chelseabatten

[chelseabatten]

A prayer to Our Lady Joan

Joan, our lady of the incisive observant pen, pray for me.

I want to be an observer like you, but it’s so, so hard. It used to be kind of easy, before I was living life at any level. Now I’m either out of practice, or things are perhaps less new to me than they used to be, or I’ve just got too much other shit on my mind. 

Were you somehow immune to these forces, Joan? Did your mind never succumb to the entropy of contentment? And if not, were you happy? Were you at least not regretful of having taken on opposing roles that demanded your nature be two separate things--coldly observant and warmly humane? 

Or did you find it easy to compartmentalize when occasion called? 

As for me, I have become lazy or else found my powers lacking. Playing an active role in the world I inhabit has made my life happier and more dynamic, but it has made me less devoted and punctilious an observer.  

The impressions have not left me. When I decided to, I found I was able to tap back into the habit again. But catching them all is so difficult. They show up while I’m doing other things, like washing dishes or taking a shower. (The sound of water helps, though alas, sitting beside water with no other task at hand but to observe and writer has so far been mostly useless.) I receive these impressions with both immense gratitude for their visitation and resignation at how quickly, in the time it takes me to extricate myself from the task, they will evaporate, leaving me to scratch out clumsy sketches of the vanishing imagery left in my head. 

For that matter, there are so many of them. Even when I steel myself for the crazy task of commanding them to appear, I can’t make up my mind which to focus on. How do you know which impressions, which themes, are the important ones for you that day? How do you know what to keep a lookout for? (Because surely no one, not even you, has the strength to hang onto everything your creative mind attracts.) 

It’s so easy to hang it up on time and place. You lived and worked within the late 1960s and 70s, in the cities, among the musicians and the politicians and the celebrity criminals. Your work was cut out for you. Here in the rare and isolated north, mine is mine to invent. Maybe sometime an obvious assignation (no offense) will find me. But for now, I’ve got to decide which stories are worth telling. And it takes a long fucking time to discover that, without some preconceived idea serving as my northstar. 

I don’t want to complain. The last thing I want to do is sigh and give up. I just want your advice, your help. How did you know what to write for that “Prix de Paris?” How did you find your way from precocious moralistic essays to the New Journalism you helped pioneer? How did you convince the tastemakers and the publishers that you knew what you were doing and were the one to do it for them? How did you convince the world that your observations were what they needed?

[chelseabatten]

Hey you in there,

In case you’ve forgotten, you love writing. Nothing about that has changed. You love it so much that even when you hate what you’re working on, you can get lost in it for hours. You also are good at it. You make pedantic shit sound interesting and deep. Not everyone can do that.

So what possible justification can you make for not working on the things that genuinely interest you? For not writing about the non-pedantic shit? That stuff is interesting even if a moron writes about it. People are going to want to read it. They can’t get enough of foggy coastlines and street-view observation and windows into the lives of people they will never meet. 

You always wanted to do right by the people you interviewed. Make them feel proud that they talked to you, that their time was justified. Well, that window has long since passed. Maybe that was your problem the whole time--you were trying to be a saint when you should have just been selfish. You didn’t promise them a Grapes of Wrath-style canonization. You just said you were going to write about them because you found them interesting. That was enough. That should be enough for you. You know by now that they’re never going to think what you did was right. So why keep caring? Why keep trying to make it good or true by any standard but your own?

This is your time to write the stuff that people really do want. The stuff people always love reading from you. Stop trying to be smart and just observe and record. That’s good enough. You’re good enough. 

[chelseabatten]

Thread

The crack across My screen affords Pleasure inex- plicable, the way the angry tears felt when, hard and clean, they hung for a sharp mo- ment before the wind swept them off my face. This thread of thin, causeless imperfection  across the glass confirms my choked unspoken rage at compulsive optimism forced upon me,  as if love could not admit of or contain despair.

[chelseabatten]

I showed up at the farm for my first day of work in old jeans and a grey hoodie, half zipped up because even with the constant southern California sun, the ocean wind rolling across the fields puts a chill into your bones. My disheveled appearance was the product of careful crafting--not only which to pair with which jeans, but especially crafting my hair--my brand identity at that time in my life--into a symmetrical sphere around my cranium, finished with an artful swoop that just grazed my right eyebrow. 

