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the midterms for Trump
Tuesday, November 6 2018
Today was the midterm election of that Trump Era you might be familiar with from history books, future reader. I'd set my alarm to get me up at 6:30am because of the ongoing landlording emergencies I've been having to deal with. I left the house not long after 7:00am and my first destination was the polling place at Old Hurley's Town Hall. After voting a straight ticket on the Working Families party line (and yes, I even voted for Andrew Cuomo even though I despise him). Also supported the ballot initiative calling for a non-partisan redistricting panel to be in charge of any future redistricting (because partisan redistricting is one of the several egregious anti-democratic forces in America that has led to dysfunction and Trumpism).
Next I went to Herzog's in Uptown to buy two air-release valves so I would have them should I find a place to install them at my next destination: the third floor (attic) apartment at the brick mansion on Downs Street. Before going to that apartment, I went to the basement to get a sense of how hot water to that apartment is supplied. I found it traveled via two separated chases: one up an old abandoned stairwell and another in a small chase I had not previously been aware of. Both pipes going to the third floor were hot, suggesting a certain amount of hydronic fluid was flowing.
It was precisely 8:00am when I knocked on the door to the third floor, and after a wait, the boyfriend came down to let me in. He looked about 14 years old, but was surprisingly knowledgeable about heating systems, being conversant in such things as air release valves. It turned out that he had six years of experience with such systems and probably could've fixed any problem that I had the tools with me to fix. I didn't find any easy places to install air release valves; to do such a job would've required draining, cutting, and soldering. Fortunately, though, the heat was slowly creeping back into the system; evidently air was being purged from it automatically and it was just going to take awhile. I left an electric space heater in case emergency heat prove necessary.
The workday was an unusually boring one as I took on another project and had to get up to speed yet again on the lightly-commented code written, yet again, in the ExtJS Javascript framework. For lunch today I ate a sandwich I'd made this morning. It had lettuce, bacon-flavored tempeh, tomato, and half of very old avocado, the kind marbled with dark spots and a having a couple voids where it looked like a fungus had started growing. The bread wasn't toasted and fell apart in my hands, but the sandwich wasn't as bad as it sounds.
At some point today, Gretchen sent me a message saying that the motion-sensor light above the landing (outside the entrances to the second and third floor apartments) wasn't working at the brick mansion. When combined with the heater problems, it seemed to overwhelm her, and she said it felt like the place was "crumbling." To me, though, none of these problems seemed like a big deal at all. Sure, it was annoying to have to deal with them, but for the most part the houses are trouble-free self-milking cash cows. So on the way home, I stopped at the Home Depot to get a motion sensor wall switch and then drove in the darkness to the brick mansion. Sure enough, the light on the landing was out, so I immediately removed the motion-sensor unit installed behind a switch plate near the door to the second floor, using the "torch" of my cellphone as a flashlight (in the darkness, it provided perfect illumination with the phone in my shirt pocket). At some point, the tenant from the second floor apartment came out and opened his door to give me even better light. I still had a slow radiator leak to fix in his apartment, but all that required was some further torquing of bug brass nuts and the addition of a toroid of plumber's putty beneath a hollow gland nut and around the remains of the broken knob spindle. With that out of the way, I had a new theory about the motion-sensor light in the hallway: that its bulbs had all burned out. My multimeter (luckily I'd provisioned both cars with these as part of their respective tool kits) seemed to indicate electricity was leaving the motion sensor device. So I went to get the eight foot aluminium stepladder that had been out in the garage (it originally came from Gretchen's brownstone in Brooklyn). But that ladder didn't turn out to be in the garage; I found it outside in the gap between the garage and a fence, partly buried in the dirt. It took awhile to clean it enough to bring it inside, and even then I had to rescue some pillbugs still clinging to it. It turned out the lights in the chandelier controlled by the motion-sensor were candelabra bulbs, so to replace them I was going to have to go to a store. 15 minutes and $24 later, I had four LED candelabra bulbs from Herzog's. But there was only one bad bulb in the chandelier (which had five, not four, bulbs). It seems the problem really was the motion sensor, and I'd misread my multimeter tests. So I replaced four of the five bulbs and then installed the new motion-sensor device, working on the circuit while it was live because I knew how difficult finding the right circuit breaker down in the distant basement was going to be. But if you work slowly and purposefully, you can do such work on a live circuit. You just have to remember not to touch the ends of the wires as you go to install a wire nuts on them.
With the new motion sensor in place, the chandelier immediately came to life. I noticed the voltages I tested were on the order of 145, which seemed kind of high. I wonder if this was why the old motion sensor had failed. Another reason could be the large currents it had to switch with five forty watt bulbs. With four of those bulbs now electricity-sipping LEDs, the amount of current switched should be about sixteen percent of what it had been.
My last chore of the day was to just check the baseboard radiators in the attic apartment. Heat seemed to be coming out of more of them, so it looked like I wasn't going to have to worry about that problem any more. My chores were done!
