I was 8 when Cap declined the chance to run for President. Today I’d vote for him three times if I could.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’m an introvert, I suck at belonging to things, I don’t do sports or frats or hivemind collectives, I tend to be disqualified from group identification, and yes, sometimes I feel extremely sad about this weekly during Sunday church service. My misfit attitude — some of it my own fault, some of it everyone else’s — goes double for political parties. Were it up to me, all parties would be dissolved, everyone would be forced to deliberate their votes alone in a soundproof closet, and all candidates would be forced to run alone with no support system whatsoever, just their resume and their wits, exactly like any applicant for every ordinary job ever.

But I vote! Because I can and I should. I’ve voted in every Presidential election since 1992. I have never, ever been given the option to vote enthusiastically for a Presidential candidate who radiated wisdom through their every gaze and was demonstrably, empirically without sin. I’ll keep a light on for my future President Dulcinea, should they be born and ascend through the mud-slung ranks before I die.

And I’ll keep voting while I wait in vain for the placeholders who’ll take up all the years between now and that idealistic era to come in some other, brighter timeline. In one corner, we have the former officeholder. When I was 15 and The Art of the Deal was on sale in every supermarket reading aisle next to the tabloids and the Star Trek paperbacks, even then he struck me as a rejected Dallas villain desperate to get J.R. Ewing’s attention. In 37 years he has never performed a single action that’s changed my mind, nor have any of the legions of otherwise trustworthy people who’ve totally sworn he’s a Boy Scout. Winning an election under that aided-and-abetted pretense only added him to the same pop-culture pantheon as President Lex Luthor, Mayor Wilson Fisk, and Mayor J. Jonah Jameson. At every step he’s thoroughly confused serving as the American President with being a company boss. They are not the same thing.

In the other corner, we have a ranking member of the caretaker team who’ve tended to Grandpa Simpson’s four-year reign without admitting he needed caretakers. The Democrats judged her vastly inferior to Hillary Clinton eight years ago, then more recently decided she’s evolved into a totally different person with a totally different resume and may have transubstantiated into our super awesome synthetic syncretic American Jesus. Huge, if true.

Here in Indiana, the only other Presidential candidates on our ballots are the Libertarian candidate whose name I have never seen or heard used in a sentence (though he and the party had a strong reaction to the tragedy of Peanut the Squirrel, possibly his finest and only moment); and human punchline RFK Jr. That’s it, that’s our entire list of Presidential options that qualified for our ballot -– no Jill Stein, no Cornel West, none of the candidates from the four (???) different Socialist parties out there. I didn’t know anyone after that em-dash were even running till this past Sunday.

Farther down the Indiana ballot…of our gubernatorial choices, one is a U.S. Senator whose very first sentence he ever uttered in any campaign ad in his entire life was “President Trump was right!”, which I’ve held against him for every election thenceforth. Of our choices for state attorney general, the incumbent is a grandstander who made national headlines with a post-Dobbs photo-op stunt and whose office’s taxpayer-funded newsletters are routinely devoted to culture-war preening. And so it goes down to other offices in varying degrees, on down to the 22 different judges, none of whom I could pick out of a lineup, who were the subjects of 22 separate questions on our ballots, each asking “Should [name of complete stranger] be retained as judge (Y/N)?”

I sigh now with temporary relief, for my part in the American experiment is done for the day. We’re fortunate to live in a relatively benign, multi-ethnic district that has not made the news or the social-media rumor mill for Election Day shenanigans so far. [UPDATED AT 5:40 P.M.: OKAY, SO MAYBE I SPOKE TOO SOON.] While other Indy residents were enduring two-hour waits for early voting opportunities in recent weeks, this morning my wife Anne was in line before the polls opened at 6 a.m. and was out by 6:40. My son and I showed up at 3:10 p.m. and were out in ten minutes flat, even with those 22 extra questions about judges. The worst part of the experience is our polling station ran out of paper ballots and “I VOTED!” stickers earlier, restocked the ballots but not the stickers. Anne got a sticker; I came away empty-handed — no sticker and no recollection of a single judge’s name. I needed that sticker to prove I was there and farm for Likes!

Nevertheless, for me it is finished. All those polls I ignored over the past year are even less than worthless now — so much virtual compost. Now ensues a long night or week or eternity of sorting, tallying, arguing, accusing, recounting, the losing side refusing to trust the results, re-sorting, re-tallying, re-recounting, and every social app devolves into an internet slap-fight tournament where all the points are made up and the rules don’t matter. Beyond this point, all the other steps in the electoral process fail a Serenity Prayer check for me. All you compulsive feed-monitoring insomniacs will not somehow butterfly-effect into me awakening Wednesday morning to learn the world has been saved, inflation has been wished away and Big Mac Extra Value Meals are only $2.99 again.

My plan for the evening: not doomscrolling. Not watching the news. Not fiending for updates after every tenth vote is counted in every city in every county in every state. I cannot micromanage the proceedings and I refuse to micro-obsess over them. Sooner or later I’ll be informed — most likely whenever Anne is compelled to read her doomscrolling out loud. It’s not as though Friday will come and I’ll be covering my ears while I work and shouting “LALALALA NO SPOILERS! NOBODY TELL ME WHO WON! GONNA WAIT FOR THE KEN BURNS DOCUMENTARY IN FORTY YEARS!” Anne can keep secrets, but I doubt she’ll hide that one from me for long, to say nothing of all the entertainment site newsletters I subscribed to for the specific purpose of having something to read on my phone instead of doomscrolling. You know they’ll find some reason to pretend political news counts as entertainment. Maybe to them it is.

Tl;DR, I voted, I’m done, go vote now if you haven’t already, and I’ll be over here having my weekly Binge Night. Tonight’s features will include last Sunday’s Penguin and a few episodes of Slow Horses, which appears to be about outcasts consigned to the same tenement and maybe figuring out how to function together even though they have little in common and can barely pretend to tolerate each other. It’s set in Britain and I’m only one episode in, but right now that sounds a lot closer to an America I can understand.