My boss, Lucila, who owned the farm, met me at the loading dock. The truck was bigger than I’d anticipated--I couldn’t imagine driving it, let alone parking it on Newport Avenue amid the farmers market setup squeeze. 

But she assured me that I wouldn’t be alone that day. The erstwhile market attendant would be training me for the next three weeks before I took over the market stall on my own. I wasn’t thrilled about this--part of the draw for this job was the ability to do things my way.

As if on cue, Kristen stepped out from the truck’s cabin, where she’d been loading the tarps and the tables. She was wearing old jeans, a grey hoodie half zipped up, and her hair fell into a symmetrical sphere around her cranium, with an artful swoop that just grazed her right eyebrow. 

We stood there, on either side of Lucila, looking at each other.

My first impression was fuck. her. I was thinking it even as we shook hands and smiled. I continued thinking it as I loaded crates of vegetables under her guidance. I tried to mask it as I made small talk, asking her how long she’d been working for the farm, where she’d gone to school, what her plans were after this. She told me she was going to travel, return to southeast Asia where she’d spent time in the past, maybe go to Europe afterward. Fuck. her. I continued to think, because the only thing more brand identity than my hair was my intrepidity. 

But something shifted between the loading and leaving for the market. I strapped in my seat belt in the passenger seat as she leapt up on the other side. Looking at her face in profile as she shifted the sticky gears, I suddenly found the fuck. her. gone from inner dialogue, replaced by something quite unexpected.

The truck was rumbling down the dirt path to the highway when I suddenly asked, 

“So was it weird to find out that you’d be training your twin today?” 

She looked at me, a slight ripple in her equanimity. Then a smile broke out on her face. 

“Yeah--I was like, Who’s this girl?’” 

That was the first time. The second time was three years later, though it felt (and still feels) like eons lie between life as a farmhand in San Diego and life as a nomadic journalist who, in 2013, ended up in Bedford, New Hampshire. 

I don’t even remember now how I found Elizabeth’s blog. Maybe she liked something of mine on social media? Maybe I stumbled across her work while searching for an image? Whatever it was, I wound up wasting an hour or two reading her blog, studying her photographs and, finally, examining her “About” page’s blurry profile photo. Everyone told me I couldn’t have a blurry profile photo, which immediately poisoned me against her. Why did she do it when I couldn’t? 

But something changed between that bitchy judgment and the end of her byline, where she mentioned that she was currently in New Hampshire. The term “nomadic” was still tumbling around my brain like a rock in my shoe when I suddenly emailed her and asked if she’d like to meet up. 

She said yes, and we did, and her hair fell in a symmetrical sphere around her cranium, finished with an artful swoop that just grazed her right eyebrow. But it only bothered me a little, that time--I was already succumbing to that feeling, still unfamiliar enough to be unexpected. 

I was always really good at playing alone. It didn’t make me not want to play with other kids, but it was kind of indifferent to me. I don’t remember when I decided I was different from girls, or that I liked boys better, or that doing things alone was preferable above all. I don’t remember what even led to these conclusions. 

It’s amazing how different you become when you decide that’s what you are. 

I’m not sure when it reversed on me--when my indifference to friends became a conviction of my inability to have them. 

Last weekend, I drove five hours to meet up with two female coworkers...one of whom happens to be Elizabeth...for dinner and drinks. It’s hard to describe, let alone explain, how excited I was about it. 

I spent half the drive imagining what we’d talk about, and the other half trying to figure out what has changed. Where the competitive streak went, whence it came in the first place, why I get excited by commonalities instead of alienated by them. 

Is it because I’ve stopped judging myself? 

Is it because I’ve achieved the respect I crave? 

Is it because I’ve learned to self-identify through more than my hairstyle, profession and peripateticism? 

It felt so. good. to talk my face off with these women about books and work and backstories. I could feel my brain expanding like a bike tube, my heart a gratitude-powered piston pinging between respect and validation. 

Friends. The word still feels strange on my lips. 

[chelseabatten]

It will never get easier. 

You are not getting younger.

The lake doesn’t get warmer. 

Today is perfect.

[chelseabatten]

I don’t care. Almost. 

