Pioneers

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I wrote the other day about my great-great-grandmother Mary Rowe, who got involved in a stupid mid-1800s hoax which encouraged people to believe they were entitled to a share of downtown Manhattan property if they could prove their descent from a woman named Anneke Jans Bogardus (sort of the 19th-century equivalent of Nigerian lottery emails). Mary Rowe, according to the family records, died insane.

I'm lucky to have such a well-documented family. Some of my relatives – especially my aunt Louise Williams Ingraham – have been very good about collecting and documenting everything. And my grandmother Minnie Bromley Williams was very scrupulous about writing down everything she could think of: her own family history, her husband's family history, stories, the lot.

This is my grandmother talking about her father, Herrick Bromley:

“My father was twenty-one years old when he ventured west in 1848 to make his fortune. He came west with a partner. Herrick drove a span of mules. San Francisco was just a small mining town. Herrick and his partner made it good in gold dust. Herrick bought sheep and lost about all he made from the wolves killing them.”

I love that turn of phrase: “made it good in gold dust.” She was a smart cookie, my grandma.

Later, she tells the story of her father and his two kids coming north to Washington Territory in the 1880s:

“Herrick told the two younger children, Albert and Etta, that they were headed for the North Pole. When they got to Bickleton [Washington Territory], they saw a tree stripped of its bark by the Indians so it resembled a barber pole. The children shouted for joy. Weary and tired of traveling, they shouted they had finally reached their destination because there was the North Pole. Herrick was willing to be convinced . . .”

My other paternal great-grandfather, Harrison Williams, was known (no kidding) as “The Traveling Man.” He was a salesman, and a charmer; he did a little bit of everything. The earlier pictures of him remind me of Harold Hill from “The Music Man.” He looks plausible, if you see what I mean. He had a tough little wife – my great-grandmother Nora – who took care of things at home. The above photo, probably taken around 1920, shows both of them leaning on a tire in front of the gas station / general store they owned and operated. My great-grandfather Harrison looks scrawny but spry; my great-grandmother Nora looks murderous.

You just remember that, you city folk. I may look like a regular citified daffodil on the outside, but inside I'm pure Yosemite Sam.

Now get out of here, you varmints!

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Fame and fortune

 

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I am descended from many generations of unwealthy and unfamous people.  No surprise there.  (I had a great-great-grandmother who fell for the Anneke Jans Bogardus hoax of the mid-1800s, which entailed proving your descent from Dutch royalty, but she died insane, so there you go.)  I marvel, though, at how money and fame and position go rippling through the generations.  There must be something Darwinian at work.  Once you’ve got any of those three things, you will pass it/them along to your kids.

 

And all three of those things buy access.

 

Access to a good education.  Access to other influential people who may be helpful in life.  Access to leisure time, and good food, and a nice house.  All of these leading to net positives for one’s own offspring, and so on.

 

They also buy recognition, and the appearance of worth.  The children of wealthy/prominent people seem better and worthier than our own children.  (Well, my children are stuffed animals, so it goes without saying in my case.)

 

Every time I find out that someone is somebody else’s brother / sister / uncle / grandmother, I become just a little more cynical about this.  I like A. O. Scott’s movie reviews in the Times, for example – and now I find out he’s the nephew of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.  Hmph!  Anderson Cooper I knew about.  I don’t begrudge him anything, he’s smart and cute and seems nice.  Chris Cuomo on ABC is a big harmless goofball of a journalist, but he’d be stuck behind a desk in Waukegan if he didn’t have that Cuomo name. 

 

And now, hey ho, Bristol Palin is hoofing her way to heaven on “Dancing with the Stars.”

 

Bristol’s family’s fame is of recent vintage, to be sure.   Until very recently, the whole brood was stuck in an icebox up north. 

 

Then lightning struck, and now all the Palins are celebrities. 

 

I don’t care so much about Bristol Palin myself; I wouldn’t know her in a crowd if I tripped over her.  But she appears to be doing okay on “Dancing with the Stars,” although her dancing is mediocre at best.  Are people voting for her because they like her style, or because they feel good about the Palin dynasty? 

 

Oh, hell, who cares?  Ultimately we stand or stumble on our own, whether or not Mom's storm troopers vote for us. 

 

 And dynasties don't last forever. 

 

Usually no more than three or four hundred years, anyway. 

