The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Parent-teacher conferences at my kid’s school today, which ate up most of my evening, and then I had two tests and an assignment to write for tomorrow, and I’m contemplating how long I’m going to wait until I take this big bastard out of its box:
… so, I have spent money unwisely, but fuck it, I get to give the original PS5 to my son and get some good dad points, and fuck it, the world’s ending so I may as well buy useless shit, right?
More tomorrow.
I don’t have a lot to say, and I’m not going to use that as a launch into a ten thousand word post. I said plenty last night. America has demonstrated rather conclusively that she will choose any man, no matter how mediocre, over any woman, no matter how talented, and she has now demonstrated that twice. I am deeply disappointed, but I cannot claim to be surprised. I didn’t think this was going to happen, but unlike 2016, I didn’t think it was impossible.
I am writing through a fog of brain pills; I finally went to bed around 1:30, got up at 7, went back to bed at nine and slept past noon. I am pretty sure I am going to work tomorrow, and the day after that.
We can always hope he dies before January, I suppose. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are still going to run the country either way, and RFK is about to singlehandedly ruin everything they don’t ruin, but maybe his heart will finally give out. JD Vance will be President before 2028; the only question is how long it takes.
Christ, I hate it here.
6:33 PM: I am sitting on my couch, iPad in my lap, phone to my right, MSNBC streaming on the television in front of me. The polls in Indiana closed half an hour ago and the state has not been called yet, which I’m choosing to believe is a good thing despite the fact that Trump is up 60-40 with 3% of the vote in. I can’t promise regular updates or that I’ll not abandon this in a fit of depression in a couple hours but We. Are. Live.
6:40 PM: I know I said this yesterday but I actually do think we’ll have an idea of who the winner is in a few hours. Will it be literally called? Probably not, but I think the writing will be large and glowing on the wall. I’m sure I’m wrong.
6:41 PM: This Philadelphia DA really should have just said “Fuck around.” If you’re gonna repeat “eff around and find out” four or five times just say fuck.
6:45: One of my cats spies a random other cat through our front window and starts making absolutely psychotic noises at it, causing the whole house to temporarily freak out and descend upon the room he’s in.
6:50: I take a few minutes to track down useful local race coverage. It occurs to me that the school board races are probably the first things I’ll know about definitively tonight. Mike Braun and Todd Rokita are both up but there’s only about 10% of the vote in and I’m not worrying about it right now. No matter how things go nationally the local races in Indiana are probably not going to be good news.
6:54: Reports of multiple bomb threats in Democratic areas in Georgia, which … sadly fails to surprise me.
7:00: A whole lot of states are about to close, and meanwhile … this, from Rush County, IN. I don’t actually know where these results are from; they were just posted to BlueSky.
My wife has had a theory that Kennedy was going to do unexpectedly well in Indiana that she has been talking about for a while; we’ll see.
7:06: It does look like that data was flipped, and everybody’s called Indiana. They called Banks for Senate too, fuck. Oh well.
7:17: They’re chattering about Georgia and I’m reloading the local races over and over. I really want to see School Board results, dammit!
7:22: Mental note that I’m not allowed to look at the New York Times website tonight, first, because fuck the fucking New York Times, and second, because their tech people are on strike and I don’t cross picket lines.
I’m gonna have to figure out a way to charge my phone from the couch. Hmm. Surely the boy has a charger around here somewhere. He lives on the couch.
7:27: I mentioned this in other places earlier, but I dressed in blue from head to toe today without even realizing I was doing it. I just changed into comfy pants and those are blue too. Meanwhile, I can’t find a charger cord long enough for my phone, and my son’s charger is Lightning, not USB-C, so I’m screwed there. Somebody bring me a ten foot USB-C cable.
7:29: The Vermont Senate race is called for Bernie Sanders, who I didn’t realize was running again. Does he know how Goddamned old he is?
7:30: A few more states’ polls close and West Virginia gets called immediately for Trump. What a Goddamn surprise. Meanwhile, Joe Manchin’s Senate seat goes to a Republican. Sigh.
7:36: Still waiting impatiently for my county to report literally anything.
