We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

There's always an edge to Halloween at the electoral quadrennial. If you're an irredeemable obsessive like myself, everything has become so saturated with politics by this point in the cycle, all aspects of society jump out at you as though it's some kind of political statement. Are the people dressed as zombies all Republicans because they represent the unnatural reanimation of a policy set that died by bloody strangulation in the recession of the George H.W. Bush administration? Or are they Democrats attempting to make a statement about the result of continuing to neglect the rising costs and sinking quality of proactive, preventative health care in this country? I don't know. I'm a little heightened. There was one kid, maybe 5 or 6 years old, dressed as an elephant that I may or may not have kicked into a hedge. Well, "kicked" is a little strong. Seriously, it was a little too strong. I felt bad.

As usual, I allow my own children to choose their costumes, without judgment from me. They went went dressed as (in descending order of their age): Montmartre in Paris circa 1906, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Thor.

You'd probably be surprised to know that Thor was the most difficult to pull off. Lighting is almost impossible to generate reliably, especially if you want to be portable enough to roam the neighborhood begging for candy. But Halloween is a firm deadline date and at some point, you just have to hook up red to positive and black to negative, shove him out of the van and hope for the best. I won't say it went 100% smoothly, but how many fingernails does a person need really?

Usually holidays stress me right the fuck out,* but I'm so addled by election stress that I welcomed the superficial reveling in the company of the double tragedy of strangers and family if only to take my mind off obsessing over poll numbers. It's gotten to the point that, as a partisan in favor of the party that hates the white man, I have to break up my regular cycle of reading through the latest 30-second flash poll of undecided New Hampshire non-gay junior college educated heads-of-households with a hit from Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com just to remind myself sometimes that we aren't lurching inevitably toward being ruled by a man alongside whom Donald Trump comes across as principled and sincere.

That's been one of the few places on the political interwebs where a progressive can go and consistently see that my man** Barack Obama still has not only a shot at it, but a better-than-even one. Everything else is polluted by pundits and their "gut." Appropriately for Halloween, the internet and talk radio and basic cable are littered with guts, but of the unfortunate metaphorical variety where we have to endure "analysis" wherein very earnest types with angular haircuts and Thinking People Glasses tell us not what poll numbers say, but how they make them feel.

Nate Silver doesn't want a talk about his guts. Which is not the rules of the talking-about-elections game. Which makes him the enemy. And probably a homo. Or, OK, at least homo-seeming. Which is TOTALLY WORSE because it makes you bad at math. Probably because of the internal conflict caused by all that fantasizing about cock.

But as much solace as I take in the gayness of facts, I am old enough to remember Election Day 2004 when celebrity pollster (and an ARAB, I now shout in suspicious retrospect) John Zogby predicted John Kerry would win 311 electoral votes. And the cruel bastards in the second GW Bush administration didn't even send him to Guantanamo for that. No, much worse: they left him out here amongst the rest of us to try to live that shit down.

At this point, I'm just tired. Yes, the horrible Hurricane Sandy thing where NOT GLOBAL WARMING tried to divest us of most of our Mid-Atlantic coastline and several kind of major cities was a minor distraction, but that just makes me feel kind of guilty. Because it's only a "minor distraction." And that's the last thing I need now on top of all the other wrenching geopolitical stresses: guilt. Sometimes in life, the giant wall of seawater hits the coast you're not on. All you can really do is be grateful to the non-existant God and hope that, given the chance, all the people you're stuck calling countrymen don't willingly vote for something metaphorically similar.


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*seriously, who needs this much fucking pressure to be cheerful? How many days a year do we need to set aside for the fellowship of man? Man is a dick.

**totally didn't mean that racially.