Day 240…
There’s a scene in the movie of The World According to Garp where the hyper-paranoid and doom-fearing character of Garp, played by Robin Williams, is looking for a house for his family.
While he’s standing outside talking to the real estate agent, they notice a small two-seater plane sputtering and stuttering in the sky above them. In front of their eyes, the tiny plane nosedives into the house and explodes.
“I’ll take it!” Garp says looking at the burning wreckage with enthusiastic relief.
Whatever happens moving forward to him and his family while they are in that house, the chances of a small plane crashing into it again have been reduced to almost zero. One less thing to worry about.
We are now in the third day of vote counting following the election. I went to sleep with the President ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia and I woke up to him behind.
Thanks to Steve Kornacki on MSNBC, who simply will not leave his post, we all have a much more solid understanding of the math behind the different kinds of voting.
Steve has been at his tally board almost non-stop since November 3rd. Last night, MSNBC said that he was, “having a mandatory rest and food period,” and he disappeared. A few minutes later, he tweeted that he was heading back to the studio.
What he has been doing is mathematically predicting where the votes are going to go based on where the remaining votes are coming from. He is averaging in those different areas based on what the percentages for each of the candidate’s results have been there so far. This area still has 3,000 votes left and its results are trending 58% for the President and 40% for Joe Biden. Another area of the same state, however, still has 8,000 votes left and that area is averaging 72% for Joe Biden and only 16% for the President.
We have been watching him forecast what the resulting numbers are going to be and based purely upon statistical trends, he is usually spot-on.
He is the living embodiment of all of those awful SAT questions like “A train is heading east at 45mph and another one is on the same track is heading west at 36mph - if they start at the same point, how far apart will they be after 27 minutes?”
I dimly remember that there were formulas that you could plug those numbers in and come up with the answer, but I could never bear them. I suppose I could sit down and figure it out, but that is not the way I think at all. My South African cousin could probably solve that question in his head.
So could Steve Kornacki.
Wikipedia does not know how old Steve is. He is either 40 or 41. He was born in Groton, Massachusetts and went to Boston University. After a bit more digging, I found out that he came out publicly in an article he wrote for Salon magazine in 2011. Despite the fact that many people have imagined that they are married to him over the last few days, he is not married at all but does have a partner named Michael Bauer.
This morning I texted a friend and said, “I feel like I need to bring Steve some coffee and maybe a little nosh.” They texted back, “I just rolled over and asked if he was hungry, so I got this.”
These days have been a lesson in patience. There is actually nothing whatsoever to do except wait for the results to be tabulated. It’s like watching a movie on Netflix with a poor internet connection. We get a minute or two of story then it freezes, and we watch the spinning ball until enough of it loads to lurch forward a little more.
Even though it is trending in the direction that Democrats want, it is still, by no means a sure thing that that’s where we are going to go. It’s one thing wanting to see how an episode of Supernatural ends and quite another wanting to see who is going to be elected the President of the United States.
We want to know NOW.
The Stock Market has been a bit all over the place.
The October jobs report came in and it shows an improvement. Our economy added 638,000 new jobs last month which brought the unemployment rate down to 6.9%.
My understanding of how this works, and I may be utterly wrong, is that the 6.9% number represents people who are actively searching for work. It does not include people like me who aren’t actively looking. (Mind you, the only reason that I am not actively looking is that my industry is, for all intents and purposes, not functioning.) I believe that, taking that into consideration, that far more people than that are without work. Steve is probably the person who could clarify it all for me.
The Stock Market fluctuates because investors try to predict what the future will be. When there is a national event as big as a Presidential election, there is a lot of speculation of what the future economy will look like under each of the candidates. The market usually fluctuates a lot. Investors rely on much the same math that Steve is using to calculate his results.
All of the store owners in New York City who covered up their windows with plywood before November 3rd are looking as if they overreacted. Prior to November 3rd, however, their reaction did not seem that far off the mark.
Yesterday, the President addressed the nation from the White House and within a minute or two most of the networks just cut away from their coverage of it in disgust. It was nothing but a barrage of lies and propaganda.
