Election IV

by practicalspactical

I have voted for President four times. 

My first time, I was a freshman in college and took the train to NE Philly, and then took the train back, and was reading Game of Thrones (Storm of Swords) and missed my stop and wound up in N. Philly Station, the very heart of darkness, and found a cab and got in the cab and in my nervousness leapt into the front seat and rode with the cabbie back to 38th and Walnut my dorm, the Heavenly Hill House, and the cab driver was pro-life and had voted for Bush, and I had voted for Gore, because I am not stupid, and that night we all learned how stupid everyone was as it all went to shit and no one knew who or how was President ever and ever again — 

The next time, I was a graduate from college, and I was down in Elsewhere on election day, so I must have voted by absentee ballot prior, and I remember standing in line in Greensboro, NC, with G & S and happy teachers and we all all all happily voted for Obama and we stayed up and up that night at the Green Bean Cafe right on Elm Street and yet Ohio (I believe) they couldn’t call, late into the night, and I said, fine, I’ll go to bed, and went to bed, in that abandoned old building, by myself? sure, and I believe I was reading the Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, or maybe Gravity’s Rainbow, in a huge empty building on a little old metal bed – and then, the next morning, got up and walked down to the corner to look at the newspaper in the newspaper box which read “Bush Wins” — 

and so there was four more years of that

And four years later, I was a law student living in New York City, but I decided to go home to vote, in Pennsylvania, my swing state, and must have taken the train home, where, the night before, hard to say, this one is fuzzy, the great greatness of my excitement, and I went to vote — in the old location, or the new, hard to say, the old location I believe, the old, they had just moved into the new house — and came home, and watched the returns with my parents, and then must have called my girlfriend, N.S., who I loved (and love, though that love is full of bitterness) – and ah yes, the answer for the fuzziness is that this was the one time where I was deep deep deep in the depths of my depression — or maybe discombobulated, confused by the all the new bedrooms and new cities and new places I was being shunt to and from – it was a time of crisis, but still, a time of love, and that night, Obama won, and a couple months later, down I went to Washington DC with N.S. and the watch the man speak of hope to the heart of winter. 

And today. Discombobulated again. Poll watcher or lawyer. Woke up at 5 AM. Went to the polls. Opened the polls. Helped a handful. Then went to work. Filed a complaint. Helped a pair. Then sat nervous at my desk. Internet at my fingers. Waiting waiting waiting 

there must have been waiting on other days

but this day is the least fun; just a plug, just screens, just just just / more more more / ten more times — what does that mean — 44 years. 16,060 days. 23,126,400 minutes. I feel every one. I do not feel any one. I am not the President of the United States. and never will be — 

I am at the present — the open fringe of the present – I am Schrodinger’s Cat. 

Advertisement