7:38: I threw $20 at Slingbox for a month of CNN and MSNBC, by the way. I’ll cancel it in a couple of days because once the election’s over I don’t need it any longer and the second month will be twice as expensive.
7:42: Some dude is on a college campus in Arizona talking to students waiting in line, and apparently some male student told him that he voted for Trump because Kamala Harris didn’t go on Joe Rogan’s podcast and he didn’t know what she stood for, and I think it’s fine if that kid is never allowed to vote again.
7:43: Apparently that dude is at Arizona State and his name is… Gottie? I dunno, Rachel didn’t spell it.
7:44: Sigh. AP has called the IN governor’s race for Mike Braun, which not only means that we have him in office but his Christianist, psychopathic running mate, who makes him look like Mitt Romney by comparison.
7:52: I swear to Christ that if Kamala should have done Joe Rogan makes its way into The Discourse I’m gonna commit some crimes. I don’t even know which ones. Some of the crimier ones.
7:58: The way I can tell all the MSNBC people are my age is that they just interviewed De La Soul and all of the anchors are losing their minds over it.
8:00: Seeing online that Mark Robinson has lost the Gubernatorial race in North Carolina. Florida just got called immediately which kind of catches me off guard. It probably shouldn’t, though. So far no real surprises anywhere.
Illinois being “too early to call” is kind of alarming, though. Then again, so was Indiana.
8:03: This is unreasonable but right here at this exact second is the first moment of real dread tonight. Rick Scott is projected in Florida, too.
8:06: I want a Big Board.
8:10: GOD DAMN IT ST. JOE COUNTY DO YOU NEED ME TO COME HELP COUNT THE POLLS HAVE BEEN CLOSED FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS REPORT SOME VOTES
8:20: Not a lot going on and one of the cats is trying really hard to move into my lap, which is already occupied.
8:21: Rachel Maddow says thirty-two different places have received bomb threats in Georgia today. Christ.
8:28: Fuuuuuck I do not want Mike Braun to be my governor. Again, it’s not surprising at all, nothing that has happened tonight has been a surprise yet, but I’d like some good news other than the North Carolina governor’s race.
8:30: Florida’s abortion amendment is running at 57% but Rick Scott has already been called as winning the Senate race and Trump has been called for the state. Make it make fucking sense.
8:44: Kind of in a holding pattern until 9:00 hits and a bunch more states’ polls close. We’re in the doldrums part of the evening right now and I don’t think things are going to be getting better for an hour or so. That’s if we’re lucky.
A tranche of votes hit in St. Joe County, and with a quarter of the vote in the guy I really don’t want on the school board is in second place, which puts him on the school board. No idea where the votes are from, though; there’s no way I’m getting precinct-level data on school board votes.
8:47: I just saw an actual TV ad for … a podcast? Seriously? We’re doing that now?
8:49: Oh, there were bomb threats called into Navajo areas in Arizona too? Really? Weird how these keep happening to Democratic areas.
8:59: How horrible will the next minute of my life be? Stay tuned!
9:00: Nobody’s talking about the House at all. Anything changing there? Anyone wanna mention that?
9:01: Pretty fucking horrible, as Texas got called fucking immediately. We can still hope for Cruz to go down, I suppose, but Texas continues to disappoint.
9:06: Wait, NBC hasn’t called Illinois or New York yet? Come on.
9:14: Big Board dude is going on about how suburban and rural counties are moving more to Trump, which is true, but a difference of 200 votes isn’t really going to make much of a difference if the cities move by the same percentage and have twenty times as many people.
9:20: OH MY GOD STOP SAYING SLIPPAGE. PLEASE. IT HURTS.
9:21: Quit talking about Georgia and give me some numbers from Iowa.
9:24: Hey, good news! Sarah McBride wins a House seat in Delaware, making her the first transgender woman elected to the House. That’s a big deal. And apparently Fani Willis just got re-elected, too.
9:25: The FBI says the Russians are calling in hoax bomb threats all over the place, in case that single minute of good news made you feel any better.
