Election 2008

I decided to start my non-anonymous blog today because of the election. I was thinking back to the events of my life over the past eight years and the elections of 2004 and 2000 were emotional pivot points. In fact, for my first post,I'm going to put up my thoughts and feelings from election night 2000 and juxtapose those thoughts with my reflections on eight years of the Bush Administration, which coincided with my eight years of being single.

Election Year 2000

November 7, 2000

I don’t want to feel emotion. I don’t want to be human. I don’t want to desire anything. I find myself craving a touch, a caress, a hug, and some comfort. I am tired of being hated and despised. I am tired of feeling like no one thinks like me. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere. I don’t like feeling so alone. Sometimes it gets so discouraging. I feel like I am Sisyphus and I’m not enjoying pushing the rock up the hill. What can I do to enjoy myself?

ELECTION NIGHT

I wanted to vote today.
I wanted my voice to mean something.
I wanted someone to care about things the way I do.
I wanted help.
I wanted hope.
I wanted to make a difference in someone’s life.
I wanted to make the world a better place.
They said I wasn’t registered.
My ex-wife was registered.
She didn’t vote.
She didn’t care.
My friend lost by 32 votes.
No one won that I wanted to win.
The world seems to be tilted against how I feel.
I was registered.
Why did they take me off the registration list?
What does it matter?
How could my solitary voice have even been heard?
Who would have cared?
When will I feel part of something again?
I feel myself going down.
I can’t stop it.
My electoral college is well short of 270.
I’m just losing.
The votes just aren’t there.
I’m a fourth party candidate in a two party system.
How can you even make a dent in this life?
What difference can one person make?
How do you get to a position to make a difference?
Why do I want to make a difference?
How many times can I take the voters saying they don’t want me?
How many times can I take the women saying they don’t want me?
Nothing seems to go the way I want it to.
I mess it up if it does.
I opted to be alone.
I can do alone.
Just don’t let me see everyone else together.
When will my storybook existence arrive?
It won’t.
No happily ever after.
I just can’t want or desire.
Then I won’t suffer.
No suffering if you don’t want anything.
I’m too tired.
I’m going to bed alone.
I live my life alone.
What is going on with me?
I thought I could believe in the symbol.
I thought I could resurrect.
I thought I could be saved.
I thought I could have faith.
I believe in something, I just don’t know what it is.
I don’t know what I believe in.
I’m supposed to find eternal life in the moment.
It is a pretty dismal eternity.
I suppose it could be worse, I could not be here.
Why would that be worse?
I wouldn’t hurt.
I’m so tired of hurting.
I’m so tired.
I’m so tired.
I’m so tired.
I’m so damn tired.
I kill myself for what?
A hope that sometime in the future I might have a little money.
I’m so tired I can’t even work.
Why the hell do I want money?
I don’t need money.
I can starve with the best of them.
I drive a car I didn’t pay for with a busted windshield.
I gambled in Vegas and lost.
I spun the dice and got snake eyes, a 1-1 on the 11th floor.
I landed on green in roulette.
I went bust in 21.
I lost it all.
Worst of all I lost hope.
I don’t know why I lost hope.
My desk is swamped.
I can’t even seem to get through it.
I’m being sued.
They want my money too.
I can’t even turn around without someone’s hand in my pocket.
I can’t sleep.
I can’t work out.
I can’t run.
I can’t function.
Everyone is mad at me.
I added 100 new clients and I don’t know how I am going to handle them.
I’m dying.
Day by dying day.
I go down with the sun.
When do I just blow up and give up?
I can’t believe that I can’t keep it together.
I can’t maintain this.
I can’t function.
I can’t do anything right.
My life is a joke.
I am paralyzed half of the time.
I’m supposed to instill confidence in my employees and I have none in myself.
Why am I appealing?
Why would anyone want me?
My money?
My ex has that.
My love?
My ex had it.
I’m not funny.
I’m not inspirational.
I don’t know anything.
Why am I in crisis again?
I haven’t felt like this forever.
I’m angry because I seem to be a biological animal, reacting to chemical reactions in my brain.
I’m not even autonomous.
I’m a chemistry experiment in some warped universe.
No one else even sees the world the way I do.
I don’t want to feel so damn alone.
I don’t want to be so damn tired.
I don’t want to only feel the cold of my sheets at night.
I don’t even have anyone to talk to.
I can’t let anyone read this.
It would be some manipulation on my part.
Some cry to just love me.
Hi, I’m in pain, please love me.
Nothing else seems to work.
I can’t get anyone to love or care about me by just being me.
I love women who sleep with other men.
I sleep alone.
Alone.
A-1 one, solitary.
I don’t think anyone has cried about me.
I don’t know why.
A Republican president.
The end of the world approaches.
Maybe we can have a nuclear war and in a blinding flash of light – happiness.
In a moment, the pain would be gone.
