"The Dolphins" by Fred Neil played in my head before I realized why. I captioned a call. A man was talking to his elderly mother. They talked abou the weather. Then he said, "It's election night." And he askked her what time the polls closed where she was and I don't think she knew.
"Now that they won, the Republicans got to figure out what they're going to do with themselves," he said. "Try to make it a better, stronger country." He paused while his mother said something, he said, "I hope so too."
And this affected me to a degree that surprised me. It does not make me sad or mad. The riff from "The Dolphins" started strumming. Everything was quieter or clearer than usual and it affords me a piece of mind that is rare for me, like a connection to something larger.
When the call ended, I bowed my head and for the first time saw the furry red and green undergrowth that lines the area of the keyboard underneath the letter buttons. It looks to be made of shredded construction paper and many pinches of various spices and herbs.
The Fred Neil song goes:
"This old world may never change
the way it's been,
And all the ways of war can't change it
back again.
I've been a-searchin' for the dolphins
in the sea.
And sometimes I wonder, do you ever
think of me?
I go searching for the dolphins
in the sea."
I am at work as I write this, interrupted every few sentences by a call. The pen I write with, from Staples, is lousy and it forces me to press unnaturally hard on the paper to allow the ink to spill out. These things have, as I knew something would, dissolved my euphoria. It is something i have experienced before. It is always brief, always unexpected, always when I am sober. Traces of it hang now in my mind like pastel streamers left over from a birthday party last week, torn and wilted and waiting for me to feel okay about crumpling them and mingling them with the rotted trash in the can under the sink. It's not time yet.
And all this is about the elections somehow. I just noticed today that presidential elections come the same year as summer olympics and halfway between them we get winter olympics and these elections.
So, now the president is a democrat and our house is republican and I think what has caused this feeling in me is the idea that nothing will be resolved or accomplished. There is a tug of war above me and right now I feel like playing in the mud pit in the middle. I feel free because I did my patriotic duty and voted today. That's what that guy on the phone called it. Earlier today, I was trying to figure out why I voted and I guess that is actaully the best way to put it. It felt like my duty. And now I did it. My mom said back in the 60's, what people call the 60's, meaning the late 60's, they all thought the world was going to end and they found a freedom in that. I don't think the world is going to end. It is the knowledge that it will keep revolving forever that gives me my freedom. I, in this moment in this place right now, love you all and want to be all over you. I picture you all blowing kisses at me and them forming in a rosy cloud above me and then descending on my body all at once. Me in a fetal womb of thousands of kisses is what I am picturing and I am for real. I really want all of you to too.
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