So the day is finally here, when the US electorate choose between making a normal human being head of state, or a narcissistic, misogynistic felonious fantasist. Not a tricky decision you’d think from the outside in, but we in the UK have no room to talk, I mean, Boris Jonson.

So I’m zoning out. Or trying to, because it’s too excruciating, especially when you have loads of competing inner voices and not a crumb of power to influence events. I manage no mind-changing logarithms, neither am I a modern-day influencer with bazillions of social media followers – I don’t even have a vote – which truly sucks because this time it does feel like the outcome will have real implications in what used to be called the free world. So best to keep me head down, thoughts and voices under control and hope for the best, I reckon. Thus far, I’ve walked the dog, dug up the summer tomatoes and swept up and green-binned my own body weight of autumnal leaves – working not thinking. Working not thinking. Big mistake those leaves though because, as I looked into the kaleidoscopic eternity of strobing yellows and crimsons and crispy ochres, my back-brain started, whether I liked it or not, to consider the nature of reality, truth, power and belief. ‘The truth is a bloody chameleon’ it thought, ‘if half the US electorate think voting for Trump is a good idea.’

‘A good idea,’ my front brain postured. ‘predicated on their believing there is genuine truth in his proclamations that he’s smart, brilliant and going to get rid of every single problem and (dare I say) Make America Great Again.

And they defo do believe in him, in the face of logic, reason, evidence, science and facts – believe in him in a religious way maybe? Like the Taliban in Afghanistan right now believe it’s wrong, evil even, for women to have agency over any aspect of their own lives, to be educated, speak outside, even hear each other. Seems crazy, but believe it they do. Not that we have much room to talk here in the lets-call-it, west. I mean it’s only 150 years ago that in the UK married women had no rights to property, their own kids, their own money. Mid Victorian women had no vote, no rights and no agency over their lives – and that’s less than a nanosecond ago geologically speaking. We really should remember that when we find it hard to reconcile ourselves to what we currently think is unconscionable. In my own grandmother’s lifetime, women were seen as fundamentally weak mentally and physically, way stupider than men, either rampant for sex or totally asexual and with a wandering womb that needed to create children or it would float upstairs and drive its owner insane (the actual derivation of the word hysterical) – a constructed narrative line believed by most British men and women not all that long ago. In my own lifetime rape in marriage was not a crime

‘But why do humans make up stories like they do?, continued my back-brain as I shovelled the leaves trying not to think about the Trump conundrum. ‘About ourselves and gods and monsters? Stories that become much more than stories, that become reality because they are made into reality by the people who come to believe them?’

‘Yes’ agreed my front brain, falling into the trap, ‘because humans can make their imaginings reality (skyscrapers, i-Phones) which we can all agree, only existed once in someones imagination. In fact, is reality and therefore truth even an absolute at all? Do either even exist outside the human mind? Is a tree still a tree if no-one sees it?’

I looked at the leaves, pretty sure,they would still exist if I didn’t. An undeniable truth therefore. So far so good. And I’m sure because I used my senses, my firsthand experience to be absolutely certain. I breathed in their musky aroma as I shovelled a heavy spade-full into the wheelie, to magnify the point.

‘But what about believing in things beyond firsthand experience? Like events you only see on the internet? Or what about ‘evidence’ that comes out of the mouths and minds of people who want to control others? Surely they’ll say anything to convince others of their truth. And what about faith? That’s a right bugger faith is, because not only does religious faith claim truth exists beyond reality and human perception, it says that using your firsthand evidence is bad. To have religious faith you need to set aside primary experience and simply believe despite the evidence, to just take a leap of well… faith.

Too. Many. Voices. And too many questions. I counted backward from ten to shut them the chuff up then wheelied the bin down the path. When I let myself think again it was cautiously, about something safe, like wheelie bins.

Wheelie bins didn’t exist when I was a kid, we just had tin dustbins full of mixed rubbish, unsorted plastics, food waste and not a thought about recyclables. The bins were way too heavy to lift but no matter because binmen came two by two every week, right up the backyard and carried them out and tipped them into the bin lorry for you. And never mind bins, said my unquenchable back-brain, there was defo no such thing as wheelie luggage. When you think about it reality didn’t require wheelie luggage in 1969. Before the wars, anyone who could afford to travel had serfs or servants to carry their massive trunks for them. Anyone who was someone didn’t lug luggage – that was for underlings and so wheelie luggage just didn’t exist.. Why would it, especially since said servants and their luggage struggles were supposed to be almost invisible so as not to annoy their high-minded masters. Fast forward to 1980 and everyone in the lets call it free world could afford to go on grand(ish) tours – well have a couple of weeks at leisure in Europe – and suddenly luggage lugging was seen, experienced. It’s not that the truth changed – it was just reevaluated. Like women not being capable of running their own lives. Yup its a weird chameleon, the truth, reality, control of our own environment.

I left the wheelie bin on the road determined to stop pointless pondering, determined to go inside and write till all this election malarky is over, thanking my lucky stars that I write fiction to channel these random, powerless over-thought thinkings. This aftie, I’m going to fall back into my work- in-progress – a let’s-call-it novel, sci-fi about all these issues – fake truth, manmade belief systems and the stories we tell ourselves when trying to make sense of the inexplicable. Here’s some info about it. I entered the start of it into a comp in the summer and it was shortlisted – mine’s the ninth one down https://www.firstpagesprize.com/fiction-shortlist

Also below is a flash fiction I wrote to channel other emotional mind meanderings (follow the link under this paragraph) which came second in this year’s Cambridge flash prize if you fancy distracting yourself from current events by having a teeny read. But be aware, it carries a content warning, https://theshortstory.co.uk/words-and-sayings-by-jan-kaneen/

Writing is such an important part of my mental wellbeing. Hostile Environments, my collection of short and short-short stories that comes out next August from Northodox Books, is full of vented fears – there’s even a story in it about Donald Trump who, so there can be no room for doubt, I hope will not be president of America when that story is published, in fact I’m praying to all the gods I don’t believe in he’s not. True story.