Back at the house, Gretchen had been both preparing food and cleaning the house in anticipation of a small election-night get-together. Normally I would do all the cleaning, but she was so delighted that I was dealing with the brick mansion landlording chores, that she volunteered to do all the cleaning (both pre and post party). Gretchen had also built up a raging fire in the woodstove, actually making the first floor of the house uncomfortably hot. I could really feel the difference when I came down the stairs from the teevee room, which felt like descending into a warm bath.
At around 7:30pm, Carrie & Michæl (as Penny the Dog) arrived. We stood around in the kitchen eating chips with dips and vegan cheeses as we chortled about various absurdities such as Trump's much-hyped caravan of poor people. At some point I reminded everyone that we should be drinking, and so it began.
At some point we went upstairs and began watching the returns come in on CNN, though initially there wasn't much to see except Wolf Blitzer and John King with their massive touchscreens. Wolf is consistently infuriating, mostly due to his mastery of the technique of talking endlessly without managing to say anything at all. Initially it seemed like we had unexpectedly good news coming out of Texas (where Beto O'Rourke had a good lead over the execrable Ted Cruz), Florida (where the Democrats had leads over their Trumpish competition), and even Georgia(where the Republican candidate for governor got to simultaneously administer the election he was competing in, and had been flagrantly bending the rules in his own favor). I tried not to get too excited about this stuff, because I remembered how things had gone down two years ago, back when the idea of a President Trump seemed too absurd to actually happen. The on-air talent wasn't making things easy on my nerves; they always do their best to hype any possible drama and exploit any ignorance their viewers may have. That harder to do with someone like me, who has been paying attention and knows why it is that Indiana is unlikely to re-elect a Democratic senator. But when I'm sitting with a group of people who are hanging on every word, it becomes tiresome. So I spent a fair amount of time downstairs, chatting for awhile with Sarah the Vegan after she arrived. And I did the same with Nancy.
There was a grim phase in the evening, when all the races that had been going well started not to go well, when Beto O'Rourke seemed like he was going to lose after all. Meanwhile, the Democrats weren't stacking up their wins in the House races that they were going to need to take over that part of the national legislature.
But then things started improving. True, the Senate looked like a lost cause (mostly because it a lot of Democratic senators just happened to be up for re-election this year). But the odds of a Democratic takeover in the house started to inch upwards: first 65%, then 70$. At some point it was %95 and then the House was called for the Democrats. Meanwhile, that asshole Kris Kobach, who had built a career out of hyping the fake threat of voter fraud, had lost to a Democrat in the race for Governor of Kansas. At some point we learned that our own 19th Congressional District in New York State had been called for Antonio Delgado, meaning John Faso's nakedly racist campaign had failed in one of America's whitest districts. And there were other major victories all over the country. I would've liked pickups in Texas, Florida, and Georgia, but it just wasn't to be.
By this point in the evening, I'd moved from beer and a gin and tonic to red wine (which had been chilled in the refrigerator for some reason). Anticipating an early end to the evening, I'd also taken 125 milligrams of diphenhydramine. But Gretchen had two tickets to a Democratic victory party at the old Senate House in Uptown Kingston, and she wanted to go there to cheer Pat Strong, whose campaign she had put a lot of volunteer effort into. So we wound down our party, said our goodbyes, and then drove into Kingston. By the time we got to the Senate House, nobody was guarding the door to make sure people had tickets. This meant anyone could've come in and taken advantage of the open bar. Despite having difficulty walking from diphenhydramine-induced sleepiness, I nevertheless would've loved to have a beer and the only thing that kept me from getting one was not wanting to have to justify it to Gretchen.
We quickly learned that Pat Strong (and a number of other Democratic candidates we'd supported) had actually lost, and Pat had even given a concession speech. At some point Pat came out from the curtained VIP area and Gretchen gave her a hug, as did I. She was clearly sad, but one doesn't run for office without risking this sort of thing. It must really hurt to lose in the context of so much winning. At some point Delgado showed up and gave a long victory speech, and then mingled with the people so they could take their selfies. At some point a DJ started playing music. It was mostly late-70s funk, and it made a few people start to dance as though it were the waning minutes of a wedding.
Gretchen remarked at some point that tonight's victories were great, but they were leaving her somewhat unsatisfied, though she couldn't think why. I felt the same way and was pretty sure I knew what my problem was: that someone as horrible as Trump needed a bigger setback then the one he had received. Otherwise, what would the lesson be for future authoritarians? As it is, this whole Trump ordeal has made it shockingly clear how shallow the roots of democratic republicanism are in this country, which had long been considered among the most mature of all free societies. Imagine how much damage a person as malevolent as Trump would be if he had a bit more discipline and competence?
I was so sleepy on the drive back home that I put my seat down to make into something of a bed and closed my eyes. Ocasionally I'd open my eyes and try to figure out where I was based only on the trees, lamp posts, and how long we'd been driving.
Pat Strong with Gretchen tonight at the Democratic Party victory party in Kingston, where she'd given a concession speech.
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