by Avalon » Tue Nov 07, 2006 10:47 pm
My village is so small it doesn't make it onto all the maps, so voting is easygoing and mellow here. <br><br>I walk down to the firehouse with my younger daughter. Two of the three ladies with the signature books greet me by name. I give a handful of copies of some pages of the local freebie paper from 2004 to one of them, as they'd done an interview with her on the front page (there was a nice picture of me further back in the paper that issue, and I'd found that I still had a stash of them). She actually didn't have any of them, so she was pleased. Parents of a girl my daughter used to be friendly with in elementary school are there, so we catch up while I wait for the single machine to be free.<br><br>We still use the old manual machines. My daughter loves to come in the booth with me and grab the red bar to pull the curtains shut. I love snapping the little levers down under the names, it's such a satisfyingly physical action. Click, click, click, fuckyou I'm not voting for _you_, click click. This exercise in democracy is an endorphin-producing experience<br>that I wish the rest of you could have.<br><br>Earlier this evening I'd gotten locked in the library. They have an ongoing used books sale area down in the basement, and I lost track of time. I came up the stairs to find it pitch black, with the front door locked. Luckily it turned out that their meeting room was a polling place, and that door was not locked. A very surreal experience.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>