Everything’s still here — but it’s been moved around, like a burglar came in while we were out at the movies. It makes for an uncomfortable scene in your own home.

Stephen Colbert had a similar sort of night, it turns out, but his was televised.

1. Now we’ll have a First Lady we can see naked on the internet if we want.
2. No excuses for GOP now.
3. Now that there’s no opposition to drop bombs on, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc., soon out of business?
4. Won’t have to ever hear from Hillary Clinton again.
5. Good material for comedians for at least four years.
6. Good daily reminder of principles I don’t share. Keeps me strong.

The election was called about three hours ago, but the result was obvious almost from the start, when the first returns started to come in.

Hats off to my friend Doug. Months ago, he called it. He pointed at the Brexit and gasped, and then he closely tracked what was coming, with mounting alarm. I owe him dinner. I wish I could feel good about his winning the point. (He doesn’t feel good about it either.)

I’m already over my anger and my sadness. Life goes on tomorrow. If we’re going to have a global recession because of this, as is the hot topic at the moment, I refuse to contribute to it. I’m going to get up tomorrow and fight for my little corner of the economy just like every other day.

I also won’t root against President-elect Trump. Yes, it’s hard to even write the title; I loathe him. But what I did like was his victory speech. It was completely unexpected in tone, being  generous of spirit, and just what we needed, in calling for people to come together. I hope we’ll see more of that. I will oppose him and his positions when I disagree, which will be almost all the time, but I have to hope for him to succeed. You see, I live with him. So do you. So does everyone else on the planet. So we must hope for the best.

What little anger I have left, after this long and exhausting and disgusting national contest, is directed at the media who made billions of dollars off the Trump campaign before finally approaching it as a serious candidacy, and, especially, at many of the elders in the Democratic party. Two years ago, I said to many of those people, “Ready for Hillary?!?!? NO, I’m not ready for Hillary. I want an actual contest with actual primaries.”  But party elders worked to clear the field for her — and here we are. Eight years ago, she was beaten by an inexperienced and (let me say it) black man, against all odds — and then this year was almost beaten by an elderly, socialist, Jewish Senator from Vermont with almost zero track record of success. And tonight she was beaten by a misogynistic, profiteering tyro with no understanding of the job requirements. So you know who I’m blaming right now? The Democrats who actively discouraged an actual contest and pushed the nomination of an unpopular candidate with a history of blowing a lead.

But the dirt is already on that coffin. And after the burial, life goes on.

I’m sharing this, from FiveThirtyEight.com — back from yesterday, which now seems like a millennium ago, back when 538 still had a relevant business model. As of 2 minutes ago, they’re the new Pets.com.

I voted weeks ago.

So Donald Trump’s extremely compelling last-minute argument that he’d just make everything great unfortunately came too late.

Having read the latest polls, I can now confidently make this prediction:

When all the counting is done tomorrow night, I will have just as many votes in the electoral college as Gary Johnson and Jill Stein COMBINED. And I didn’t have to make an ass of myself to do it.

I am not the best stage director I know.

I’m not even the 20th best stage director I know.

And probably not the 50th.

But after 40 years of directing for the stage, starting in my teens, I do know some things, and I thought I’d share them. These specific bits of advice — very specific — follow from a play I saw recently. In no particular order, I offer these quick takeaways for directors everywhere:

• When a character says “pass me the hot-water pitcher,” please make sure that it’s a water pitcher. And that it appears to be filled with hot water. This will entail having the actor who has grabbed it by its side pull his hand away as though it’s been burned. Or, perhaps, he could grab it  by the handle. Either way, help us believe that it’s a pitcher, that it’s the right pitcher for the set, and that it’s filled with hot water.
• When we are led to believe that a character is yelling down a flight of stairs for another character to enter, and then the first character steps into the scene, don’t have the second character immediately follow — because then we’ll know that he was right outside the door, next to her, all along, for God’s sake.
• If the play is set in the 1960’s, do not have print art on the walls that all of us in attendance can recognize as being unmistakably from the 1980s.
• And don’t mix those prints with pastoral prints popularized in the 1950s.
• Along the same line, if you’re going to have three pairs of chairs on stage, can they at least have a glancing similarity? Like — they’re from the same period, or design type? Otherwise, you’re making us believe that the upper-middle-class couple you’re trying to make us believe lives there is, well, psychotic.
• If the set designer says, “Hey! I’ve got an idea! When they talk about other countries, they could refer to a globe, so I’m going to pick up a children’s globe from some thrift shop and stick it on the sideboard next to what we’re supposed to believe is a fancy tea service,” you should worry about your set designer.
• If a character is described as old and frail, and the play consistently refers to him as old and frail, may I suggest that you cast someone who can appear as old and frail? Middle-aged and well-built isn’t going to do it.
• When someone says “Pass the teapot,” engineer the action is such a way that the teapot is not literally already touching the requesting person’s resting hand at the time.
• If we are led to believe that the old and frail man is homeless, do not outfit him in a brand-new coat. Insight:  People who live on the street are frequently dirty.
• If he’s going to be barefoot, perhaps dirty up his feet. (See the note just preceding.)
• If one character says to another — who is the homeless man, and who we are told has been trying to sell matches out in the rain for days — “These matches are all wet!” then please make the matchboxes soggy. We can see them. If they look like they were just purchased from Smart n’ Final, here’s what we are going to think: “Those were just purchased from Smart n’ Final!” While Smart n’ Final is only a mile away, this reminder of its proximity is troubling for a play set in another country.
• If you hear that one of your actors delivers almost every line in the same manner, the two of you should investigate variance. (Or replacement.)
• If your actors are doing an accent, insist on the same accent. Both collectively and individually.
• Try sitting in the house while directing. At least a couple of times. One of the things you may discover is that your lights are fucking blinding the audience on several occasions during the play. When you see people pick up their program to shield their eyes, that is an indicator. Heed it.
• Dissuade the house manager or whoever she is from giving a curtain speech from the stage. If she insists on doing this, make sure she’s back off that stage before your play starts.
• If you are directing a three-character play, cast three good actors. Or, for God’s sake, settle for two if necessary. Even just one if that’s all you can manage. But at least that one.
• Finally, don’t ask your friends how the play is. They’re your friends, so they’ll just lie. Invite an audience in a couple of times, for rehearsals here and there, or for previews, and ask them to be brutally honest. If they say to you that they honestly can’t tell you what the play was about, or what those actors were talking about, and perhaps can’t even recount any of the events of the play, and finally they just spent the time reading the program or checking out the light plot, you should listen. Before the rest of us have to pay money for it.