Nighttime is harder for the apathy I’m attempting to cultivate. When I acknowledge that I’m arguing in my head with a lot of unknown information against a person for whom I am not a reality, it gets just a little easier to not to care .It’s like fighting with the weather--either bring an umbrella or don’t expect to stay dry. 

The feeling of not knowing is the greatest challenge. But as long as I don’t know, things are as they are, not as I fear they will be. So actually this is better than whatever I’m fearing. Wouldn’t that be a turnaround, if I were to embrace uncertainty as a general good? Instead of as a general evil? 

I want to see the world as an ally. I suspect that starts not with a sudden revolution of attitude, but with taking the world’s lack of concern less personally. 

[chelseabatten]

I was tempted to start this with a caveat, but fuck it. 

I am a special person. 

My masseuse cuddled me at the end of our session today. People at the bar look at me and dump their life story without my even being friendly. I say the word “storytelling” and people don’t roll their eyes; they want to know more. 

I have a gift. People said it and now, at 34.5 years old, I believe it.

The goal is always to do things easily and seamlessly. Be grateful. Make connections. Live with an open heart. Create a living out of who you authentically are. I still haven’t worked out where the resistance lies, why it should feel hard for me when it’s all been so strangely easy...but. Here we are.

I have something wonderful to offer. I can make things easy for others. That would make it easy for myself. 

I want to be friends with Ruth Meteer the poet. I want to be a rep for Backcountry. I want to be pals with the nomads I currently envy. I want to build a business around traveling and helping people share the stories of the people who support them. I want to tell more of the stories that intrigue me. 

Selah.

It can be easy. If I let it.

[chelseabatten]

Yasss

Calligraphy Stools.

 I love to see type or lettering is used as decoration, simply for its own beauty but even more so when it’s functional. I’ve previously written about Type Tables, Concept Furniture and Type Architecture, and now, another inventive blend of form and function, Calligraphy Stools.

The above works are by Beirut based designer, Iyad Naja. Most recently he produced the calligraphy stools (the top five images above) for for Dubai design week, last month. The decorative top half is created from abstracted calligraphic forms that have been sculpted into a continuous ring. These have been cast into three types of metal and interwoven with a concrete base. There’s several other script inspired pieces over on Facebook.

[chelseabatten]

The smell. This smell. I remember it and I don’t know why.

The first thing that comes to mind is the smell of anxiety. Not anxiety against death--the teenage kind. Trying to grow up too fast. Straining to reach full potential, discontent with the gradual unfolding. Where others see something shooting up like a weed, they see only what hasn’t happened yet. 

I remember this smell as part of new Easter dresses as a child and experimental hairstyles as an adolescent. Getting ready for church (our one big social occasion) in the hope that whatever I wore would...attract attention? It wasn’t that. In fact if people commented on how nice I looked, I found myself annoyed and embarrassed. Couldn’t have told you why at that time, but I can now. I didn’t want them to think I’d suddenly changed into a poised, beautiful, confidently aloof person. I wanted to always have been that. The hairstyle was meant to make me a new person in the past as well as the future. 

I’m working on a book for a therapeutic coach right now, whose premise is all about the principle that you always have been what you want to be. That life problems are the result of telling yourself that you’re not, or needing external validation that you are. 

That very well might be true. I got lucky--I met someone who saw me for what I always was and, by the way he treats me, consistently demands that I rise to being that person.

To bring it back to place, if you’re very lucky, you find yourself in a place that pulls out of you what you’ve always been. I was raised in southern California but I come from Viking stock. (Way, way back but still.) I have fair skin, hair on my arms, a constitution for struggle. I love the sun, but the Keweenaw has revealed that I love it best when it finds me waist-deep in snow, or when it penetrates through the whipping winds off Lake Superior. 

 I recognize this smell from college. The smell that signaled it would soon be time to leave for the summer. (Or, one year, forever.) Now that’s fucking anxiety. The simultaneous eagerness to emerge into the world and the eagerness to complete what the year seemed to promise. God, thinking about it now I get stitches in my gut and sneaky currents in my loins. I remember. I remember. 

That smell. 

There is no smell like this in the Keweenaw. Which makes sense because there is no time in the Keweenaw. It has always been winter, until it has always been summer. I always wanted to live in a place where time was inconsequential. 

