Any resemblance between my Daredevil T-shirt and the Doomsday Clock, or any significance of placing my free “I Voted!” sticker at five minutes till, are largely incidental.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I do the democracy thing twice a year (yes, even primaries) because I believe I ought to and because they keep letting me. I don’t recall why I didn’t post about it last year. Maybe society was to blame? Or maybe the reason was so dumb that I was counting on my aging brain to forget the reason why, just so I couldn’t blame myself for not writing about it I can’t recall, so maybe Past-Me’s plan worked. Politicians prefer long-term memory loss in their constituents anyway, so really this is just my brain getting into the spirit of the occasion.

As I Instagrammed minutes ago when I got home from the polls:

It’s votin’ time! Straight-party tickets aren’t my thing, so I spent much of last night cramming for this quiz and realizing which noxious TV campaign spots weren’t even for wannabe power-mongers running in our district. In and out of the Lions Club at lunchtime in five minutes flat, no fussin’, no feudin’, no flamin’. Now I can relax and forget who I voted for by Thursday.

That caption didn’t leave me much else to write unless I care to reveal my thought processes for this year’s ballot office-by-office. That sounds boring, so let’s not. I could do a paragraph about the accused sexual harasser who made it onto the Indiana ballot, but…eh. Nah. He isn’t even our first. Let’s just toss in an obligatory “Really?” and say I covered it.

In honor of the abject panic that seems to have gripped large swaths of the American populace — fueled by widespread, flabbergasted disappointment in the whole “checks and balances” thing over the past six to 239 years — this morning I awoke with portions of an unconsciously written, definitely unsolicited Election Day carol lodged in my head from out of nowhere. I spent a groggy five minutes padding out the remaining lines and tweeted it out, because Twitter is where I bury things I want no one to read, as opposed to this site, where I bury things I want almost no one to read.

In the event that Twitter is deleted within the next few days and all 18,000 of my tweets are vaporized without backups after a desperate Elon Musk rams a Tesla into company servers in hopes of making his life’s biggest mistake explode and go away, here’s the full text of that carol saved for posterity, set to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”:

Democracy, democracy
How wobbly are your branches
Democracy, democracy
You bought the rich their ranches

Election Day in autumn time
May help us stop the selfish side
Democracy, democracy
What’s our survival chances?

This isn’t the first time I’ve written an Election Day carol, so I’ve now given you two songs to sing tonight while you and your family are huddled around your phones, drinking your hardest liquors, constantly hitting “Refresh” and dreading that moment you’ve been imagining for years, when whoever wins the County Assistant to the Regional Manager race in your area decides their first act in office will be to set off all the local nukes. I’ll be at the movies tonight, neither singing nor doomscrolling, but trust that I’ll be with you in spirit. I’m lying, but trust me anyway! It works for politicians!

[Mood: accomplished. np: XTC, “The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead”.]