Oh the sweet chaos and complete saturation of election season. Candidates faces and their common refrains decorate our tvs and magazines, their voices drip from our radios. As much as I enjoyed all the rigmarole of debating and researching and voting, it's taken me nearly a week to desire rehashing it in written form.
It felt good to vote. It's not often enough that I get to make a contribution to the democratic process in such a tangible way. Don’t know if I can say it better than Andy did on that morning…“it’s the one time when I feel powerful…or, uh, maybe it’s better to say it’s the one time when I don’t feel completely powerless.”
I made my way to the Baptist church at 11 am thinking I would miss the ‘I’m late for work’ crowd and beat the ‘I left early for lunch’ crowd. I stood in line, patiently, reading my
Radar magazine, for about 40 minutes. Occasionally I would mull over the jesus posters and god propaganda that decorated the Life Center’s walls. The irony of voting there wasn’t lost on my mind which subscribes to the separation of church and state doctrine. That sliver of time though was a small poll tax to pay in order to contribute to this monumental election.
It was monumental in another way as well…I baked.
We (or I should say Andy and his roommate Scott. I’m not so into sweets…) hadn’t even completely finished the Pumpkin Turtle Pie I made the other day yet…
And I was already baking again. Something must be wrong with me.
Andy had been bugging me about making a cake and this seemed like the perfect occasion. I picked up some red and blue frosting the other day in anticipation of creating a pro-change sheet cake…a pro-democratic frosted masterpiece…a pro-obama vanilla cake with vanilla frosting…more lovely irony. As I was crafting my second cake ever (the first was a set of boobs that Amanda and I made for a friend in Columbia so many years ago), I felt a little like I didn’t deserve to be using the cake pan my grandma had bestowed on me. It was a bumpy attempt. This realization lead me straight to a metaphor of the cake as the election itself. The bumpy road to Pennsylvania Ave…all the smearing of frosting I did, which seemed analogous to the smear campaigns and negative ‘he said-she-said’ that colored the process. Then there was the excited, carnal way that we all devoured the cake that was reminiscent of the energy Barack has generated amongst constituents this time around.
We ate dinner and cake and drank beers and watched the election unfold. I was initially a Hillary supporter, but I mustn’t understate the excitement and potential I feel at the dawning of this era of a new president. The door is open to possibility, to opportunity. I can imagine a future that’s bright and better. And, hell, even if it’s not, I bet it’ll be different, and change is something I have always thrived on.
(In a final irony, I swear "America the Beautiful" just began blaring from my radio as I was posting this. Nice touch NPR.)
