When I was still quite young my then-lover and I worked at all times like twelve bastards on the newspaper and one of the elections we so wore ourselves down reporting, writing, and editing on the voting that when the day of the actual voting arrived we had not gone to bed until near onto dawn and so when some hours later we awoke we were both too drained to get up and go to the place of the polls and there make our own votes.

What, we figured, anyway, difference, could it, possibly, make?

Very late that night, we listened, in horror, clasping one another, in fear and trembling, as a radio man soberly intoned that our county supervisor, a woman out of a time tunnel, a Confederate war widow of some type, who believed everything not White, Old, and Mean, should be beaten senseless with a branding iron, and then be tossed down a well, had escaped having to appear in a runoff, by a single vote.

We swore each other to eternal secrecy, she and I, that never, would we breathe, a single word, of the harrowing Fact, that because we had lolled around in bed, in sex and drugs and rocknroll, Mary Suratt, she had survived, to serve another term.

But then, even later that night, thinking about it, coming on another dawn, I thought: what in the sam hill alice in wonderland kind of voting could it be, that it would make a difference, that a couple of kids, didn’t flail out of their libertine wallow, to trail on down to a poll?

A voting that’s a nonsense, that’s what.