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as all-damaging as an asteroid strike
Tuesday, November 8 2016
What with the return to Eastern Standard Time and lingering effects of having spent more than a week in Central European Time (both in and out of Summer Time), Gretchen and I have been getting up early these days, often before 8:00am (normally it would be more like 9:30 or even 10:00). So we decided to combine our visit to our polling place, the Hurley Town Hall, and then walk the dogs in the nearby corn fields. I think the last time we'd done this was back in 2004, the day George W. Bush threw us into a months-long funk with his unexpected (and devastating) re-election.
Hurley is a fairly Republican area, so when we arrived, ours was the only Prius in the parking lot. Normally we vote in non-peak hours, so the polling place was more crowded than we're used to. Still, there was no wait for a ballot or for scanning it in the machine that hopefully hadn't been tampered with somehow by the Ruskies. As always, I voted a straight Working Families party ticket (that's mostly Democrats, including Hillary Clinton for President and Zephyr Teachout for Congress), though there were two state Supreme Court positions where the candidates were on both the Republican and Democratic tickets. In those cases I wrote in "Gretchen Prιmack" and "Ray Gαnade" (that's the Ray who lives up the street with Nancy; he's not even an American citizen). Meanwhile Gretchen handled that by writing in my name and Michæl Asbιll (out friend Michæl of Michæl and Carrie). I would later joked that she'd written in two white males and I'd written in a woman and a Filipino. As we left the polling place, another Prius was just arriving, and it appeared to contain Indian Americans (dot not feather). Who even knew there were citizens of that ethnicity in Hurley Township?
Our walk in the fields was along that farm road heading south from Wynkoop. I'd broght one of my drones to fly, but it seems my batteries were out of juice, because the drone wouldn't fly long before petering out. Still, Gretchen got a chance to fly it for the first time.
In the remote workplace, I checked in with my colleages Ca and Da, both of whom voted soon after I did. Da lives in Atlanta, where voter ID laws require extra paperwork to get a ballot. Da doesn't know much about the world outside of Atlanta and wondered if we deal with the same shit in New York and California, respectively. We don't, or course. Because those rules are idiotic and designed to do something other than what is claimed.
It was hard to concentrate on work with the tension of election day. All the numbers seemed to point towards a good result. Sam Wang has a good track record, and he was giving Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning (though that seemed overconfident to me). Meanwhile, Nate Silver (whose site I hadn't been able to check since Comey's first late-October bombshell) was only giving Clinton a two-in-three chance of winning (which seemed low to me). Meanwhile, the betting markets (as represented by Predictwise.com) seemed to have risen since Comey's unwinding of his October surprise and they now had Clinton's chances at 89%, which "seemed" about right. I like my news from my lefty sources, but I didn't think I was living in complete epistemic closure; I'd learned the dangers of that in the run up to the 2004 election. I'd been sure to check Politico.com (which is generally considered non-partisan). And, while HuffingtonPost.com has been clearly in the bag for Clinton (who equipped with brain wasn't?) they'd been presenting the good and bad news alike.
Slate.com (one of my nominally-lefty news sources) was trying an experiment where it was using real-time voter data (which is used by campaigns but generally ignored by the media) to mathematically predict how well Clinton and Trump were doing as the day progressed. This seemed to suggest Clinton was on track to win, though the technology was brand new, so it had no track record.
Early this evening [REDACTED] I went on a small cleaning jihad to prepare the house for a returns-watching party. Gretchen had baked an enormous penis-shaped cake complete with pustules and a dirty taint to represent Donald Trump's STD-riddled equipment. She'd also made spætzle (from scratch!) with vegan bratwurst. The spætzle represented the spirochetes of Donald Trump's tertiary syphilis and the bratwurst was a play on words: Donald Trump is the world's worst brat. When Eva and Sandor showed up, they'd brought a pepper-sauce pasta that was soon sculpted into a dome-shaped rump. Because Donald Trump is also an ass. We had more difficulty deciding how to work other food items into this framework as they arrived. The spicy chana masala brought by Nancy (and made by Ray) but delicious, but we couldn't think of any way for it to be a punful description of Donald Trump (or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton).
Results started coming in as we began eating (which we mostly did in the living room in front of a fire in the woodstove). I had two laptops out (my Chromebook and my HP Elitebook 2740p) showing both Slate.com and HuffingtonPost. Initially, of course, the states were falling for Trump: Kentucky, Indiana. But then came a few for Clinton: Vermont and Massachusetts, and later Maryland and New Jersey. HuffingtonPost.com was color-coding states with light blue or pink to show the lean of the counts as they came in, and this was when I first started feeling anxiety. Ohio was light blue, but why was Virginia pink? Then Texas came up light blue and that felt good for awhile, but it soon turned pink and mostly stayed that way.
We eventually went up stairs and one of our guests asked (while we were in my laboratory) if perhaps we could smoke some pot. I'm almost out of pot, but I managed to scrape together some crumbs and pack a bowl. Despite how marginal it was, it definitely got me high. I became acutely aware of this when I joined the others in the teevee room as the results came in (and as I checked them on my Chromebook; by now Michæl Asbιll had taken over my Elitebook). My anxiety quickly ramped up to something just short of panic. In 2008 and 2012, states had been called quickly and Obama had been declared the winner early in the evening. But tonight, a large number of states (including important ones like Virginia and Pennsylvania) were lingering in the too-close-to-call category. I checked in at Predictwise.com and saw Clinton's chances had fallen a little, but they were still in the 80s. Okay, maybe it was just going to take awhile.
But then Ohio was called for Trump, and not too long after that Florida and North Carolina were too. The mood in our little party had deteriorated, though for some reason Gretchen was optimistic. I checked in at Predictwise.com again and saw Clinton's chances were 51 and Trump's were 49. Really, it was down to a coin flip?
It was still possible for Clinton to win, but she was going to need to win all the states in the upper midwest that were too close to call, and the math just didn't seem to be working out. Michæl was zooming in on the counties in Pennsylvania and Michigan and seeing that the votes probably weren't there. The folks at with the maps on MSNBC seemed to be seeing the same thing. I'd already started bracing myself for a Donald J. Trump presidency, which had been too ludicrous to imagine only hours before. I checked in at Predictwise.com and saw the the vertical line of crashing Clinton chances had brought her down to 10%. That meant Trump had a 90% chance of victory.
At this point, we tuned in to the Daily Show on Comedy Central. The atmosphere there was funereal but supportive. We were experiencing a mass tragedy as all-damaging as an asteroid strike. We were all its victims, and we were all gathered to mourn.
By now people in our party were finishing up their pieces of the penis-shaped cake and somberly heading home. It was pretty clear that Donald Trump was now going to be president, and absorbing the implications of what this meant was going to take some time.
For now, though, it was just Gretchen and me in a house full of party debris. We turned off the teevee and contemplated the horror of what was underway. I'd been drinking a fair amount but was less drunk than Gretchen thought I was. She would've preferred me to be sober (as, for some reason, she was) at this extremely sobering moment in our life, but if there was ever a time in my life to drown my sorrows in booze, the night when Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States of America seemed to be it. But I stopped by drinking and turned my attention to my wife. What can you do in such a situation except say "I love you?" You can't even add, "Everything is going to be alright."
Neville the farm road in the Esopus Valley corn field this morning. Click to enlarge.
The Trump penis cake, complete with pustules.
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