Groups of armed MAGA supporters have created disturbances at vote-counting centers in these last few key states, but there is nothing concrete for them to protest against. They want the count to stop. They are claiming fraud.
Different states have different laws and it seems, from all that we are hearing, that the counting is progressing as it should be.
Joe Biden is ahead. If they stop counting now, then he wins. These protestors are complete idiots.
There was a report on Wednesday that the Post Office had lost about 300,000 ballots somewhere in their system. It now appears that while these ballots weren’t scanned into the system, they were, indeed, delivered. To speed things up, postal workers were apparently sorting batches of them by hand.
Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union supports that explanation. A US District Court judge has ordered some sweeps of USPS facilities for missing ballots but not for these now largely discounted massive batches.
We are still at a point where anything could happen.
New York voted solidly Democratic. Upstate New York has far greater percentage of Republicans in it that the city does. New York City Republicans tend to keep their heads down. The lunatics that rode around in the trucks with flags a-waving on November 3rd were not from the city. They came in from somewhere else.
If something happens last minute that takes us away from the result that we are now all starting to expect, then, yes, there might be some reason for those windows here in the city to remain covered, but it seems unlikely.
It took me a long time to get to sleep last night. I kept running different scenarios in my head and trying to take them to their logical conclusion.
The truth is that there is no way of knowing what’s going to come. There’s nothing much we can do to plan for it.
I have never really gotten a job that I’ve gone after. My jobs tend to fall into my lap.
Lincoln Center did a revival of A Delicate Balance in 1996 and when it was announced, I wrote to every single person I could think of connected with it to make my interest known. I really wanted to do it. I got no response at all from anybody, so I gave up and started looking elsewhere.
A few weeks later, I got a call from somebody offering me the job. Not as a result of anything I had done, mind you, but because my name had happened to come up in a meeting in regard to something else. Somebody connected with A Delicate Balance, who was there, got the idea to hire me and gave me a call. I really worked hard to get that job but, in the end, none of that mattered. It just fell into my lap.
We plan for the future and try to make things happen regardless of what our past track records are of doing it successfully.
We are constantly told to live in the moment and live for the now, but we can’t help ourselves, we plan and worry anyway. We get encouraged by things that happen that we take to be signs.
Garp believed that his house was safe because the unimaginable had already happened to it. Well, who’s to say that there might not be another plane circling right behind the one that crashed? His comfort was just an illusion, but one that helped him move forward.
We all went into this election thinking that if one candidate won that everything would be bad, and that if the other one won that everything would be good. Already we can see that the results are going to be far more complicated and nuanced than that. We will have to wait and see what happens.
We seem to spend much of our lives waiting to see what happens.
Steve is loving every single minute of this wait. Each little drib or drab of information that comes in, he is all over it.
I’m not interested in living fully in the moment. I am interested in living mostly in the moment. I like to know where I’ve been and where I’m heading so that I can be fully open to what is happening now.
Many times, the most exciting parts of the journey are when you veer off the path and get lost.
Michael and I were given the name of a restaurant to eat in in Venice by a friend that was too crowded for us to get in. We were disappointed and as other places were crowded too, we ended up eating in a tiny little hole-in-the-wall just down a little side street near our hotel. Three tables. It was one of the most memorable meals we have ever had in our lives. We went back to the same place several times after that.
Who knows where we are going?
I am writing this across from Lincoln Center under a tree. It is gloriously sunny and I’m in a short-sleeved shirt.
As soon as I hit ‘post’, I am going to get another cup of coffee and take a walk. Then, I’ll check back in with Steve. We have to wait for these election results, but, in the meantime, there’s life to be lived.
Whatever the future holds in store for us, it’s not going to be what we think it is going to be.
And really, who would want it any other way?
💙I love being surprised
getting comfortable not knowing
cause I love living on the edge
Must admit though
feeling kinda BLUE
like the beautiful sky above me
I love your writing. I just recently "met you" when I was introduced to you by my dear friends Bob and Bernie who I also met on vacation (Kenya 1987). I would never miss you now (and I have other Chicago friends who have also turned into Kornacki groupies)