Doom And Gloom On Sunday

It is six thirty in the morning on Sunday, and I get the espresso machine heated up and make myself a cup of coffee.  While it settles I open the front door half hoping that the paper will have arrived, but knowing that it is the weekend the Sunday Times is, as one delivery person once remarked, "a bitch to assemble," but, lo, there indeed it is on my mat.  God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world, I intoned to my inner self.  As I bent to pick it up, I instinctively tensed my calf muscles to counteract the tendency to topple over which is a common plight of the elderly, only to discover upon closer inspection that the paper was an enormous heavy mass in its blue plastic weatherproof wrapper.  It was indeed very heavy to lift; my stance was only just able to manage this and return to an erect position. Could they have packed two papers in here by mistake?  Once back into air conditioned heaven I tore off the wrapper.  No, there were the customary front section, travel, business, style, magazine, but, aha, five heavy special sections of all the arts and leisure of the upcoming "season."  Yes, the season, something one really misses down here in faraway Sarasota, where not even movies worth seeing manage to penetrate into the dread monolith of cineplex culture.  I take my coffee to my comfy chair where I have already deposited what is surely enough paper to constitute one whole tree.  I read the front page.  Mrs.Clinton in struggling in Florida, Mr. Trump made his fortune through manipulating tax breaks, a Harlem girl lies in a hospital bed on life support from having been randomly shot. "Assad smiles while Syria burns" and the back story of the two prison escapees and how they survived fill out the front page.  The deep foreboding which fills me night and day wells up.  I set the paper aside, something I almost never do. I am not sure that I can make it through until Election Day. Luckily I am exposed to television only at the gym when I am on the treadmill.  But my beloved Times!  I know that it always peddles pessimism a legacy of its history as a New York paper of record created by Jewish mothers who are always expecting the worst, but still . . . . .I pick up a novel I was reading yesterday.