 

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Kid stuff: Sparky Schulz

 

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We are dismissive of anything labeled “kid stuff.” If a book or a movie is marketed toward “young audiences,” we tend automatically to assume it's mediocre at best. And some media / art forms – animation, comics – are automatically consigned to the “kid stuff” bin.

 

But everything in the bin doesn't necessarily belong there. The author / artist may well have had children in mind, but that doesn't mean that the art is childish.

 

Charles Schulz – well, hats off, gentlemen, a genius. I grew up with “Peanuts,” and I still get a thrill from the sharpness of the dialogue and the simplicity of the drawings. There's also the bizarre juxtaposition of everyday reality – school, baseball, lunch, holidays – with the distinctly surreal atmosphere created by a dog who pretends he's a World War I flying ace, and whose best friend is a bird who communicates in long strings of punctuation marks.

 

For a long time, I assumed Schulz was a devout Protestant Christian. Somebody (usually Linus) is always quoting the King James Bible; whole parables get acted out sometimes. And there was Schulz's public image: an amateur hockey player in a funny sweater, whimsical, modest, a family man.

 

Then I read David Michaelis's bio of Schulz.

 

It turns out that Sparky Schulz was not quite like that. He drifted away from his church after a while; he had extramarital affairs, and he actually used the strip to communicate with his girlfriends. Remember all the times Snoopy fell in love? Schulz was dropping codewords and sweet nothings into the dialogue, messages to the women in his life.

 

The one stable point in the strip, I think, is the bittersweet note of resignation. Charlie Brown is resigned to being a loser. Peppermint Patty is resigned to being a failure in school. Snoopy, much though he struggles against it, is resigned to being a dog. Linus is resigned to being a little brother.

 

You don't always get what you want, and sometimes you just have to live with what you're given.

 

Kid stuff indeed.

 

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Ironic America

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Partner and I take turns in the bathroom getting ready for work every morning.  If anything scandalous happens on TV while I’m in the bathroom, Partner says “OH MY GOD!” in a loud voice, and I come running out to see what it is.

Yesterday morning it was the new series of All-American Chia Pets.  Washington, the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln – hmm – Obama.

“I notice they didn’t do a George W. Bush,” Partner said snappily.

“I think George W. Bush already has stuff growing out of his head,” I said, quick as a flash.

The wit fairly flies around here.

I pondered this new product all day.  On the one hand, I bet President Obama might think this is pretty funny.  It goes without saying that he has the perfect head for a Chia Pet; only Elmer Fudd has a more symmetrical cranium.  Obama might take it as sort of an ironic tribute.

Or someone could buy one as a mean gag gift for the entrenched Republican on his gift list.

Either way, whether you buy the thing ironically or sincerely, the company makes out like a bandit.

We are drowning in irony these days.  One of the NBC junior executives on “30 Rock” referenced his “ironic kickball league” last week.  New York Magazine wrote an article on the death of hipster culture, which brought out lots of bitter (and deeply ironic) commentary from both pro-hipster and anti-hipster partisans.  New York Magazine also keeps track of trends with the “Undulating Curve of Shifting Expectations,” charting “pre-buzz” trends, “saturation-point” trends, “backlash” trends, and – here we go – “backlash to the backlash” trends.   Apparently these last are things that are so tired, so ridiculous, so overplayed, that they’re worthwhile again.  


Or maybe they really were worthwhile in the first place, and we just got tired of them because we hipsters are so jaded.


Real-life examples:

• Designers are sending handbags to Jersey Shore's Snooki. Not their own handbags, though. They want Snooki to be seen with their competitors' handbags, since Snooki is Ms. Bad Taste. Snooki is probably completely unaware of this; she only knows that she gets a lot of free handbags. (What do you suppose she likes best about a handbag? Separate pockets for pickles, lip gloss, and bronzer?)

• There was a snarky little article in the New York Times dissing the pretentiousness of the foodie movement. This was followed by a snarky little New York Magazine article dissing the pretentiousness of the New York Times article.

• And one last local example of unconscious irony: the night before Halloween, I heard a student talking on her cellphone.  “MU-thaw!” she bellowed.  (I’m trying to give you an impression of how completely unbearable her voice was.)  “I’m GOING? To a PARTY?  And I need something – like, some Seventies dress – something REALLY AW-ful and UGLY – you know, like you probably still HAVE, like in your CLO-set?”

Imagine you're that girl’s mother.  What would you have said to her?


