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11/07/04 4:59 a.m.

My father and I met, as is our custom, in a secluded field. We were on our way to vote, and had long known that our votes would always cancel each other's out.

Open combat, we'd decided, was the only way to end our voting stalemate.

"Once we get a Democrat back in the White House, things will go back to being alright," I said in the tradition of my grandfather, a lifelong New Deal mill hill Democrat.

"George Bush is a good president," my father replied, ignoring the way the birds and beasts of the Earth raised a cacophony of voices as in laughter, and the way that the Earth itself trembled, as if sobbing.

"Come and get some old man!" I yelled, and we clashed.

He struck first with his FOX Stance, screaming "He's a flip-flopper and the most liberal member of Congress!" as he wrested a tree from the ground and swung it at me.

I countered with an emergency dose of Kerry Rhetoric, slowing his swing and time itself down as I intoned "Fiduciary matters are vastly more complicated when you consider the ramifications of..." But my father startled me and broke through my spell with a fierce, teeth-clenched cry of "Rush is Right!", finishing his swing and sending me through the side of an abandoned homeless shelter, which had been forced to close down because of Republican pressure (its seemingly endless flow of homeless Americans was taking jobs away from the cheap immigrant labor to which the Anderson elite had become accustomed).

I wiped the blood away from my mouth and leapt to my feet, employing my Liberal Logic technique, telling my father "Why shouldn't everyone have health care?" However, I'd forgotten that my father, years back, had paid to have his liberal cortex removed from his brain in a risky back-alley procedure. I'd scarcely uttered the phrase when his adrenal glands, powered by Conservative Fury and bereft of the normal restraints applied by a sense of fairness towards the working class, surged into overdrive. He hurled talking points at me as if they were Zeus' own thunderbolts.

    "Saddam was an imminent threat!" he hollered.

    "I never said Saddam was an imminent threat!" he immediately countered himself, believing himself to be Donald Rumsfeld and able to baldly deny things that he had been videotaped saying.

    "It's perfectly OK that Halliburton got a no-bid contract!" he hissed. I staggered.

    "John Kerry's out of the mainstream!". His eyes were bulging out of his sockets, his cigarette a mere ashy stub. I dropped to a knee, in awe of his wiry, nicotine-fueled fury.

    Then, the coup de grace. "John Kerry will have gay doctors performing abortions with their left hand while their right hand is marrying off our sons and daughters into forced gay marriages!" I nearly blacked out, lost in the blackness of his Logical Fog technique.

Thankully, I was able to grab onto a kernel of hope. "You're going to live with my sister when you get senile!" I screamed, leaping twenty feet into the air and coming back to the Earth with such force that we was thrown back and sent skidding across four acres of land that had been clear-cut for no gosh-darned good reason.

I'd had enough, and closed the distance with my father. Toe to toe, we used our fists and secret Martial Arts techniques to debate healthcare, gay rights, the environment, and every other topic under the sun. He belittled all of my deeply held opinions as the product of sly soundbites by the liberal media. I told him to quit getting his news from the 700 Club.

"Send you off to college," he muttered, "And you come back with all kinds of crazy ideas!"

"You're a blue-collar worker," I replied. "Why the hell do you want to screw yourself every four years?"

We continued to rain down blows and verbal insults. The cheap cookie-cutter subdivisions nearby collapsed from the shock waves of our fury.

Soon, we were exhausted, at a stalemate. Realizing there would be no victor this day, we began to limp towards our respective voting locations, agreeing that next year, we'd just go back to slashing each other's tires.

(I have to amuse myself this way. The whole thing's just too bleak to think about otherwise.)

11/07/04 3:55 a.m.

"The angels killed the devils / Hung them in the streets / And reveled in the bloodlust and the fires of revenge."

                                                                                    -- The Sadies
                                                                                        "1000 Cities Falling"