IT’S ALMOST OVER

This is gonna be one crazy week.

I’ve been doing my best to couch myself in rosy, upbeat predictions about what’s going to happen tomorrow, all the while knowing that the only things that are guaranteed are:

• Several states with Florida-thin margins
  

• Allegations of voter intimidation, voter fraud and dirty tricks, including some involving presidential brothers with leadership positions in key states
  

• Networks making misleading, inaccurate early predictions in order to beat the other networks’ misleading, inaccurate early predictions
  

• Lots of anger, confusion and anguish
  

• The NetZero guy making a victory speech of some sort

It’s going to be close again, and it’s going to be nasty. My only hope is that none of this will matter, and Kerry will pull out a nice, comfortable, uncontested victory. I dream about all the things that will mean. People cheering in the streets outside my apartment? Senator Barney Frank? A Bush concession speech?

I’ve been trying hard not to consider the alternative. Four more years of those bastards looking smug and running our country into the ground? I’m tempted to make some liberal Hollywood proclamation about moving out of the country to wait out the dark days. But let’s be honest. I don’t want to learn another language, and I don’t want to miss a single episode of Lost. Besides, the exchange rates suck right now. And I don’t want to pay 80 Euros for my import copy of Diff’fent Strokes Season 2 on DVD.

So if things don’t go my way tomorrow, I’ll do something I should’ve done four years ago: go insane. I’ll shut down and live in my own fantasy world, where the 2000 election was actually decided in a fair way. I’ll rant from a padded cell somewhere about how blissful life is under President Gore, how united America is and how Michael Moore’s true talents were unearthed when, lacking a good political target, he was forced to become a game show host.

I’m still optimistic that things will go well tomorrow.

Please tell me I’m not living in a fantasy world.