10:45pm. Discouraged. I’m drinking every time Dan Rather busts out a Texas aphorism. Which means I’m ripped.

9:11pm. Nice to see a few things: Maryland went Democratic (no surprise there.) Barbara Mikulski looks like she’s going to win. Barack Obama crushed Alan Keyes.

Black Helicopters Dept. I went and voted this morning after waiting a while for Jen come back from giving blood; she has some kind of mystery sickness thing and they sort of threw their hands up in the air and said, “We’ll draw some blood”, which means, we’re stumped. We had romantic dreams of walking across the street hand-in-hand to vote the fascists out of office (actually, she had that dream, while mine was more like the Matrix, where I used the Crane Style Technique to clear a bloody path through the throngs of Bush supporters barring our way to the polls. It turned out that there were just four teenagers asking quietly, “Kerry for President?”) I walked over by myself and after signing the card found myself in front of one of the Deibold machines. My misgivings have been documented before, and I can see where there could be a problem; the fact that my little voter credit card thing was about as insecure a device as a blank piece of paper did not lend a sense of trust. (You sign a paper, they give you a credit card. You walk to the machine, insert the card, cast your ‘ballot’, and the card pops out. You then hand the card to the dork with the “I Voted” stickers, and who the hell knows where your vote went.)

So, for better or worse, I cast my vote for the guy I believe in. Lord help us all.

Professional. I got an email from the VP of marketing at a T-shirt company this afternoon, with the subject “Looking for creative artist”. Here is the body of the message, verbatim:

If you are interested in doing art please let me know

Now, I don’t have any idea who this guy is, or what it’s like “doing art” for him. Based on my previous experiences with T-shirt companies, there’s no way in hell I’d ever send one a sketch, let alone attempt to do business with one. But this email makes me laugh. My website is reasonably professional; my work is generally good. How does this guy expect I’m going to react to an email this impersonal? I mean, his signature took up more space than the message. Get bent, buddy.

Humor. The quiet lakeside town my parents live in is going through some growing pains lately. Some folks bought a big house across the street from them, decided they didn’t like the layout, and so picked it up and moved it off the property to an open lot, where it’s sat up on blocks for a year. Some snarky individual decided to play a Halloween prank with it this year.