She Takes 'Em Sort Of Like She Dishes 'Em Out.

"I Voted Today."  Yay.  I'm hoping for what I think is best, here and elsewhere around the country.

I like to vote on election day.  It feels different from early voting, or voting by absentee ballot.  Voting is a community (small or large) expression, and voting in person on election day has a community feeling you don't get the other ways.  Among other things, you interact with your neighbors, who are there in the same spirit as you are.

I got to the poll at 6:00 AM, an hour before it opened.  I was third in line.  Behind me was a couple I hadn't previously met.  Behind them was Tracy Truppman.  Someone told Tracy she looked very nice.  She said "I'll take all the lies I can get."  I thought it was very fair of her to be willing to accept being lied to the same way she lies to other people.  The difference is that Tracy can self-impose insight to decide if something someone tells her isn't true.  When she lies to other people, they often don't have a perspective to know they're not being told the truth.

A case in point was the husband of the couple behind me.  We were talking about a variety of things, and among them was the local election.  He happened to mention that Will Tudor is his next door neighbor, and he said he had suggested to Will years ago that Will run for Commission.  Presumably, Will gave his neighbor some version of "aw, shucks," and he didn't run until two years ago.  For whatever reason, the neighbor pointed out that Will's decision was at that point independent of the suggestion the neighbor made years before.

The neighbor then, unsolicited by me, went on to complain about how Village Commissions don't do anything.  He gave as an example that the streets are so bad.  He concluded "we ought to be ashamed of ourselves."  I told him I thought so, too.  He added that he had recently run into Harvey Bilt at Cafe Creme, and Harvey confirmed that he was not running for re-election.  According to our neighbor, Harvey gave what seemed to me to be a very curious explanation: the Commission doesn't accomplish anything.  If that was Harvey's complaint, why was he so much a part of the inertia and non-function?

I was thinking about our neighbor's confidence in Will Tudor, and his frustration that the Commission-- the current one, anyway-- doesn't do anything, and I told him he should come to Commission meetings.  I told him that sometimes, you can form an image of what someone would be like as a Commissioner, but that they might turn out to be very different than you imagined they would be.  I hope he decides to come watch some time.

Once we got into the polling room, the usual group of volunteers was there.  Among them was our Village clerk.  She saw Tracy, and she jokingly said "I don't recognize you."  Tracy responded with "you're fired," which she delivered with that nervous, self-conscious, and faintly paranoid laugh Tracy does.

Well, I did vote.