Samain and the Moon of Radical Change
Tuesday gratefuls in post below
Midday reflections. Distracted, edgy. Finding it hard to focus. Sifting through various websites. 538. NPR. NYT. WP. Everyone’s so well, I’m not sure yet, yes he has a chance, you can’t tell what all the early voting means.
Cleaned my computer screen. Keyboard. Swept up around the computer and table. Keeping busy with thing that don’t need to be done. Now or even soon.
It’s only 1:50 pm, Mountain Standard Time. Polls are open. Ballots take marks. Get put in machines. ID’s get checked. I served several elections as an election judge in Anoka County. It’s stultifyingly boring work. Unless a problem happens. Hmmm. Can we accept the trash collectors bill as evidence of residence? No, that ballot is spoiled, you’ll have to do another. All the time sitting in metal folding chairs. After a while these old hips were not happy, especially since we had to get there before 7 am and couldn’t leave until the polls were closed, the machines tallied, and printed out. Right now there’s some old whitefella or blackfella deciding this is the last year to put up with this nonsense.
For the individual voting is or at least can be, a fraught process. Do I really have to say? Is it necessary to choose only one? What does that proposition or referendum really mean? Do I care? But it’s over in a matter of a few minutes. Unless you dither. A lot. The aggregate of all these actions is not over in a matter of minutes. Sometimes not even days, weeks, months. It was 36 days after the election that Gore conceded to Bush II. We’re in for a pins and needles moment collectively and it could last (please election gods, no!) into 2021.
Distraction quotient on the rise. It’s now 3:20 p.m. Nobody really knows what’s happening. All of us have a guess, but guesses are worse than polls. Aren’t they?
Gonna post this and go downstairs. I bought a prime rib roast for Kate and me. Baked potato, Caesar salad. Cookies. This is a celebratory meal in anticipation of Biden’s win. Kate suggested if, god forbid, Trump wins, that we have liver and onions tomorrow. Penance. If that happens, I’ll feel like liver and onions so I won’t need to ingest it. But, I don’t think it will. This will have been a prescient meal, a foreshadowing of the good about to drape itself over our Covid tattered shoulders. May it be so. Blessed be.