So that did it. I figured if my head is daymaring old car accident scenes it’s past time to take on the source of that stress and answer my own admonition. I’d already put in most of the work but there were a few things on that ballot I needed to learn more about first and decide on.

(Really? A guy in LA made tens of millions off a loophole for charities and made himself a slumlord and fought building better and something about a stadium and paid for repeating defeated ballot propositions as a hobby so there’s ‘the revenge proposition’ about his AIDS foundation regarding rent control? We need Tim Walz over here. Say it with me, Tim: Weird!)

Arizona’s ballot made the front page for being two pages long, front and back–it was going to hold up the lines!

Beginners. Ours was three like that. That’s normal. What it does is tell the voters to do their homework ahead of time so as not to waste anyone else’s. (Pretty much a moot point now that our ballots are mailed to everyone.)

It felt contagiously good to go through all that and declare it ready, so Richard sat down with his.

Prop 34 was the weird one. It should have been fixed by the legislature–you know, where different ideas get hashed out, justifications get shot down, motivations get holes poked in them, compromises made, and tax- and ratepayers’ money gets looked after. Supposedly.

We checked fronts and backs multiple times making sure we’d filled out every single thing correctly. The envelope, too. Card A, I went back and looked at one more time.

Kamala Harris. My filled-out oval beside her name. I held that in my hands and eyes and just let it wash over me.

There was a woman my age reading all the print all over the ballot boxes trying to make sure she was doing this right, a little flustered as I approached at being caught in her uncertainty, afraid of potentially doing anything wrong but quickly letting go of that as she saw my face and laughing for joy with me as we saw our ballots, our precious precious at-long-last votes, our declarations of democracy and hopes for all we hold dear to continue as they slowly slid down inside those slots out of sight.

A neighbor. I have no idea who she is, all I know is if we ever see each other again we will most likely throw our arms around each other in recognition of all that that moment had meant.

And then I went home, found this, and watched Kamala Harris’s speech at the Ellipse, starting at one hour twelve.

That. That was a speech of unity for the ages. That is my future President. That is what I did my part to help come to be. I can’t wait.

The joy!