Burned away in an explosion of instantaneous pain numbing pain.
Happiness.
I’ve been trained against greed.
I’ve been trained against pride.
I’ve been trained against lust.
I’ve been trained against loneliness.
I manage to buck my training.
I have a full day tomorrow.
How am I going to function?
I’m not even sleeping.
I can’t sleep.
One a.m. and I have to be in Salt Lake by 10 a.m.
I have so much to do before I leave.
I get to go to Salt Lake twice today.
If I’d planned, I could have gone and stayed.
I can just feel myself getting my ass kicked in court.
I feel like an idiot.
I like to live in my little fantasy world that I am good.
I like to live in my little fantasy world that I do a good job.
I like my fantasies.
I believe that there is something to have faith in, but I don’t know why or who.
I admire faith, envy it, and feel as Tolstoy in his Confession – how can they have faith?
I must understand.
My mind won’t let me not.
What am I?
I am a sad case of a human being.
I look around me and I look at the people living out their existences.
I don’t watch TV.
I don’t much care about anything.
I am worthless.
I could be gone and within a year no one would care.
Gone.
And no one would care.
No one would miss me.
No amount of good I’ve done would count.
The pain I caused would live on.
Sometimes it is really hard to believe that my life has much meaning.
I want it to have meaning.
I don’t feel like it does sometimes.
I want to be loved and respected and I’m not.
I am a nut case.
Why is it so important for me to have my life mean something?
I look at the world and it is so large.
I am so insignificant.
It just seems bleak and pointless.
It is as if my brain is large enough to capture it all, but it can’t capture any meaning out of it.
Having some other human being say they want me, that would suffice.
Actions spoke louder than words.
Man, the actions are screaming.
Screaming that the only thing important is selfishness.
It makes me cry.
I don’t know why I’m upset over being unselfish.
I thought it was a virtue, but it feels mostly like a curse.
I’m unselfish.
I could list off the deprivations.
I indulge myself by buying books.
I have no house.
I have no legitimate car.
I give most of my disposable income to my ex-wife.
I pay her twice what I pay myself.
I’m getting fat.
I don’t run.
I’m out of shape and I can’t get the inertia to start again.
Oh yes, I write.
Whoppity Damn Do.
I write.
No one reads it.
It isn’t anything that makes any sense to anyone but me.
I write and write, hundreds of pages, but no finished product.
I am a writing masturbator.
Jacking off with the word processor.
Coming on the page.
Totally infertile.
No meaning growing out of this page.
I am alone.
I come back to that because I am.
I’ve written nearly six pages of sentences tonight.
This is one strange piece of writing.
I spout off and feel better.
It doesn’t feel better.
I just hurt.
Ouch.
Ouch.
Ouch.
I hurt.
I don’t feel better.
I’m just as alone as I was ten lines above.
Still all by my lonesome.
Sometimes it just feels overwhelming like there is no point.
Suicide is an option.
Not a very good one.
Most people would laugh at me suggesting that option.
Maybe I just want to be selfish.
Maybe if you don’t do any selfish acts, you manifest it in the most selfish act of all.
The thing is suicide doesn’t seem all that selfish.
The line seems so fine.
I could walk into the back room – climb out on the landing and jump.
Headlines and splatters.
11 stories right on to my head.
You won’t even grieve me for very long.
My therapist would get a kick out of this suicide note.
Mabye someone will read this and think I mean it.
I kind of do.
It scares me to go to work almost.
Funny, a kiss would make it all go away.
No one is going to be kissing me in the near future.
You start to feel unattractive after awhile.
I’m tired of taking all the blame.
I have big shoulders, but it is so heavy I’m about ready to dump and go on.
I’m just afraid I’ll get dragged over with the refuse.
George W. Bush – president.
Orrin Hatch – senator.
Mike Leavitt – governor.
Mark Shurtleff – attorney general.
Jim Hansen – Congressman.
Kent Winward – Alone.
Alone and with no popular vote.
I try and help people and I get killed.
The world is not set up to allow people to be kind.
Kind – hah.
Kind equals getting destroyed.
He’s nice, let’s sock it to him.
I’m so hurt.
But I’m kind -- damn it.
I need to scream.
It comes out silent.
Things just roll off my back.
Nothing bugs me.
I think about Rent.
I love that show.
The writer who can’t use words.
The songwriter who cannot hear, the filmmaker cannot see are my heros.
They are me.
I want to see that show.
I will go it alone.
I am always going to go it alone.
Here I am folks.
Here is your son.
I got 4.0 average in high school.
Cum Laude in college.
William Leary Scholar in Law School.
I’m flunking out of life.
I’m alone.
I piss everyone off around me.
So, here I am.
I am alone.
I am God.
I am the God I don’t believe in.
I don’t know how to put God at the center of my life.
I can put on a good show.
I can say that I feel something akin to your perceptions of God, but that I don’t believe in God.
I am a heretic.
I am a lunatic.
I am an unregistered voter on election day.
I am overwhelmed.
I can’t catch up.
I can go crazy.

