November 01, 2004

Maximum big surprise she knows something new,
I pull my shirt off and pray.
I'm saving myself to suffer the heatwave,
Pull my shirt off and pray.
We're coming up on re-election day.


I couldn't find the lyrics to Lyle Lovett's "Election Day," so instead I'm stuck with Duran Duran. And what's worse, late post-"Seven and the Ragged Tiger" Duran Duran. It's a crappy little song, but just like the real Election Day, if you can only wait a little while it will soon be over. That's right, just 24 hours from now it will be November 3, and this seemingly eternal election will finally be over.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! That's a joke, son! This goddamned thing is gonna drag on for months! Lawyers are already massing on the Florida and Ohio borders, just waiting for the signal to attack! (And just so I can be the first to pass along some soon-to-be-unavoidable information, 68 of Ohio's 88 counties use those chadtastic punch cards, and seven counties use touch-screen ballots which might not be possible to recount! Wheeee!)

As for the local scene, I can report that the voting machines are already in place in the lobby of my apartment building, so if anybody wants to hurry over we could probably get in a good three-to-five thousand votes in before the volunteers arrive. And there sure are a lot of candidates to choose from. Besides the big two there are candidates from three different socialist parties -- the Socialist Equality Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and Socialist Party USA (or perhaps U!S!A!) -- which will certainly split the socialist vote, throwing the election to the damn capitalists again. The much-scarier-than-you-thought Lyndon LaRouche is not on the New Jersey ballot, but the selling-a-DVD-on-which-he-debates-hand-puppets Ralph Nader is.

Of course, the big Jersey City battle is for a Mayor to finish out the late Glenn Cunningham's term, which expires in June. It's been a pretty normal election season here in Chilltown, with your standard assortment of defaced signs, dead rats, and photos of a candidate sprawled out on his porch, drunk and naked.
"I was walking down the block and I see this guy naked on his front porch, and my friend tells me he's running for mayor, so I go running back and start taking his picture," said Hector Rodriguez, 18, who used a camera phone.
Ah yes, just the kind of quote any political hopeful wants to see in the heat of the campaign battle. I'm actually going to vote for that drunk/naked hopeful, Jerramiah Healy, since Tris McCall, whose opinion I value on local issues, has endorsed him. The race seems to be coming down to Healy and Louis Manzo, about whom I've never heard anybody say a good word, but he does actually live in my building (though I never saw him until last week, when he stood in the lobby one morning shaking hands, though not introducing himself), and his mailbox is directly above mine, so that I occasionally get his mail. I have to admit that it would be kinda cool to get the Mayor's mail, but that's not much of a reason to cast a vote.

Speaking of which, I probably need to decide who I'm voting for pretty soon, huh?
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