(This also takes me back to college, to this smell, to turning in my sophomore essay on the eleventh chapter of Augustine’s Confessions, to melting under Mr. Page’s aloof approval, then emerging out into a world of this smell and wishing I could stay another month to bask in the glow of this approval among the only people who would understand it. Oh, to be young again but also male, that I might have known Mr. Page’s approval better.)

[chelseabatten]

It appears that I’m a battler by nature. Even when I don’t want to, something in me looks for things to fight, fix, puzzle over. I should have been born in some medieval Celtic village, where I’d be justified in this constant state of teeth-gritted tension. I’m not built to enjoy a life of abundance and privilege, only to snarl and claw my way to achieving it. 

Honestly, I cannot fucking relax. The only way to take my mind off the future long enough to enjoy food or sex or sunshine is to chant to myself “Be here right now.” 

This gets worse the more money I make, the more security I have, the more reason I have to relax. I cannot for the life of me figure this out. 

I read something in a Joan Didion essay yesterday about how southern Californians respond to the omnipresent threat of earthquakes:

“it is less equanimity than protective detachment, the useful adjustment commonly made in circumstances so unthinkable that psychic survival precludes preparation.” 

I think I perfected this mistake in the last several years of being an indigent freelancer. Which means I never learned the skill of preparation. I never learned how to psychically survive even thinkable circumstances. 

Talking to Bryan about it last night, I said my mentality is like financial anorexia. I don’t know if that’s exactly the right analogy, but it strikes me as being the same. I felt safer barely surviving than doing the work of being responsible. 

It pains and embarrasses me, but I still don’t feel like a grown-up.

Rather, I don’t feel ready to be a grown-up. 

I am that millennial. 

Gross. 

The other day this vision popped into my head of what I *hope* is the future me. I was dancing in a club with Bryan. My face was lined with wrinkles. My muscles were taut. I was confident and secure. There was nothing I was trying to forget. 

That’s who I want to be. I’m currently trying to bridge that gap between the victim I was intent on remaining and the conqueror I hope to become. 

Stay tuned.

[chelseabatten]

Preorder her book here.

[chelseabatten]

I’m eating dinner as the Argentines would--at 11.30pm, with no compunction and full intention to nap tomorrow. My boo is working, which means the music he’d normally be playing over the stereo is instead blasting directly into his head through earbuds, so it is quiet as I eat. I’ve put on a Claude Debussy compilation to accompany my dinner, which tonight is not boxed soup and crackers nor chips and salsa, but something I made up that contains protein and--if I may boast--at least one superfood. I’m reading a Joan Didion essay provoking reminisces on the time we spent in the Bay Area, and the friends we spent that time with. I’m feeling so grateful, I almost post about it on social media.

Every day since we moved up here, to the land of unsalted oceans and ten-foot snow drifts, the land of Stormy Kromer and Iggy Pop, the land of ice fishing and agate hunting, the land of needful beards, has been better than the last. Even the monster cold that passed through last month was an occasion to rejoice--we sprawled on the couches, drank orange juice by the gallon, and gave ourselves time off to watch Warriors games and HBO.

Meanwhile, the world downstate goes to ruin.

As the man in the print shop said, when I went to pick up our enlargements for the gallery opening, “If worst comes to worst, we’ll hold them off at the bridge.”

That idea wasn’t as comforting as the way he said it: assuming we’d agree. People here are united by their mutual desire for the rest of the world to keep clear.

As the sign over the perpetually closed antiques store reads, it’s “the last place on earth.”

My mom sent us--my boo and me--a text this morning in which she said that she had a vision that God was smiling on us. That we were walking in a beam of his pleasure. This wasn’t weird, first of all because it certainly feels as though God is smiling on us, but second because this is language I’m familiar with. I’ve said similar things to people. When someone comes to mind in a kindly way, you tell them you’ve had a vision. When something doesn’t feel right, you’ve had a check in your spirit. When you are guided by intuition, for yourself or on behalf of someone else, it was the Spirit (capital s) leading you.

