So I walked the whole twenty yards from my front door to the polling place. Boy, am I exhausted. Bellefonte does have its advantages - walking-distance access to just about every basic need is definitely one of them. My voting ward has its polling location in the Girl Scouts shack, across the alley from Wetzler's Funeral Home's combination garage-and-crematorium. The Girl Scouts hall/shack/whatever is in the back of a compound extending behind a grand old cut-stone house that belongs these days to the library - they use it for their important holdings, offices, and so on. The compound is surrounded by a waist-high red brick wall, topped with a wrought-iron fence, with a gate leading into the wooded garden between the shack and the library offices. The political activists normally set up on the sidewalk just outside of this gate, which qualifies as sufficiently far from the polling place to get around all of those politicking regulations.

This year, "NOWPAC" had two activists standing outside of the gate pushing a slate of approved candidates. Great! I thought - I don't know that much about the school board candidates this year. I looked at the paper they handed me. They had a single recommendation. For the State College school board. I noted this to the activist, and asked her if she was aware that Bellefonte is a separate school district. All she could do was shrug. She could have at least been embarrassed.

The only really competitive race, besides the one for county commissioner, was the one for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Max Baer vs. Joan Orie Melvin. I used the irritation principle for that race. Melvin's drones have been leaving automated messages on my answering machine for the last month. Very irritating. Baer, on the other hand, has concentrated, at least in my area, on cutesy bear-in-a-judicial-robe yard-signs, and not even very many of those. Baer, clearly, is the most considerate of the two candidates. Let's vote for him - even if the half-assed incompetents of "NOWPAC" endorse him.

(Here's an article about that race. It seems it was a good thing I deleted those messages half-way-through. Apparently they were dripping with sleazy accusations.)

I was feeling a little guilty about accepting a gimme pen from the "NOWPAC" people for Goreham without actually voting for her. Then I took a closer look at the pen. Made out of shitbrown cardboard. With a chip of pine wood for a clip. "Recycled" glyphs all over it. Screw it, I'm not feeling guilty for this crap. Dershem & Conklin it is!

Now, if you haven't grasped the significance of this post yet, there's truly no hope for you. Nevertheless, one more time: Election Day! Go vote, ya heathens!