Election 2020: Swimming in Sewage Toward a Different Kind of More Hopeful Cesspool
8:00 a.m.
I wake up a few hours ago. Slept like the dead. I read through the same bullshit with poll numbers and predictions with the same combination of hope, certainty, uncertainty, and boredom as I did yesterday and the day before. Yeah. Trump is a full-blown dickhead. Biden is a truly nice guy. Will Texas go blue? Do I even know anyone from Texas anymore?
My wife wakes up. She’s helping friends move to North Carolina by helping them drive their shit for the next week as if today is not anything big. She gives me a blowjob and gets a bagel.
I’m not worried about the results of today. I truly am confident that the nation will tip back into some semblance of rationality and dump Trump. I’m more interested to see how it all unfolds and if the deposed Mad King will take a shit on the desk in the Oval as a parting gesture in three months.
I have this image of he and his whole skeleton crew, fully repudiated by a massive and historic blue wave, sitting in the White House like squatters, selling off pieces of our national history on Ebay and hiding from His Majesty as he stomps through the hallways screaming at portraits of presidents past about the unfairness of it all.
In tandem is the image of the cultural left sharpening their knives to go in full attack once Biden is sworn in to remake the country into some bizarre Maoist Shangri-La doing what the Left always does — cannibalize it’s own — while the defeated Republicans pretend they were never in league with Trump but held hostage by him like the rest of us.
Fuck me. This is going to be a long day, isn’t it?
10:00 a.m.
I’m not terribly worried that Trump & Co. will steal the election.
I remember years ago a prominent Chicago poet who dressed and spoke like a rap star telling me “It ain’t the n****rs who talk about shit you have to worry about. They’re all bark and no bite. It’s the quiet ones you need to keep an eye on.”
Trump has been barking about stealing the election for months now and I’m pretty certain a man so overwhelmingly incompetent as the one who completely blew both his debate appearances and fucked up a national response to an epic pandemic so horribly that a retarded child could’ve done better is not going to suddenly reveal that he is an evil genius capable of stealing one of the most televised elections in history.
I’m likewise less concerned about the rabid, angry Trumpers wreaking havoc on the country. They were never in this for a long campaign. They couldn’t even take COVID seriously enough to wear masks. They’ll make some noise, get into some melees for a few days and then slink home and grouse just like their hero.
I wonder what the Antifa crowd will do once Trump is deposed? Start an emo band? Go back to working at Starbucks and REI? I hope they decide to occupy Kentucky and reign terror on Mitch McConnell. It’s a terrible thing to say but the party I’ll throw in my semi-quarantined apartment when Trump loses tonight (this week? Next month?) will be nothing when compared to the full-on Mardi Gras parade I’ll throw when the Evil Senator from Kentucky dies. I’m known to say that I can’t hate someone unless I’ve met them but I fucking hate Mitch.
I read a weird op-ed online that essentially thanks Trump for giving us four years reprieve from the cultural warriors of the Far Left. I wish I read it in a paper so I could wipe my ass with it because an iPad makes for an uncomfortable symbolic gesture.
I shower and get dressed. I’m on shift tonight at the casino so I’ll be dealing with the regular crowd while history unfolds like a soiled sheet and you can’t quite tell if that’s a bloodstain or merely ketchup.
For our sixth anniversary, Dana got me my eleventh tattoo. She came up with a cool design concept: a Chicago tattoo for my right back shoulder that included the baby in the clamshell from the City of Chicago flag, a light blue background and three of the red six-point stars of Chicago, each representing one of my three decades there. She booked an artist in a very chic studio who happened to be a great trace artist but not so much with the original design thing.
As it stands, it’s a fine tattoo with some elements that look like a child drew them with a Sharpie. Not great but growing on me. But the odd thing is that it being being on back, I don’t see it so I forget it’s there. Reminds me that as Americans we tend to dwell on history but not what is directly behind us. We’ll send Trump packing and immediately forget how embarrassing he was and set into attacking the new administration because it isn’t as brazenly Marxist as we fought for (I use ‘we’ although I actually voted for Biden’s moderation).
12:00 p.m.
Dropped Dana off for her trip. Ran some stuff home. I’m now actively avoiding anything news related. I receive an email that our division of casinos is not putting the election coverage on the screens in our Sportsbooks and I’m relieved.
2:00 p.m.
At the casino now. It’s pretty empty and I’m unsurprised. I’m informed that the larger properties and on the Strip there are special task force groups of LVMPD set up at every location to stem any bad partisan behavior in the casinos. For our property, I’m the task force.
I recall clearly the night four years ago when so many of us were so certain Hillary had it in the bag only to be gut-punched around 9:00 p.m. with the news that Trump had won the thing. Unlike so many, I accepted the result regardless of fact that she won the popular vote. Until we sack up and remove the Electoral College, that’s a legitimate win.
5:25 p.m.
I checked. I couldn’t help myself. The only thing that pisses me off is that Mitch won Kentucky, that sour, putrid fuckface.
Yeah. I really want the Dems to sweep this up. The question I’m asking myself is if we repeat 2016, why? The answer so many gravitate to is that half the country is racist but I’m not buying that reductive bullshit. If I had to guess, half the country doesn’t buy into the identity politic of the Far Left.
Alright. Enough. Optimism. Fucking optimism.
7:30 p.m.
At this point I have to remind myself that Dems voted overwhelmingly early and so many of those votes are still to be counted. I’ll admit, I’m surprised that Trump is even competitive but given my disdain for the Wokesters I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. If I can’t take them someone from the rural side of Texas probably hates them as much as I hate Mitch.
I was hoping for a blow-out but it’s looking more and more like this thing will get decided in the courts over mail-in votes.
On the floor, no one is talking about the history unfolding. By now, the place is about half-full and people are far more concerned with getting their comp drinks and hitting payouts. I overhear a couple of guys at the blackjack table. They think the Dems are going down. One thinks it’s because of Kamala Harris. I walk away without saying a word.
If there’s anything we should have learned from 2000 is that, under no circumstances should the Blue concede until every last vote is counted. Every last fucking vote.
I’m finding a bit of Zen. We aren’t going to know who won tonight. In some ways this is a good thing. It means Trump will be wrapped up battling the process rather than losing and tearing shit apart out of petulance. We still have a raging pandemic and our economy is shredded.
The divide in this country is not one of race or racism. The divide is between city mice and country mice. As the picture emerges, the urban centers of almost every state skews left in statewide seas of rural red. It also demonstrates how deeply unpopular the extremes are with the opposing sides. The racial identity politics of the Far Left — you know, the folks who flatly state that all white people are racist — and the strident authoritarianism of the Far Right — you know, the ones who love the police and lotsa guns — are so toxic that equal measures of citizens will vote with little more than a passionate hatred for one or the other despite a host of rational reasons to vote the other way.
9:40 p.m.
We won’t know until later in the week.
Votes are still uncounted in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. We wanted a decisive repudiation of Trump and, once again, half the country (and much closer to half than four years ago) took that away.
From one angle, this is the best outcome. Uncertainty as to who won means all those businesses boarded up can breathe a sigh of relief. With no clear winner so far, there isn’t a reason to riot in the streets. A couple weeks of legal battles and ballot counting and the assholes on both sides will get bored.
I was humbled in 2016. I thought I knew how it would go because I was so certain my worldview was so obviously right that how could anyone not see it so? I’ve been ready for this. Like so many, I felt the surge of certainty once again with the polls and how incredibly monstrous Trump became in the last days of his campaign. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe Biden will be our president on January 21st, 2021. I just wish it had been an easier road.
