A Brief Hiatus from my Hiatus

Excessive curiosity has always been a problem for me and it manifested itself again Tuesday morning as I was driving home from work shamelessly listening to NPR. As I puttered the dilapidated and crowded highways toward my house the early morning radio reports of long lines at polling places got me wondering what the situation was at the Presbyterian Church that serves as my altar to American Democracy. Sure enough, as I drove by I could see the line stretching out of the Christian certified community center attached to the church and weaved its way down the long sidewalk toward the main road.

Feeling like a shark I turned into the parking lot slowly cruising by and seeing at least a hundred good citizens chatted in the cool morning air waiting patiently in line for their chance to take their country back if the assorted bumper stickers attached to all the fancy minivans, SUV’s, and manly man trucks were to be believed. It was a fairly jovial and perky bunch except for one sullen fellow looking rather out of place much like a lone surviving human who had found some way to blend in with the pod-people in an “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake. My liberal radar, or “libdar”, was picking him up as the lone Democrat of the bunch. Not feeling as brave as my political compatriot I went on home deciding to return once the best of Southern suburbia had filtered back to their respective hives and Borg collectives.

I returned early in the afternoon wearing just an old Hawaiian shirt and jeans as opposed to my Che Guevara t-shirt and New Black Panthers baseball cap which I’m sure the poll workers would have thought was a great gag as some deputy sheriff tazed my goofy ass.

Once I was escorted to the new fangled electronic voting machine I reviewed the list of candidates that this election cycle had to offer. I didn’t vote a straight Democratic ticket, despite my high admiration for Alvin Greene and his accomplishments, I just couldn’t vote for the guy in his bid to unseat Jim DeMint. I did vote for the Green Party candidate in that race and actually wondered for a few seconds who had the slight advantage between the two, measured in picometers, since neither had a snowball’s chance in Hell in defeating the Godfather of the Tea Party.

I did have an unique dilemma in a couple of races because several Republican candidates did not have any opponent. I solved that issue by writing in Scrooge McDuck for State Treasurer and General George Armstrong Custer for the Office of Adjutant General of the South Carolina National Guard. I almost wrote in Robocop for Attorney General but a lot of people here have issues with Obama's skin color, voting for a cyborg will have to wait a couple of more decades.

Satisfied with my acts of sedition against the body politic of the state I went home and recommenced my increasingly futile attempt at composing my “musical” exposing the seedy and hopefully humorous underbelly of South Carolina and its people. I’ve passed the 10,000 word mark on Sunday but given my history of typos you can realistically cut that in half.

Election Day for me did offer a few surprises, later that evening after deleting three whole pages of my zygote of a tome that made no sense whatsoever my wife came and slapped me aside my head while I was typing and began to tell me that both the Democratic candidates for governor and Joe Wilson’s House seat were several points ahead at that moment. Figuring that both my nightly beer intake and writing frustrations had pushed me over the edge into some delusional state I figured I heard my wife wrong but it turned out true, both Democratic candidates did have a nice lead over the Conservative anchor baby hussy and the slime mold that wears two-thousand dollar suites.

I was perplexed, could the voters of South Carolina have actually delved a little deeper into troubling issues surrounding those two Republican candidates and decided it was best to seek a new approach? In other areas of the country such a query would be minor and easy to answer. But here in South Carolina such a question would open a nasty can of worms forcing me to reconsider many of my long held assumptions about my state. So I plopped on the couch and watched as more voting returns were tabulated, thankfully my assumptions and ultimate fate of my hypothetical novel are safe. Further election results soon arrived sending Nikki to the governor’s mansion, Joe back to Congress, and saving me from having to yet again rewrite significant portions of the mishmash that has come close to sending me screaming insanely off into the night.