The Nameless Horror

Tomorrow us plucky Brits get to vote on changing our voting system. I won’t go into the basics here because everyone’s bored sick of them, but here’s my tuppence worth.

The ‘No’ arguments routinely shovelled through my letterbox (and yours) are either outright lies about cost, people getting more than one vote, or some unpopular bugger getting in anyway, or they’re meaningless (“only three countries use it for national elections”; so what? There’s only five countries that have a widespread understanding of the rules of cricket, but I doubt most ‘No’ campaigners would say that made it a stupid game), or insulting (“none of you oiks can possibly understand how to list people in order of preference”).

The ‘Yes’ arguments are less duplicitous, but don’t amount to a huge amount more than, “It’s slightly fairer than the current system” and “it should reduce tactical voting and vote wasting”. Which it will. A bit. In some places.

In short, I’d vote “yes” because the other guys are quite clearly, on this issue, the biggest cocks of the two. Vote for Lesser Cocks on AV. You know it makes sense.

Digital cameras our shitty hand me down guitars. Copying the conventions of amateur sites like three chord garage rock. We knew there was nothing original in the structure but our impulse was pure. We scraped the surface, made porn blurry and accountable and difficult. It was what we taught ourselves late at night in each other’s rooms, in bathroom stalls in clubs, hallways and by-ways that took us from our parent’s houses to our own, eventually. Porn was $100 a gig. Nothing special. A few beers, a bit of the rent in the share house, a train ticket to a boyfriend stuck in a worse town. He would know how you got there. You’d grab his face when he’d come to greet you because your nakedness made this possible. Your body. All of it. He looks at the pictures and he admires your resourcefulness and he wants to meet your friends.

Men passing in and out of the toilets, men zipping their flies as they turn from the trough and other men approaching the long receptacle, thinking where they want to stand and next to whom and not next to whom, and the old ballpark’s reek and mold are consolidated here, generational tides of beer and shit and cigarettes and peanut shells and disinfectants and pisses in the untold millions, and they are thinking in the ordinary way that helps a person glide through a life, thinking thoughts unconnected to events, the dusty hum of who you are, men shouldering through the traffic in the men’s room as the game goes on, the coming and going, the lifting out of dicks and the meditative pissing.

(thanks, @stevemosby: Sad Baby Monsters: Cthulhu and the Rancor Just Need a Hug)