And keep it unironic, please.

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Debo

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There was a nice article in the Sunday Times about Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (which is the best alliterative name I've ever heard, edging out Marion Mitchell Morrison). Deborah – Debo to her friends – is the last surviving Mitford girl. She is ninety years old, intelligent, charming, loves Elvis Presley, loves her chickens, and still takes care of her privacy (I admire the way she gently hints to the reporter that it's time to end the interview).

I didn't know any of the Mitford sisters were still with us. Sometimes I try to enumerate them, the way people try to remember the names of the Seven Dwarves. Nancy the novelist; Jessica the Communist; Unity the Fascist; Deborah the duchess – who am I forgetting? I had to look. Pamela, who stayed home and raised poultry, and Diana, the beauty (also a Fascist).

The Mitfords were born into an upper-class family in England, and tumbled effortlessly through life. They did not struggle upward; they just floated up, up, up. Even when their politics were awful, they never seemed like awful people. They were funny.

Money doesn't hurt, of course. Without money, there's very little comfort to be had from life. But money came and went for Debo too, and now she has plenty of it again.

She reminds me of an Englishman I knew in Morocco. He was in his eighties in 1984, walked with great difficulty, had trouble breathing sometimes, but was very sharp-minded. We were both dinner guests at a friend's house, and I accidentally quoted Jane Austen, and we were friends after that. He'd been in the British Foreign Service for decades. He had a much younger and very nice Senegalese boyfriend. He'd known Olivia Manning. He said no one liked her; she was always making furtive notes, as if she was going to write a book about you someday. Another day he pressed a copy of “The Towers of Trebizond” on me and said, “Rose Macaulay. Strange woman. But very good book.” I had a long funny letter from him, but I think I've lost it, and now I wish I'd been more careful about keeping it.

And there was a piece in the Sunday Times about the 94-year-old Eli Wallach, whom Tennessee Williams said “has discovered the secret of pissing people off,” and whose wife of 62 years, Anne Jackson, sometimes walks into interviews and announces that she wants a divorce, just to shake up the interviewer.

I think of Maira Kalman visiting Louise Bourgeois (“She is 96 and still works, for God's sake!”) and Kitty Carlisle Hart (“She dated George Gershwin, for God's sake!”). They both served Maira Kalman chocolate. It must mean something.

I think of Auden's portrait of Voltaire in old age:

. . . He would write

“Nothing is better than life.” But was it? Yes, the fight

Against the false and the unfair

Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilise.

We'd better get out there and cultivate our gardens, y'all. Time's a-wastin'.

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Sunday blog: Sn00kiana

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Nicole Polizzi, aka Snooki / Snickers, is a real person on the television program “Jersey Shore.” She is, however, more of a cartoon character than a real human being. She is a combination of Kay Thompson's Eloise, Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont, and a a not-very-smart cat or dog.

She says the damndest things.

Such as:

• “My most prized possession would probably be my bronzer and eyeliner. Bronzer because, just in case you go out and then you look in the mirror and you look pale? Just apply the bronzer. You don't have enough eyeliner on? Put the eyeliner on.”
• “Um, I don't read books. I tried to read 'Twilight,' but it got boring the second page. There's no pictures, so, I'm not readin' it.”
• “I'm fat. I'm about to eat a sausage right now. Fuck you all! Ha ha!”
• “Pickles is my thing.”
• “I am a princess at home, like, I am the fucking princess of fucking Poughkeepsie. Here, I am nobody. I'm, like, emotionally exhausted.”
• [to Jwoww:] “If you leave, I'm going to stuff your nose with tampons.”
• “I feel like a Pilgrim from the friggin’ ’20s washing this shit in the sink.”
• “I don’t tan anymore because Obama put a ten percent tax on tanning. I feel like he did that specifically for us. McCain would never do that, because he’s pale and probably wants to get tan. Obama doesn’t have that problem. Obviously.”
• [Preparing for a date:] “And if it's a smush, you gotta put lotion on your butt.”
• “He's a really good guy. That's the kind of guy I need in my life. I think his name is Ron.”
• “If you want me to cook and poison everybody and we're gonna be dead in two minutes? Whatever.”
• “[Vinny's] like my big brother, I love him. But usually you don't have sex with your big brother.”
• “The glasses are all bling bling, but when you put them on you can't really see. So I don't think you can drive with them, because you can't really see.”
• [Snooki's list of criteria for a man:] “Tanned; guido; juicehead gorilla; big sense of humor; likes to party; fist-pumps; frolics; isn't a jerkoff; a dork at heart; pays for meals; smells good; nympho; likes pickles; takes interest in my hobbies; very protective; not so serious; likes to sleep in.”
• “White's in in Miami. What if you get your period? It's ruined.”
• “My first thought was: I don't wanna clean this up. My second thought was: I just fucked up dinner. My third thought was: What the fuck am I gonna eat?”
• “Sympathetic. Word of the day. That's a big word!”

