks, leading legions of McDonald’s fans to try and figure out which restaurants are carrying it and how many they have left. For the last few years, fan-created McRib locators have popped up on the internet.

Now, for the first time, McDonald’s is leading the charge, with a new iOS 10 McRib Finder iMessage app. It doesn’t ask for a zip code, using the device’s location to help customers find the closest McRib, then share that with friends. There’s also a McRib keyboard attached with stickers.

The McRib is back! And McDonalds is making it much easier for you to find one, which will help them to market their pre-masticated toxins at you with increased efficiency in the future. Anyway: WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE McRIB? Funny you should ask.

A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage

Pass me the mashed potatoes while you think of an answer.

Holiday Dread is The Awl’s series dedicated to the season of joy and other emotions.

Keep your bad dreams close.

I had a couple of really intense bad dreams last night. I am not going to tell you about the dreams or speculate as to what they mean (because dreams are meaningless) but I do want to note that now when you jolt awake and realize it was all a dream, the feeling of relief only lasts a couple of seconds before you remember that what is happening in real life is so much worse. Since we are told these days that the most important thing is to find the bright side I will say that at the very least this makes sleep — the one thing left in my life that brought me pure joy — even that much more appealing. Now I can go to bed hoping I never wake up, not even to stop the nightmares!

Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy.

★★★★ A contrail broad and dense enough to block the sun shone like a razor clam shell. The bill of a passing starling was pale between its flying dark body and the blue above. Branches and their shadows tossed outside the church, till a bright spot of the wavering light found and held the face and wings of upraised arm of the angel at the center of the dark window behind the altar. In the afternoon, as the five-year-old kicked a soccer ball around the forecourt, leaves scraped along the pavement, south to north and north to south, and helicopter and siren sounds carried from the distance. Down on Columbus Circle, the police behind their barricades were variously dressed for everything from a passing chill to a hard deep freeze.

Shrunken heads, ‘Enchanted Tiki’ apparel, and a Shakespearean goblet

Lot 1: A Handful of Skulls

To cast your thoughts toward something more cheerful than last week’s election, try seven tiny reminders of your mortality. Carved from ivory, porcelain, fruitwood, and metal, these miniature memento mori, dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, are slated for auction in London later this month. The phrase memento mori, often symbolized by skulls or skeletons, translates as “remember you must die.” They were all the rage among Puritans, and pretty on-trend for 2016 too.

This grouping is one of several eclectic auction lots within the delightfully named sale, Seward Kennedy’s Cabinet of Curiosities and the Tony Robinson Collection of Treen Drinking Vessels (not tween; treen, which means wooden in ye olde English). Kennedy, who met his end last year at the age of 89, had amassed, according to the auction catalogue, “Thousands upon thousands of idiosyncratic objects layered as thick as impasto on tabletops, shelves and in tumbled piles throughout his two residences on Park Avenue in New York City and Norland Square in London’s Notting Hill.”

As they say, you can’t take it with you. Soon this collection of craniums, despite their empty eye sockets, will peer out onto someone else’s life — whomever is willing to bid about £1,000 ($1,250).

Lot 2: The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Dress

At a ‘Souvenirs of Disneyland’ auction in California next weekend, a gloriously kitschy vintage dress from 1963, the year the Enchanted Tiki Room debuted, will be on offer. Female cast members wore this get-up to welcome visitors to the South Seas-inspired show, with its squawking animatronic birds and talking Tiki statues. Bidding for this original starts at $400.

The garish uniforms, designed by Imagineer Rolly Crump, “were so popular that they were later made available for sale in Adventureland retail outlets,” according to the auctioneer. Speaking of which, this one is a women’s size small — can we get ModCloth on a replica stat?

Gentlemen, do not despair: two vintage ‘Enchanted Tiki’ men’s shirts are also available. True ‘Tiki’ enthusiasts might also be interested a “park-used animatronic sparrow prop” for $30,000.

Lot 3: The Holy Grail

William Shakespeare spent the last nineteen years of his life in Stratford-upon-Avon, where, it is said, he planted a mulberry tree in his garden in 1609. A subsequent property owner demolished the house, but the tree remained, and when the souvenir hunters began arriving, hopeful to snag a literary relic … timber! Whittlers turned Shakespeare’s mulberry into many different kinds of commemorative trinkets — some would say too many to believe.

This elaborately carved goblet, which goes under the hammer on November 17th, was made by one John Marshall in 1864 on the occasion of Shakespeare’s 300th birthday, with wood sourced from another carver of Shakespeare keepsakes. Decorative acorns, vines, and a bust of the Bard adorn the chalice, as does the line from Hamlet, “We shall not look upon his like again.”

