Writing Boots

Communication consultant Allan Jenkins tries to tell us the race is over, and that it's only the cable news creeps who want us to think the contest is still on.

I think we're the ones who don't want it to be over. No, we do want it over—it's like a repeating fever-dream, all these terms echoing in our brains paling around with terrorists, Joe the Plumber, early voting, Bradley Effect, socialist, working class whites, cultural conservatives and on and on.

We know we have to wake up, but we've been dreaming so long we don't know what the silence will sound like.

We don't know what it will be like, if Obama wins, to suddenly have a friend in the White House—or at least, an enemy of a wholly different nature.

We don't know what comes next. And we want one more day of what's familiar—the cozy communal feeling that if only we throw these bums out ….

Jenkins, an American who lives in Denmark, says he looks forward to going to bed when "the first tip state" goes to Obama.

I look forward to staying up, until long after the fat lady sings.

How are you feeling?

Here's how I'll try to remember Studs Terkel, from whom I learned a lot about communication, and the humans who do try it.

Earlier this week I and my colleagues at McMurry got an e-mail from product manager Jenny Babich, apprising that she'd be taking some paid time off this week and next. The operative sentence is up there with William Carlos Williams poem, "This Is Just To Say."

First, Williams:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Here's Babich:

I just wanted to let you all know that my puppy is arriving on Friday at 9:15 a.m., so I will be out of work Friday, and then out on PTO Monday through Wednesday of next week.