Election Night 2008

I'm at home with my wife. I just put my son to bed after he fell asleep as I watched election results. My daughters are growing up. Bonnie voted today and is living on her own. Jessica is on the verge of adulthood and at her Mom's house. Megan is on her own and thriving in Salt Lake. Emma sprained her arm today and we spent an hour and a half in Instacare while she got x-rays and an arm splint.

I'm not crazy. I'm not overwhelmed. I voted early.

America is phenomenal. I'm crying.

This is unbelievably beautiful. I'm so -- I can't even articulate the beauty.

The symbolic significance is unreal.

All things can heal. Pain and discord can be reconciled.

I am not alone. I am surrounded by those I love and who love me. I voted.

The United States won. I won.

THE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

Yes, we can.

The election is won and the work begins. I wept because the work is hard. I wept because the work can work. I wept because ideals won out over fear. I wept because hope is beautiful. I wept because I felt joy. I wept because I do believe in this country and what it stands for -- liberty, freedom of press, freedom of religion, due process, trial by jury, no unlawful search and seizure, no cruel and unusual punishment, checks and balances on power, the power to vote, equal protection, and a right to an appeal. I wept for joy. I wept for the pain of others. I wept that I have a duty, an obligation to improve the country, to protect fundamental liberties and rights. I have a duty and I took an oath as an attorney to defend the Constitution.

I saw a man, essentially my age become President of the United States. Is this a right of passage I had forgotten about -- the confusion and unsettling emotion that part of the American Dream, to become President, has actually happened for another young boy born in the 1960s. And what have I done with my life? I am envious. I am in awe. I am honored that I got to vote for the man.

I am excited that we have a professor of Constitutional Law that is going to be our President. I am excited that we have a civil rights attorney as our President. I am excited to have someone who graduated from Harvard Law School as our President. I am excited to have an attorney as a President.

The spontaneous celebrations breaking out across the country -- Pennsylvania Avenue, Times Square, Grant Park, Harlem -- are the physcial manifestation of my emotions. I am the crowd jumping up and down outside the White House. I am packed into Time Square to ring in the new four years. I am black and white. I am America, torn and sad, unified and joyous.

I am 2000 and 2008. I cried both nights.