J'cancel!

I will confess several things up front. First, I confess that I've intended to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who it was. Second, I confess that I was deeply worried going into the election. After what happened in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio, I was worried that if the election was even remotely close "something" would happen to turn it into a Republican victory. But it now appears that the election is going so strongly against McCain that even the most egregious shenanigans can't change the basic outcome.

I wasn't going to watch the news tonight, but I was driving home and found myself a little sleepy at the wheel, and sometimes listening to the radio wakes me up. For some reason I can't really get Nova-M in my car. Some days I can hear it, other days it sounds like someone dragging a 55-gallon drum across a garage floor. Today I couldn't make out a word, so I listened to NPR, which presented the leading edge of the Obama victory in a way that didn't make me jittery. So when I got home I turned the TV on and watched the news, vowing that I'd turn it off the minute things started to go badly or the minute that anyone started to argue. I don't need bad news and I don't need an argument, and I'll take drastic steps to deal with either.

My own voting experience was quite banal. It took me not more than twenty minutes get my ballot and vote, and at least five of those minutes were expended talking to neighbors that I met in line. The polling place in Wittmann was well-organized and very efficient, even though most of the volunteers were so old they looked like they'd been recently unearthed in the Valley of the Kings. I kid the volunteers, of course.

I would say that the odds of Arizona going blue are not just practically zero, but entirely zero. But I knew that when I showed up to vote. Honestly, I voted more to cancel out the vote of a notable Republican than to alter Arizona's electoral makeup. It's irrational and silly, yes, but nevertheless, there I was snarling "J'cancel!" as I fed my ballot into the optical reader.