I’ll never turn down a pleasant communication from God, even if it comes through someone else. But I do wonder how it might feel to hear my mom say, “I was thinking about you and Bryan this morning, and it made me so happy that you’re so happy.” I can’t recall any such words being spoken by either of my parents. Something prevented them from taking responsibility for deep pleasure, pride, being overcome by love. It seems you needed a spiritual dispensation for feelings of that nature.

It seems like self-protection but I’m not sure where it issues from. Did they think God would be unhappy with them for having feelings that strong? Were they afraid to make themselves vulnerable to hurt? Did those feelings make them regret never hearing such words from their own parents? Did they think their children wouldn’t respond in kind?

Or did they not believe in the power of human love? Maybe they believed that what they were feeling was too strong, so it must be coming from God.

When we first moved up here, my gratitude (and relief) was countered by intense survivor’s guilt. Not that the U.P. will escape whatever policies are done or undone; however, people up here do tend to get ignored. But the real relief was not the way people are or aren’t. It’s that there are so few of them. I said to Bryan at least once a day, “No one is here.” And I said it feeling the kind of intensity that must have fueled my mom’s vision.

It seemed very unfair. To have this reprieve when we’ve suffered nothing but annoyance. To walk outside and across the street where the big lake can fill the void. To have God smiling on us when he’s been doing so all our white lives long.

Gratitude, in these circumstances, feels like effrontery.

But meanwhile, there’s still Joan Didion, Debussy, cheap co-op wine and fried eggs with kale and chiles, friends, the lake. What are you supposed to do with all that?

I wish I’d been raised to believe that human love mattered as much as God’s love. Because doesn’t it? 

We were told that the God has put his spirit into us, but somehow we understood it the same as the way he put Jonah into the belly of the whale. Instead, we seem to think of the Spirit of God less as an animating force and more like a bullet lodged within us. The way we talk about it, it’s an uncomfortable addition that forces us to adjust and adapt our movements. Something we constantly have to mention so people understand why we’re doing something so out of character as...expressing love or pleasure?

And indeed, the intensity of this Spirit’s indwelling sometimes is uncomfortable. Sometimes alone I’ll feel too small to contain the love I have for my husband or the gratitude I have for my friends. The relief of living in safety and abundance aches so that I can’t concentrate like before on my worries. 

Can God be jealous that my husband, friends or food are inspiring these emotions? Or is it more likely that I am feeling exactly as he intended me to? That the enormity of these emotions is, at least for empaths like me, proof of his presence? The more I feel, the more it seems to me that only something greater than me could comfortably contain such passions. 

[chelseabatten]

“Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly. And their kids care less about what’s cool, which—say it with me—only makes them cooler.”

On the other hand, they end up going to hell. Far better that they should spend their days on earth sowing discord, living in toxic relationships, squandering their natural resources, trying to be viewed as ‘relevant,’ being unhappy and making others unhappy. Right, ’vangies?

[chelseabatten]

Time Type

Dehli based street artist, DAKU, has produced a dynamic, time sensitive, public art piece for the St+art Festival in India. Over two months 25 artist from around the globe will transform the colonial Lodhi district into the country’s first public art area.

Local artist, DAKU, who remains anonymous, has produced an inventive installation, ‘Time changes everything’, which connects type with the passing of time by using the moving sunlight to cast ever-changing shadows of words onto a wall. 

Over 70 words have been mounted perpendicularly to a building façade to act as sundials. The shadow type sharpens into focus in the mornings revealing english words such as; Identity, Religion, Perception. This shadows stretch and yaw across the façade to later fade away as the light dims in the afternoon.

Photos by Pranav Gohil

[chelseabatten]

I felt close to tears most of the day.

I’d like to tell you they were tears for the safety and dignity of social minorities, though that was part of it, or for the impending rollback of LGBT rights, though that was part of it too. 

But those things haven’t happened just yet. I’ll cry again when they do. 

This day, tears were for the wrongness being committed that day. 

It’s the feeling you get when your boyfriend leaves you for a trainwreck new relationship. The feeling that comes when the office slacker ends up with a promotion. The feeling when you see one child bully another and, because neither of them is yours, you can only look on.

It’s a feeling that cannot be assuaged, or even balanced out, by all the knowledge of others in the world feeling just the way you do, all the resolve to do right in the future, all the assurance of time’s cyclical nature.  

It’s grief with no object.

