post-vivum

As opposed to post-mortem.

This is what I am calling an anatomy of something that you do in order to find out what makes that thing live.

See above (also: “victory, comma symbolic,” and “victory, comma pragmatic”). Tomatoes that I was not sure were going to make it, but that pulled through, kind of late in the game, to head into full bloom just yesterday on Election Day.

Voting at the big-top

It was a beauty of a day to vote. This shot from the tundra of asphalt between the polling place entrance and the actual spot shows off the vista nicely. Lucky for me I have two able-bodied legs and plenty of time on a Tuesday, since the polling place is shockingly inconvenient. It is baldly all-American, in a symbolic way–the “city on a hill” 16th-century element is present in the church locale. The postwar element shines through in the barracks construction, visible next to the big-top. And the 21st-century kick is provided by the tour through the Best Buy on the way to this open field of pavement you have to cross in order to go stand in line. It’s like time-traveling from the colonial era in a few tenths of a mile.

There is something so not appropriate about voting in a church. The church itself was very hospitable, and had very helpful greeters out to direct people to the beginning of the line. But I feel that incorporating religious institutions into a civic process–and select Christian ones, at that–exacerbates the whole unholy muddle of governance and theology (some of it very sinister or empirically crackpot, in the case of the current positions on science) that has conjured up many of the country’s troubles in the Bush regime, or at least blessed them.

Moreover, getting to the place is forbidding if you are on foot, old, a bus-rider, or any of the above with small children, who were numerous when I went at 8am. Anyone who might have difficulty motating the .3 mile from Los Feliz Boulevard to the polling place itself would be up a creek trying to make it to the big top without some serious help. I walked it, on my approach, but I was so mad about the placement of the polling place that I went back and clocked it in the car.

There are so many better, more accessible, and secular places to vote in Atwater. Hell, the car wash even has a nice little veranda, not to mention the library, and the many many garages.