Tag: voting

When?

I want to vote tomorrow morning before work, if I can. The early voting polls open at 8:00am. I think I can pull it off. I’m hoping my wife can go with me. If she can’t then it won’t be Friday because of work, or Saturday because of travel, so Sunday?

I won’t be able to play any guitar before work tomorrow if we go to vote. Friday might work. Saturday is highly unlikely. Sunday? Maybe. We’ll have to see.

I took these this morning after finishing my exercise for the day. I thought I might use one for the photo a day thing, but I went with a cat pic from the previous post.

Guitar noodling on Friday. Two days from now. Make it so.

Vote

We are less than a month away from the 2024 Presidential Election where We The People will once again show that fascist piece of shit that we don’t want him around anymore.

I had two questions come to mind that always come to mind just before a big election. One, what is the status of my voter registration. Two, when does the early voting period start.

Massachusetts has handy online tools to answer both questions. First, how’s my registration looking? I went here and found that I am active and all is well, as it should be.

Next, I went here and found the following early voting information:

Early Voting Periods

In-person early voting takes place during a designated early voting period, set by state law.

For statewide elections, early voting periods include guaranteed weekend voting hours for every community.

November Election Early Voting Period: October 19 – November 1

Okay, that sounds good. Now that I knew the dates involved I went to my city’s website to get specifics and found this:

There you have it. If you, like me, live in Methuen, MA… you’re welcome.

Vote

Tonight at just after 7:00pm I cast ballot number 345 in Methuen, MA precinct five. It was just under an hour before the polls close. It’s 8:00pm as I type this so I can now say past tense, the polls closed.

There were no races of consequence, really. One local race was unopposed, another had about 15 candidates for 35 seats. Another was President Biden running against a few people I’ve never heard of who have zero chance of winning. There was one two candidate race. Maybe my vote will have meaning in that one.

That’s okay. I feel like a hypocrite when I miss an election. Even when there are no races that require a large turn out. We’ll have one of those in November this year. Vote against the fascists. Vote against the maga cult. Vote against trump. Vote for Biden. Vote Democrat. Let’s have a blue wave. We have eight months to organize. Let’s do it.

Brain Droppings

Random stuff coming……….

I am very pleased that I was able to cast my ballot in the presidential election early and safely. My state and my city have seriously come through for me in these unhealthy, uncertain times. I am proud of what we the people have accomplished in this regard and I am proud that as an American I was able to have my opinion heard.

However…

The downside of voting early is that November 3rd, election day, is kinda irrelevant to me now. Maybe not irrelevant, but more like unimportant. At least until the returns start coming in. I go on social media and have a thousand people asking thousands of other people, what are your voting plans, or how are you going to vote, or are you excited to vote, or everyone get out the vote, etc, etc, and my response is… been there, done that. I took election day off, just in case. I should have taken the day after so I could stay up all night watching returns. On second thought, that would probably be a bad idea. I tend to get a little… animated when fascism is taking over my country and I don’t want to put any added stress on my ticker, or wake up the neighbors, or anything like that.

Basically though… I’m done, there isn’t much excitement about the process left.

Counting today, there are nine days left in October. At the start of the month I decided I wasn’t going to do an album in a month. A few days ago I changed my mind. I’ve got 10 songs in the pipeline. They are all short. They are all weird. They are all simple things based around little poly-rhythmic tricks, or guitarmonies. I haven’t written any lyrics or melodies yet. None of the songs will be instrumentals, but they will all be mostly instrumentals. There aren’t going to be any hooks. Vocal tracks will be short and simple and lyrics will probably just be a line or two. The point of it all is to hear a guitar playing in 4/4 in your left ear, and a guitar playing almost the same thing in 7/8 in your right ear, and how they occasionally line up with each other. Or, songs where the “melody” is just three guitars with tons of fuzz playing in harmony.

In other words, October Music is Robbie’s “I’ve been listening to King Crimson” month.

I still can’t believe that Massachusetts had 1,000 new Covid-19 cases yesterday. The last time we’d had 1,000 cases was in May. All of the progress we made has been flushed down the toilet. How are we as a society capable of landing a space ship on an asteroid 300 million kilometers away and bring it home with a sample of asteroid rocks, but not able to stay in our houses so we don’t get sick. Why are we incapable of just wearing friggin masks and washing our friggin hands?

I thought I was going to have more this morning, but I’m letting myself get distracted. In closing, let me paraphrase my favorite line from this week’s episode of Archer.

I’m your rampage sherpa.

Talk to you all later. Happy Friday.