November 2008

Precinct #3221, San Francisco California. After scaling the hill to get to the polling place (7.9% slope according to the Dept of Elections!), there was the matter of voting on 36 state and city propositions, 4 Board of Education members, 4 Community College Board members, 1 State assembly member, 1 State senator, 1 Superior Court judge, 1 US Representative, 1 President. Phew!

I have a yellowed piece of newspaper with this David Foster Wallace quote on it, from my college paper dating back to the 2000 elections. He was right and he still is right - go vote.

Politics is not cool. Or rather, cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the kids who were into running for student office. Now consider some of the 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: men who aren’t even enough like human beings to dislike. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about this, even.

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who are not dumb and are keenly aware that it’s in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay home doing one-hitters and watching MTV Spring Break on Primary Day.

By all means stay at home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote

Pumpkin carving is one of those American traditions that is missing from my life experience. Sam was pretty adamant about filling that gap this year so he took the responsibility of purchasing a pumpkin and initiating me into the ways of pumpkin carving.

I came home on Thursday evening ready for the big event. Sam was out of the house when I got back but he had set up our pumpkin working station on the kitchen table.

Huh, that’s interesting - I was expecting it to be… larger. Maybe he waited too long to buy the pumpkin - Halloween was the next day, after all - and the stores were all out of the big ones. I suspected that this was part of a little joke, that there was a larger pumpkin hiding in one of the closets somewhere. My suspicions were confirmed after Sam came home and pulled the real deal out:

There we go.  We deliberated about the style of pumpkin (smiley? mean? silly?) and went through several draft sketches before starting surgery. After careful carving, vigorous scraping, and breaks of pumpkin ale, we had our finished product:

We settled on “snaggletooth sneaky” - not bad for a first pumpkin, no? We toasted the seeds, ate them with our ale, and enjoyed the warm glow of our Halloween pumpkin - a very good Thursday evening.