Tuesday, November 02, 2004
We are right in the middle of it, it's 10:30 PM on election day, all the swing states are up in the air, and I have no idea what's going to happen. But I do know this. After tonight, I'm done for a while. Win or lose, I'm on hiatus until the first of January. I appreciate the time you have spent reading this, but no matter who wins, for god's sake, I've had more than enough of politics. My daughter will be born on the 11th of November, and I intend to spend my time falling as completely and irrevocably as I can in love with her.
Since I won't be here to say it at the appropriate time, happy thanksgiving, hannukah, kwanzaa, and christmas. Come on back, and I will wish you happy new year in person.
Thanks again. Amen!
11/02/2004
Monday, November 01, 2004
Are we winning? Are we losing? The polls are hopelessly contradictory, both sides can point to a hundred reasons why their side is going to win, the whole thing is just accelerating, it's like christmas morning multiplied by vertigo multiplied by the short space of silence before the foreman reads the verdict at my trial for a murder I didn't commit. We the jury find the defendant...
I feel....well, here's how I feel. Do you remember that scene at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Indy is standing in a doorway that lets out into a huge crevasse, with no apparent way across to the other side? He sees his objective over there, a room full of many goblets, one of which, ostensibly, is the Holy Grail. But there is no bridge, no rope, nothing, just yawning distance, a disastrous fall, many thousands of feet down to death, and the roots of the earth. But there is no other way forward - this must be the path. Others must have crossed this chasm before. So, screwing up his courage, Indy shuts his eyes, jams his leg straight out like a stormtrooper, and lets himself fall forward.
And, of course, his shoe drops firmly onto the bridge that was there all along, just invisible, cunningly camouflaged, waiting for a sheer act of faith and optimism to show the way. An election, any attempt to dislodge an administration, especially one that has sunk roots so quickly into the bedrock institutions of the government, that has aggressively remade the act of governance in its own image and lashed out at anyone who has dared to criticize or question, it seems like an unacheivable task. But I just feel like the bridge is there. The bridge is there - it just has to be. How else could anyone else have ever gotten across?
And once we get there, of course, we find that we haven't even succeeded yet. We still have another test yet to go. We have to pick a cup and drink from it, and if we pick wrong, all the flesh will melt off our bones, and our bodies will detonate from the inside, rattling our dessicated skeleton against the rock wall as the creepy five-hundred year old knight watches and says "He chose...unwisely."
Okay, maybe the metaphor can get pushed too far. But the first part was right!
Happy election day.
11/01/2004
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