“Realistically speaking, objects carved from Shakespeare’s mulberry tree are the closest one can get to owning an item directly associated with The Immortal Bard,” declares the San Francisco-based auctioneer, who estimates the cup’s worth at $10,000-$15,000.

Rebecca Rego Barry is the author of Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places.

Emerging from devastation, and last week’s election

“Dude, I’m not even sure what to do with myself anymore. What can I do in the face of all this post-election insanity?” — Scared Steve

The election is over but the crazy will be here to stay. All week long I’ve had a knot in my chest. I’m scared, too. If you’re a fan of blue politics, it’s going to be a tough couple of years with few chances of bright spots. People are already talking about 2018’s midterm elections, but Democrats have to defend Senate seats in some very red places. It’s possible that things could go very wrong very quickly during the coming Republican takeover of the Federal government. But that’s not something I’d be counting on. I was kinda counting on a Hillary Clinton Administration.

The first 100 days of the Trump Administration could be a pretty grim march toward undoing anything you possibly liked about the Obama years. Imagine a Supreme Court with a much more Scalia-like replacement of Justice Scalia. And an 83 year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

If you are interested in resisting the coming Trumpism, you probably already know how to do that. The President-Elect is famously thin-skinned, and the daily protests across this country are getting his goat. Kellyanne Conway of the Trump Campaign said that protesters were getting paid. If any of you are getting paid, please let me know. That sounds like a sweet gig. I would sign up for that.

So march in the street; it will definitely make you feel better. You could give President Trump and his people a chance to run this country better than they ran their campaign. I wouldn’t hold out hope. When Republican government isn’t able to improve the lives of their electoral base, I imagine those people will turn on them hard. They have been massively lied to and a bitter reckoning will be on its way. Who will the Republicans have to scapegoat now? Some lone filibustering Democratic senator? Republicans will have to govern. Something they haven’t had to seriously do for a while.

The first thing you could focus on would be local elections. Republicans are dangerously close to commanding enough state legislatures to hold a Constitutional Congress. If you think one of those would be a ton of fun, good luck. They’ll have us wearing black and white Pilgrim outfits with big buckles everywhere.

I don’t know if we can meme and hashtag our way out of this. I won’t be wearing any safety pins. I will have to prove every day with my actions that I’m not a Trump voter. Ben said Wednesday was the day he’s felt the worst since 9/11. One thing that immediately followed 9/11 was a rise in racism against Muslims. And a temporary gentleness and deference to others. Stores hung American flags in their windows to prove they were pro-American. But people also treated each other a little nicer, for a while. Maybe we should try that.

We must call out the racism, misogyny and bigotry we encounter however we can. Racists are rejoicing. If Trump will not disown them they must be held accountable elsewhere. All this stuff is pretty self-evident. The media will celebrate a Trump presidency as if this had been a normal election with a normal victor and not a dreary and outrageous pander party to the very worst impulses America has to offer.

Chances are Trump will not be able to finish his presidency. He already seems pretty bored. No doubt he will farm out the actual work of being president to the people underneath him. Who all have questionable ethical histories themselves. Sooner or later President Trump will probably cross a line that will get himself in hot water even with his own party. They’d love to be free of him and put someone like Mike Pence in charge. He’s a more reliable Republican. A kinder face for the same policies.

All this stuff has been pretty depressing for me. But not nearly as sad as the murder of one of my co-workers this week. It’s unspeakably devastating, and for me this election stuff has been easy to digest in comparison. Syasia was one of the sweetest people I have ever met. And for her young life to be snuffed out so brutally has shaken me. I don’t understand why bad things happen to wonderful people. Syasia was kind and generous and just tried to make people smile. She made everyone’s life around her better. I will try to learn that from her. I will try to bring those things to the world, too.

What can we do now? I’m not sure. I’m working my way through this, like many others. It’s shocking to find out that maybe America isn’t what we thought it was. And that many in America could be fooled by such an obviously dubious leader. Maybe this is a lesson America has to learn the hard way. We’ve had bad presidents. We’ve had racist, bigoted, misogynist leadership. I thought that was a lesson we’d already learned. I was wrong. We need to learn it again.

I’ve heard lots of people say that they’ll be moving to Canada. I understand that impulse. For the people that stay here and do not agree with the prevailing wave, let’s figure out smart ways to fight this agenda together. Let’s have fun doing it. As bad as we feel right now, change is still possible for us. By organizing, by appealing to the best in what America can be, by voting. I’ll see you out there and I’ll try to make you smile. Like Syasia McBurroughs always made me smile.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.