And finally:

• “A crow comes, and it starts quacking at us. Or, not quacking. What’s a crow do? ... Usually when a crow comes and it does that, that means you’re gonna die; it’s warning you of your death. So right now we’re thinking: ‘Who’s gonna die right now?’ Not gonna be me!”
  
  

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Memories of the Mob

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I am not a native Rhode Islander. I moved here in 1978, so I will always be a newcomer, although I have been here only a little less time than Roger Williams himself.

I arrived just a few months after the Blizzard of '78, which had taken place in February of that year. Everyone was still talking about it; the state came to a standstill for days. Today, thirty-two years later, if the word “snow” appears in the weather forecast, there's a huge mob at every supermarket in the state, buying milk and bread. “Milk and bread.” I don't even drink milk.

And I arrived toward the end of the Great Rhode Island Mob Era.

(I hope I don't get whacked for this.)

...

In 1981, I took a job on Federal Hill, which is the old Italian neighborhood of Providence. Its Italianness has faded steadily over the years; other groups – Hispanics, Asians – have moved in. And the Italian stuff has taken on a kind of Epcot quality. DePasquale Square has been rebuilt with a big fountain and a mock-Italian plaza; the lampposts are turn-of-the-century mock-European.

But it was still pretty Italian in the late 70s and early 80s. You could still get decent Italian pastry at Piccola Italia, and there was Tony's Colonial Market, and Scialo's Bakery, and the Heritage Loan and Investment Company (which went belly-up in 1990, but that's another story).

Every week or so, the front window of Micheletti's Restaurant got boarded up. Word was that Friday nights was always a “getting out” party: if someone got out of jail, they gave them a big Friday night dinner party, which usually ended with gunshots and violence.

The Patriarca family was still in charge of local crime in those days. There was a vending-machine company with a small storefront on Atwells Avenue; you could usually see someone sitting inside, doing nothing. That was the Patriarca headquarters. For those of you who watched “The Sopranos,” it was sort of like Satriale's. The Corleone family in the “Godfather” movies is based partly on the Patriarca family.

Even nice people were connected somehow. My boss, who was Sicilian, had five or six sisters, all of whom I got to know, and all of whom were terrific. There was one, though, whom I'd never met. Oh, hey, my boss said. They're in Florida. There was some mix-up with real estate, and they're – um – on the lam.

On the lam!

(I finally met her, by the way, and she was amazing. She swept into the room wearing a fur coat, and she and I spent the whole evening telling dirty jokes to one another, and her sisters were scandalized.)

I worked for a small electrical-supply company. Construction, you see? You can imagine. I knew two grown men named “Bambi.” It's short for “bambino,” kids.

A coworker of mine on the Hill was tired of her car. Oh, well, she said. I'll tell my dad. He knows some guys.

Some guys who do what? I said.

She looked embarrassed. You know. They'll – um – make the car go away. And I'll collect the insurance, and I'll get a new car.

Neat, eh?

The final story isn't mine.

I was in Tunisia, in 1985. I was staying for a few weeks with a couple from Maine, who were amused to hear I was from Rhode Island. They'd lived there when they were graduate students, on one side of a duplex house. There was a young married couple, very nice, on the other side of the duplex. Except that, once a month, a big car would pull up in front of the house, and some guys in suits would get out, and there's be a big argument on the other side of the house. Something about the husband not joining the family business.

I stopped them at that point. I know the punchline of your story, I said. The name on the mailbox in front of the house was “Patriarca.”

And they grinned and nodded.

…

Kids, those were horrible days. But everything seems quaint in retrospect.

Even the horrible things.

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Rhode Island, bluest of the blue states

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There was an interesting graphic in the Times recently, showing how various US districts have moved to the Left and Right over the past few elections. This year, of course, it's a glare of red stars moving Right.

