The Beginning Of The End
We're all in the weeds as Election Day approaches, but do stop by our plague-inspired wine window.
The days before Election Day are typically some of the busiest in The Shitshow Room. This year, concern about the pandemic, widespread voter suppression, and a host of other potentially Bad Things have people vibrating with anxiety. We decided to open our plague-inspired wine window for 24-hour service starting today and will be doing some retrofitting of our candy chutes so we can make them a permanent Shitshow Room fixture. (Sadly, Woozy the Pumpkin’s days are numbered.) Our head chef Anne Xiety and her amazing team have been baking and cooking away in preparation for this hectic week. If you are planning to visit us in the next few days, please do be sure to book in advance.
Of course, no reservation will be ever needed for The Shitshow Room’s newest VIP Leonard Shoulders. Even if you are not familiar with Mr. Shoulders’ name, you definitely know him as the star of “Your Scariest Nightmare Comes True”: While waiting for a bus in the Bronx, the ground opened up from under this poor man and he plunged 15 feet into a sinkhole full of rats, breaking his arm and leg. “He couldn’t move, and the rats were crawling all over him. He didn’t scream, because he didn’t want the rats going into his mouth,” his brother, Greg White told The Daily News.
Speaking of nightmares, it is hard to tell if Our Long National One is winding up or just kicking off. So many people are just barely hanging on these days. Anne Helen Peterson (my former BuzzFeed News colleague) wrote about 2020 election burnout and why it is so especially intense right now. The pandemic has weakened our ability to process stress, she writes, and “chronic instability, and the burnout and exhaustion that accompany it, fundamentally changes us.”
“Imagine running a marathon, seeing the finish line and then having someone on the sideline yell that you need to turn around and run all the way home. That’s what this election burnout feels like. The unknowns — about the virus, a potential cure, just how long all of this will last — just continue to cascade. The approach of winter feels like being in a dark tunnel closing in on both sides. Your fatigue accumulates gradually, until one day you realize you’ve been struggling to breathe for weeks.”
Tallying the returns never officially ends on Election Day —remember projecting a winner is not the same as counting all the votes. Despite this country’s weird, overlong presidential election cycle, the public has been conditioned to expect a winner to be declared rather quickly. It’s kind of wild when you think about it. The cycle gets longer and longer, yet the results should be announced as fast as possible on the Big Election Night Extravaganza Show!
I mean I get it, people are exhausted and want answers. (Me? I stopped expecting to know the winner quickly after the 2000 election between Bush and Gore when counting the vote went on for over a month and, among other things, the honeymoon I had planned to take the week after election day needed to be postponed. Plan but also never plan is The Unofficial Motto of The Shitshow Room.)
So what to do? Maybe follow Zeynep Tufekci’s advice and stop refreshing your favorite election scenario forecast over and over. Check out this excellent guide from Alicia Parlapiano on the election results process for each state and the District of Columbia.
Or just spend the couple days looking at this brilliant bit of distraction. Or watching “David Byrne’s American Utopia” on a loop. Or take a walk. Definitely get off the internet for a little bit.
Thanks for visiting! See you on the other side!
SIDEWORK: Thank you for reading The Shitshow Room! You can sign up for The Shitshow Room for free, but if you if you do decide to become a paying subscriber, $5 a month (or $50 a year), I will be donating half the proceeds each month to a few charities that help struggling food-service workers and Americans experiencing food insecurity. I will let you know when we make a donation, how much it is, and who we are helping. Our first donations will go to World Central Kitchen.
Follow me on Twitter: @lisatozzi or email: lisatozzi@gmail.com