Donald Trump, as someone who doesn’t pay his bills, and who denies saying just about anything he’s said, knows a thing or two about falsehood, cheating, lying, and manipulation. He’d fit right in at these 6 Infamous Places of Political Corruption.

On Saturday night, my wife and I went to a Halloween costume party. I knew one or two of her friends a little bit, but got to meet a lot of smart, interesting people — who were dressed up as Alice from Wonderland, a pair of breasts, a secretary from “Mad Men,” and so forth. It was a low-key affair with food, drinks and conversation. I had two beers then switched to water, so the wife could drink whatever she wanted and I could drive us both home if needed.

Long after most people had left, a new guest showed up. He was a youngish black guy, friendly, but not wearing a costume. He brought up politics — the issue I had strenuously avoided all night — when he loudly announced that he couldn’t vote for the “warmonger” Hillary Clinton, and so he was going to vote for… Jill Stein.

Then he proceeded to tell us why.

For the record, Jill Stein is a whackadoodle who supports all sorts of discredited anti-science theories. She opposes vaccination, but supports debunked “alternative therapy” medical treatments, which is especially distressing for a medical doctor, and doesn’t show the slightest understanding of how our economy or our national security systems work.

As he went on in his fervor for Jill Stein, he also wandered into other conspiracy theories, fashionable and not. If you hadn’t heard that the Rothschilds control the world; that the FDA is poisoning us as part of an experiment, or that (somehow) Mummer Gaddafi had had something to do with most of that (?) that you were just uninformed.

I couldn’t help drawing him out. I started asking questions, and getting straight-faced answers. Whenever I gently tried to rebut something, he replied that anything I said was just “philosophy.” “No,” I said, “it’s a fact. I live in the fact-based universe.” “There are no facts,” he said, “just philosophy.”

By this point, my wife was making serious frowning faces at me and jerking her head toward the door. But I wanted to hear more.

“I’ll tell you a fact,” I said. “If you put your hand in there–” I pointed to the fire pit we were sitting around — “it’ll burn. That’s a fact.”

“That’s philosophy!” he said.

I asked him to define “philosophy,” but he couldn’t.

I have to say, he never grew belligerent, and he seemed like a friendly, if animated, guy. He kept checking to make sure that we were okay — even while everyone else around the circle grew very uneasy at this exchange. At one point when he was afraid he’d overstepped because he caught my wife’s strained face, he leaned over to give me a friendly fist bump to show solidarity, even though he was somewhere in the eighth dimension and I was still on planet Earth.

Finally, when he said that Bill and Hillary Clinton had eight “hurricane machines” strategically positioned at various places around the globe, a young woman near me leaned in and said, “WHAAT? Why  would they do that?!?” Right-o, because the Clintons, if self-serving, would never wantonly damage their property.

At some point, I grew tired of talking to him. As the proverb goes, “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him.” My fun exhausted, I agreed to leave when my wife strenuously suggested it again.

In the car, I said to her, “He seems like a nice guy. He’s not stupid — he’s done a lot of research and a lot of reading, just all of it bad. He’s just terribly misinformed.” Here was a guy who had seemingly read every crackpot theory on the internet, I told her — and believed all of them.

My wife looked at me. “You just met 75% of American voters.”

And that, less than two weeks before the election, was the scariest thing I’ve heard this Halloween season.

Twice, this piece on Politico says that a conservative PAC is spending “$500,000 million” on just this one GOP Congresswoman’s re-election. That’s… um… half a trillion dollars. Or, as I think of it: even more money than Trump lost in any given even year.

(Update:  They’ve corrected it. Now the PAC is spending “only” $500,000 — to protect a GOP House member in normally ultra-red Utah.)