You know what’s Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Vote 2014.
Voting should be as easy the prom queen after 3 beer bongs.
Sometimes It’s harder than Russian Sesame Street.
I’m a damn American.
I sometimes take democracy for granted.
Americans expect a peaceful transformation of power and government by representation.
But sometimes you remember that Freedom must be earned.
I expect to show up at the elementary school and push a few buttons, and viola.
DEMOCRACY IN ACTION.
Just sit back and let the exit polls sing.
I did my homework. I checked the sample ballot. It’s mid-term elections.
There’s nothing too major. A governor race, a senator race a couple of amendments.
Do you think they should sell wine in grocery stores in Tennessee?
Yes damn it! I do. And so do most hobos and soccer moms.
So I walk in to my neighborhood elementary school.
The 1st thing I see is the blue hairs at the welcome table and these old battle axes are giving me the stink eye.
These old women are collectively 240 years old.
“They must have been something before electricity” Rodney Dangerfield would have said.
“ID please.” her voice is weathered like Jack Daniels in a smoky cask.
They squint at my identification like a mole peering through the darkness.
“I know you,” the great-grandmother of father time says fondling my plastic card.
“I’m here for the Iraqi election,” I say showing her my thumb and a big smile.
She is not amused.
She thumbs through the paper before her. Back and forth. Forth and back.
I see my name twice, but say nothing.
She turns the page and with trifocal lenses forged during the Lincoln administration she says; “Your address doesn’t match your identification.”
She’s right.
My license shows where I currently live, a house I have owned since 1999.
The election paperwork shows a house I once owned, and sold a year or more ago.
Suddenly I feel like the kid who got caught stealing candy from the five and dime store.
She puts up her arm summoning an election supervisor. A woman in her late 70’s joins the fray.
I need an abbacus to add up the collective life experience trying to help me do my constitutional duty.
I survey the cobwebs before me. They are cackling like hens blurting out questions.
“did you move?”
“Have you voted here before?
“I want my Iraqi purple thumb,” I joke yet again.
This joke didn’t work the 1st time. It has yet to work with these women who knew Iraq when it was called Mesopotamia.
310 years of wisdom at the front table giving me stink eye.
I feel a bead of perspiration roll down my forehead.
Is it hot in here because I have done something wrong? Should Democracy be this hard? Should it be this hot?
Should wanting to exercise my patriotic duty make my underarms sweat?
Or is it hot in here because these old people are brittle and their bones might break if this gymnasium dips under 85 degrees.
310 years of democracy huddle like the oldest football team in the world.
Suddenly they point a craggedy crooked finger at another table.
“She’s the fail safe” they say.
OMG.
310 years of blue hair is sending me to another coffee table like I’m a terrorist.
Will I be water boarded?
Why did you sell that house? How is it you are here voting?
A coincidence?
Are you a spy?
As I trudge across the gym, every eye staring at me, I wonder if it was this hard to vote in the Iraqi election.
I walk up to the blue hair.
I hold up my thumb.
“All I want is a purple stain”
The fail safe operator isn’t amused.
Nobody is.
“Give me purple thumb. Give me death!”
“Let me see your paperwork.”
She looks at my license.
She looks at my address.
“They don’t match,” she says.
I quietly wonder if throttling a blue hair will generate a 911 call and summon the police.
I keep my cool and stare at the woman who pulls out an ipad mini.
She operates this device like Henry Ford driving a Testarosa.
She begins typing my name into the designated area.
A N D Y
Becomes A N W A R
“Well that doesn’t work,” she says befuddled.
I am staring at my terrorist name upside down.
“It’s Andy,” I say keeping my cool.
A N D Y
She begins typing again.
Her bony exoskeleton is shaking so badly I want to ask her if she has the election day palsy.
A N T W A N
“Andy,” I say again calmly.
“Oh these buttons are so small,” she says growing perturbed.
I put out my thumb. It is neither happy nor purple.
“It says you have moved. You need to fill out this form. And go vote at another precinct.”
I roll my eyes as loudly and with as much pronounced dissatisfaction as I can.
“How come the county never has a problem finding me when it’s tax time?”
“Take this fail safe document to Hunter’s Bend Elementary. That’s where you vote.”
Anarchy, I scream in my brain.
I want to turn the table of over and scatter purple ink all over this den of democracy.
Problem is; there is no purple ink. There are never any Iraqi patriots around when you want roll a bunch of blue hairs.
So I walk out of the gym, frustrated, hot.
Maybe I won’t vote today, I think.
A couple of soccer moms with little to do and all day to do it clog up the breeze way before me.
“And then Sara told me this and I said well, I’ll be.”
“You don’t say.”
“Screw Voting,” I think to myself.
As I start up my car, I think about the loss of life and the sacrifice so many have made so I can have an old blue hair hand me a fail safe document and send me packing to another voting precinct.
I stare at the document in my lap. What the hell is a fail safe document, I think to myself?
This isn’t a nuclear pay load, I muse.
So I walk into the next gym. Again, more blue hairs greet me at the table.
“didn’t I just see you?” I quip.
“Excuse me,” The great-grandmother says.
Can someone without an oxygen tank volunteer I wonder.
I am calm and tell her I am a wayward soul looking for a purple thumb.
“Free Iraq!”
She doesn’t get my humor.
“Hey I know you” she says.
Finally we’re getting somewhere.
“Yeah, everyone knows me, but I still can’t vote in a county I have lived in for more than 15 years.”
She smiles.
I hand her my fail safe.
She thumbs through the book like a lost librarian.
I can’t find you anywhere, she says.
“They told you to come over here?”
“Yes. They have me in the book there, but they have my wrong address. I sold that house year or more ago.”
She summons over more blue hairs who stare at my paperwork.
The line is backing up like the last portajohn at a chilli eating contest.
“You need to go back to that precinct and vote,” a nasty blue hair says.
“They sent me here,” I say trying not to sweat through my neck tie.
“Just write him in on the back page,” another blue hair shouts.
“Back page?”
“It’s the fail safe,” another blurts out.
Fail Safe.
Somehow I am part of a voting fail safe.
Long Live Iraq!
And suddenly a woman is turning pages to a blank space in the back. She is writing my name in ink.
It is a shaky indecipherable mess that means nothing.
It is the closest I will get to an Iraqi revolution.
Her pen is blue.
“No purple?” I ask.
“Huh? What did you say sweetie?”
“never mind.”
I move to the voting booth.
I answer my questions and make my selections in 2 minutes.
I put the “I voted” sticker on my coat and leave.
As I walk out I wish I had a purple thumb to raise into a patriotic blue sky.
I want to celebrate the greatest country on Earth. I want to shout thanks to the Fail Safe Gods.
Give me purple or give me death!”
Instead I walk quietly with purpose through the parking lot.
I think about my voting day. I have just employed 1,000 years of blue hairs to make sure I was patriotically precise.
Thanks blue hairs and thank you America.
Long Live the United States of Purple thumb Freedom.
Life’s Crazy™