Obligatory Post Presidential Election Message

 

    Voting from overseas underlined my safe remove. I got to experience the whole damn year (+++++) of presidential campaigning from my southern hemisphere bunker, which means I didn't suffer through the 24/7 campaign onslaught. If a TV is on in New Zealand chances are you will be exposed to high levels of rugby or the afternoon quiz show The Chase.    
    Signing up to vote wasn't terrible but I did have to jump through some additional hoops and track down and fill out some forms to be seen as an overseas voter. A few weeks after I submitted those papers I got an email with a link to print my ballot.  The worst part was the confusing directions involving multiple envelopes (for my PRIVACY the instructions assured me, with capitalization that made things feel less trustworthy, like an 1800s religious propaganda pamphlet).  Why does multiple envelopes feel like the paper gown you wear during a pelvic exam, we can pretend but it is really fooling nobody.

From a public domain scan of a pre-Great Disappointment Millerite pamphlet.

    I sent my ballot off at the end of September.  None of the Chicago legal watchdog groups had even issued their voter guides yet.  And I needed a lot of guidance, because there were about 100 retention elections for judges to vote for. The day after I mailed that printed-at-work (from-NZ-public-healthcare-printer-ink-funds, thanks Te Whatu Ora!) I received a paper ballot in the mail.  This physical packet hadn't been mentioned in the email that urged me to print and return the ballot in its Matryoshka doll-style privacy envelopes.  I perhaps should have saved it for art, made some wild collages like I did with my hospital and state issued April 2020 Covid-19 guidance papers. My lifetime=everything is a horrifying primary historical document.

    The day after the election was the filled with a deep, sad ache I would call homesickness. Before that day my experience with homesickness in NZ has been fleeting. Such as, after leaving the gym when I went for a lap swim in New Zealand. I hadn’t been swimming in over a month, which broke my doggedly paddled streak that kept me sane throughout the dark Chicago winter months.  I wasn't having a pang for my Illinois gym, or for the gloomy park and the bridge across the North Branch of the Chicago river that were my regular commute there and back. It was much simpler. I was at home to have been submerged in water.  I hadn't even recognized how homesick I was for that specific feeling.  For water.

 And then the election happened.  It was moving day, for me, I was sweating over boxes and I had chaos to wrangle after my helper with a car reneged their help at the last minute. My new housemates made dinner and we watched Nimona together in the house’s attached chapel (deconsecrated, I have been assured).  It was something soft for all of us, we could pointedly not look at the news.  I made a mistake before bed and looks at electoral college numbers.  Things were basically in Trump’s bag by that point, so I felt some small doom.
    Now I’m wrinkled with these easy tears and this frequent pang.  I am homesick, not for the US, not for Chicago and its glorious density and breadth, not for the bitterness of Malort and the cheek chafing feel of the late December wind but I am floating in this anticipatory homesickness for /here/, for the ambient Kiwi pleasantness on public transit. Where the bus driver waits for people to sit down before pulling back into traffic, where people are mostly smiling and relaxed, where I have never seen an assault in public and I don’t worry about conceal-carry on a regular basis
    On election day I stopped and cried on a corner of a lot in the Avondale neighborhood. That's the picture at the beginning of this blog, all tall greens fresh with summer leaves.  There’s a photo series on one side of the park in deep shade, of former residents telling their strories from around the time of the destructive 2010-2011 earthquakes. Neighbors were finding out if the government had deemed their streets and homes as falling in the geographic Red Zone--which would be bought out by the government and demolished--or if their homes would be spared.  People looked for (and found) helpers, neighbors helped each other and strangers stopped and offered their own homes for hot showers, or their help shoveling debris and earthquake slurry.  The corner park with its quiet art gallery used to house the power generators for the neighborhood in the months that it took to repair the electrical grid. It stands as a silent monument to a part of the neighbor that has now been carved away, like the bad spot on an apple, land declared to have suffered too much liquifaction to rebuild.  All that stands there now are the tall trees and it is summer day quiet, buzzing insects but, no buzzing electricity, just the wind and some geese honking on the nearby Otakaro River.

I’m not sure if I can express my disappointment with words. I just know that we will do what we have to do without the support of governmental structures.  We will have to take care of each other. It will push me to be more tender, fiercer and oh so much weirder all to spite the circumstances. I just wish it could be easier for all of us.