These charts remind me of the Doppler effect as seen by astronomers. When a star or galaxy is moving away from us, its light is shifted down the spectrum so that it looks more reddish; if it's coming toward us, the light is shifted toward the blue. The 2010 map is red, red, red, which feels appropriate to me: the country is moving away from me and my personal beliefs, leaving the map awash in a bloody glare. For now, anyway.

It's not universal, though. There are a few glints of blue here and there – districts that actually became more strongly Democratic this year, defying the trend. They're all over the country. And some are even here in New England.

Rhode Island – wizened, scrappy, scrawny little Rhode Island - is still one of the bastions of Blue State America; only the District of Columbia has a stronger Democratic presence. Politics themselves are blue-shifted here: Republicans, to be successful, have to be far meeker than elsewhere in the country, and Democrats can be as fiery as they like. Entitlements, pensions, state-run disability plans – they're facts of life here.

I'm a Democrat, of a sort, but I yearn for a wider spectrum of representation. I was stupid enough to think, in this election, that we might begin to see an end to the Democratic-Republican polarization of America, and the birth of a couple of viable third parties. The local ballot was full of third-party candidates: plain Independents, one Cool Moose, one “Hour with Bob” candidate, and a full slate of Moderate Party candidates, with their own logo and website and everything. I voted for two third-party candidates, in fact. One of them actually won: Lincoln Chafee, our Governor-elect, a former Republican who ran as an Independent.

But nationwide, third parties were a non-starter. Gail Collins has consistently maintained the superiority of the two-party system, saying that it's hard to govern with a majority if you're elected by a 37% vote. I think it's a shame. In systems with three or four or five parties, you are forced to form coalitions, and compromise. No one is deluded into believing that his party's platform is going to be voted into law as one huge chunk. And you can belong to a party that more properly represents your own beliefs.

I know the flip side of this coin: it only works if everyone agrees to play. If the liberals shatter into three parties, they'll split the left-wing vote, and the monolithic Right (which is anything but monolithic, really, but which pretends to be monolithic for campaign purposes) wins the election. But I'm beginning to wonder how comfortable the Tea Party people are feeling as members of the GOP, and how soon it will be before they create their own intransigent little party.

But Rhode Island – ah. Not a single Republican in high state office. Both US Senators, both of our US Representatives, the Lieutenant Governor, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General are all Democrats; the new Governor is an Independent. It's the Worker's Paradise!

I wish it were. We manage to foster quite a bit of scandal and corruption here. Here are a few of our greatest hits:

• Ed diPrete, Governor. Republican. Bribery, extortion, racketeering. Went to jail.
• Brian Sarault, Mayor of Pawtucket. Democrat. Bribery. Went to jail.
• Fernand St. Germain, US Representative. Democrat. Helped engineer the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s. Didn't go to jail. Probably should have.
• Those guys up in North Providence.
• And everyone's favorite: Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, Mayor of Providence. Democrat. Racketeering. Went to jail. (Did lots of other stuff too, including torturing his ex-wife's boyfriend with a lit cigar and a fireplace log.) Now out of jail, and working as a political commentator on local radio and TV. He gets everything completely wrong, but he has a devoted audience, and I know people who quote him all the time.

All hail the Worker's Paradise!

But I like living in a blue state, in blue New England. We Rhode Islanders aren't genteel Democrats like the ones in Connecticut, or wild-eyed socialist cheesemaker Democrats like the ones in Vermont, or hard-headed baseball fanatic Democrats like the ones in Massachusetts. We have our own ways. We putter around our pocket-sized Utopia with a sigh and a shrug and a roll of the eyes. Nothing's perfect. And – hey. Things could be worse. We could be living in Wyoming, after all.

Or Alaska.

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GambleTron 2010

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Partner and I spent some time recently at Foxwoods, the big Connecticut casino. I normally stick to the slots, but I also like to hang around the table games and watch people playing poker and blackjack.

Well, guess what they've just installed? Virtual-reality table games.

There were four huge TV screens on one big unit, facing the four cardinal directions. Two were displaying life-sized virtual blackjack dealers, one was a virtual craps table, and one was a virtual roulette table. I am normally intimidated by table games; I'm not very sure of my gambling skills, and I'm afraid I'm going to either slow the game down for everyone else, or (worse) make a fool of myself, or (worst of all) lose all my money in a single bad bet. Or all three.