A friend gave us a book of poems on our wedding day--the collection is titled Poems for Uncertain Times. Last night, while reaching for something to both relieve and distract my mind, I opened the book with the resolve to read aloud whatever poem was on the page. 

Here’s what I got:

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess, I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

The poem is called "America,” and was written by the Communist Jamaican-American scholar Claude McKay. 

[chelseabatten]

I’m 34 and this is the first time I have voted for a president. 

On one hand, it feels kind of great to cast my very first vote in favor of America’s very first lady prez. 

On the other hand... 

Denial

After my husband and I had passed the initial stage of romantic pleasantries and started serious negotiations about our future, he came out with his real deal-breaker. 

Was I a Republican, he asked? 

I felt like a badass stating that I was not, that in politics (as in so many things) I transcended labels; I had never voted. 

I thought he’d be impressed. 

In truth, it was an accident that I failed my first election. The year I turned 18, I was a compulsive overachiever about to graduate from high school. I spent the summer months of that year traveling in Argentina, and during the fall I was busy recovering from anorexia. In other words, bad timing. Registering to vote never once crossed my mind that year. 

I have little to no excuse for the next 4 elections. Except that I guess I thought I was protesting something by not participating. 

Anger 

In 2012, a smart woman I’d just met broke out of traditional politesse and asked me “Are you voting for Obama? Or are you supporting ‘Mittens’ Romney?” 

I consider it to her credit that she didn’t try to mask her vested interest as casual conversation. But I think she would have been less offended if I’d presented a GOP card than she was by my answer that I wasn’t voting for anyone, because it didn’t matter. 

Coolness born of apathy tends to be unassailable, and her brief attempt to scold me didn’t do much at the time. 

But if I’m honest, my attitude about voting was more laziness than laissez-faire. It was easier for me to be cynical, to opine that none of it matters, to apply my upbringing in being skeptical of authority to the legitimacy of our system of government. 

This year was an election, though, in which I cared in spite of myself. The surge of optimism in the primaries starting with one candidate’s stunning impression of integrity, followed by the slow knife-twist of advancing dread in these final hours... 

Caring this much is awful. Apathy is so much easier. 

Bargaining 

My dad hasn’t voted in years, and I think he would find it laughable that I am starting. He believes the system is rigged beyond repair, that some arcanely cached person or persons makes the decisions and that the whole democracy is just bread and circuses for the rest of us. 

I didn’t expect him to vote in this election either, but I thought he might have stronger opinions about some of it. When I called him last January, I asked about it, expecting to hear at least some level of opinion about any of the many outlandish factors in this election: a potential candidate with the word “socialist” attached to his affiliation, an almost certainly sociopathic reality TV performer...there had to be something here to at least provoke his interest. 

But his apathy when I talked to him about it was undiluted. And he seemed frankly astonished that I did care, or believe voting mattered.  

I guess I should be glad that my own modicum of political conviction doesn’t cause some major division in my family dynamics. At the same time, it feels profoundly unsatisfying, like boxing with a sheet on a line. 

Depression

Bernie. 

(Sigh.)

A hard lesson in what being part of the voting electorate means. That you don’t always get your dream candidate. That sometimes you have to vote for the lesser of two evils. 

And face even that bleak settlement being disappointed...regardless of whether or not they even win.

Acceptance

Confronting a group of conscientious non-voters, a friend recently commented in outrage,

“Why don’t people think about anything besides what’s good for them when they vote? Why don’t they ever think about voting for what might be good for other people?”

I’m a little shocked I never thought about it that way before. 

Notice she didn’t say better for the country, this broad conceptual good that really serves as a beard for the self-centered agenda.  

She said better for other people...presumably people who have to deal with things on the daily that don’t even cross my mind are people for whom apathy is not an option. 

Coolness and detachment are a privileged position. But I was brought up to understand that privilege was the reward for responsible behavior. To right this moral inequity, it’s incumbent upon me to behave responsibly after the fact, to earn the privilege I was born into.      

This post might be crummy. Sorry if it is. But I have to publish it before the results are final, while I can still see the faint flicker of the optimism that carried me into the poll today. I expect it to be gone tomorrow, and that the coming years won’t be kind to my rekindling efforts.