9:26: I don’t know who any of these people who aren’t Rachel Maddow are, but the old white guy just chimed in to say that we “never had bomb threats at polling places before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate.” That is utter bullshit, as any primarily-Black precinct in the fucking South could tell you. Christ, what ahistorical nonsense.
9:33: I think right here is where I abandon the idea that we’re going to know anything tonight. I was hoping for a scenario where we’d be overperforming the polls— the shy Harris voter thing— but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
9:37: Continuing tonight’s theme of Not Surprising but Still Depressing, Marjorie Taylor Greene is projected to win reelection. Which makes me wonder if Colorado’s polls have closed yet. I think they have; I’m gonna go check on Boebert.
9:39: She’s up ten points with 2/3 of the vote in, so she’s probably reelected too.
9:42: I know I’ve talked some shit about this costume for the new Superman movie, but I am hugely in love with this picture even if the S-shield is wrong and I can see the stupid high collar.
9:49: I would like Rachel Maddow to explain what the fuck is the difference between “too early to call” and “too close to call.” Do they just change the language when a certain percentage of the votes come in? Is it possible to flip back to “too early”?
9:52: Two hundred years since he first ran for president, I still do not understand how this guy is getting even a single vote.
10:09: Fifteen minutes of talking my brother off the ledge via text message. Having eerie flashbacks to having a similar conversation with my mother in 2016. Colorado called for Harris.
10:18: Seeing a report on BlueSky that the Dems are now projected to take the House? Assuming it’s nonsense for now; it’s way too early, but Goddammit the way I have no information at my fingertips about it is driving me insane.
10:19: Steve Karnacki, whose name I am almost certainly misspelling, continues his infuriating habit of talking about candidates outperforming or underperforming 2020’s vote totals without referencing the absolute number of votes being discussed. 50% of the vote in Philadelphia is in and Harris stands to net at least another 200,000 votes when the rest of it comes in, which erases slight Trump gains in dozens of podunk rural counties.
10:22: God damn it, MSNBC calls Iowa for Trump. And fucking Cruz in Texas. Fuck. Fuck. The fabled Seltzer poll appears to have missed the mark.
10:32: Speaking of “shit I saw on BlueSky,” somebody’s called Georgia for Trump? That’s bad. That’s the first genuinely no-shit really bad sign of the night.
10:39: I’m starting to get deeper into the weeds in looking at county-by-county results in individual states. I’m getting depressed and scared and starting to contemplate taking brain meds. The bomb threats across Georgia are starting to look like they flipped the state.
10:43: Also assuming that the “we’ve taken the House” report was bullshit at this point.
10:58: Okay, new plan is never pay attention to BlueSky again; I don’t like what I’m seeing in Georgia, but people are literally still voting and if anyone has called it I haven’t heard about it other than that one post.
11:00: God, I hate this. But I’m pretty sure I felt the exact same way at this time in 2020. Polls in California have closed and it’s called immediately for Harris. Trump takes Idaho. Still no surprises.
11:02: HOW IS NORTH CAROLINA TOO EARLY TO CALL, RACHEL MADDOW. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST AND ALL THAT IS HOLY TAKE THIRTY SECONDS AND EXPLAIN WHAT THE FUCK THAT MEANS.
11:03: Dare I look at Montana and see what’s going on with Tester’s race, or is it going to just depress me more?
11:05: Okay, only about six percent of the vote is in. Nothing to see here yet.
11:16: NBC calls the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno, which means that we have lost the Senate. Even if we pick up the seat in … what is it, Nebraska? and hold Montana, the Senate’s gone.
11:21: AP has called North Carolina for Trump. And I know that this is more or less exactly where we were at this point four years ago, but I think I’m done now. I’m sweaty and tired and I need brain medication. We haven’t seen a single state flip yet but the only one I feel good about is Pennsylvania and there are going to be flips somewhere.
7:52 am: I put on my Jackass wristband.
I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.
That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.
Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:
I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.
First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.
And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.
Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.
(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)
I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.
I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.
God help us all.
Book of the Month is going to be Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, with The Fury of the Gods, In the Hour of Crows and The God and the Gumiho nipping at its heels.
Came home and fell asleep on the couch. Dinner will be a can of Mountain Dew and then I’m going to bed.
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