But this was just a big video display dealing virtual cards.

Well, I says to myself, I can handle this.

I did quite well, actually. I played $20 into $120 over an hour or so. I also attracted quite a crowd. Casino managers kept coming over one or two at a time, wanting to know how I liked it. Players kept wandering idly by and kibitzing over my shoulder. I especially liked the old guy who kept whispering “Stand!” and “Hit!” under his breath as he watched my cards.

The virtual dealer was a woman. Actually, it was four different women. All of them were quite attractive, although evening gowns seem a little dressy for 11:00 am. Now and then they'd look up in an eerie Max Headroom way and wink in a random direction; since I was the only player, I only got about one wink out of five. The image also jumped and stuttered from time to time, which I think was on purpose, to remind you that this was not a real human being. Then, after dealing about ten hands, Virtual Valerie would suddenly morph into Virtual Veronica or Virtual Violet (my favorite was the one who appeared to be standing in the middle of a swimming pool). One, a blond in a low-cut dress, seemed to fascinate most of the men who were kibitzing, including one of the casino managers; he giggled whenever she looked in his direction, and whenever she said “Dealer busts!” - well, you can just imagine.

Casinos have two basic kinds of games: obsessive one-player games like slots, which require very little human interaction, and table games, which are all about human interaction – with the dealer, with the other players, and with spectators. And slot machines, if you haven't played them recently, have gotten very videoized; they morph and swirl all over the place. (They also don't seem to pay off the way they used to. I'm just saying.)

But now they have figured out a way to turn table games into video games.

When I was the only player at the table, I did quite well. As soon as other people joined the game, however, I played much more poorly. I was trying to pay attention to everything at once: the dealer's cards, the bets, my own cards, and the cards my fellow players were getting. And the comments, and the little interactions, and the actual near-approach to human contact. My poor head just doesn't work as fast as it used to, especially with so much stimulation.

The virtual roulette table right next door was very popular. It soon collected a rowdy little crowd of players, chatting and having a good time. Those of us playing blackjack were a morose group of loners, staring at our cards and making furtive eye contact with one another from time to time.

Roulette is just luck, you see. Blackjack actually has a skill component and requires concentration, and my concentration is very limited these days.

But I had a very nice time anyway. Technology wins again.

But as a card-carrying Luddite, I have to tell you also about one guy, wearing the vest and nametag of a casino dealer, who stood behind me for a few minutes and watched me play. Finally, before moving away, he muttered: “Great. They don't have to pay her a cent, and she can deal cards twenty-four hours a day.”

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Rainbow coalition

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Partner and I bounded out of bed like two little bunnies yesterday morning and scampered right down to the local Salvation Army to vote. The place was already surrounded by a mangy-looking crowd of campaign supporters, including one local Independent candidate wearing a ten-dollar suit and a two-bit smile, when we got there. We paid them no mind.

I like voting at the Salvation Army. They had the voting area set up in the toys/stuffed animals section, so I was able to do some window-shopping for Christmas at the same time. The election staff at their little card tables were the usual super-polite older people with shaky voices and shaky hands, asking me to spell my name over and over again. (I call them “older,” but I’m right around that age myself, and my hands shake just as badly as theirs, especially that early in the morning.)

The Rhode Island voting system is like a first-grade art project. They hand you a big sheet of construction paper and a nice fat black marker and send you over to a cheap blue plastic Playskool desk to color in your choices. Then you take your finished ballot / work of art over to the Votomatic 2000, which sucks it in like a reverse ATM and presumably shreds it into a million pieces.

There were lots of independents on the ballot hereabouts this year; I even voted for a couple of them. Seriously, how can you not vote for someone who represents the Cool Moose Party? There was also one two-person race, in which Incumbent Ick was running against Challenger Yuck. I couldn’t stand the idea of voting for either one, so I marked the write-in column and wrote in NO ONE! It probably invalidated my whole ballot, but it was fun for a few seconds.

When we got home, we both registered on the I VOTED! Facebook group. Partner added the following comment:

• I voted and voted and voted...now everything will be fixed and cows will poop rainbows...

I know exactly how he feels. For one brief – very brief – moment, you have the feeling that your vote will actually accomplish something. Things will actually change for the better. November 3 will be a better day than November 2. And cows will poop rainbows.

It probably won’t happen. But it doesn’t stop me from hoping. Poop away, you cows!

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