You can be Frigthened, It's Ok.

“Her it is,” slurred Frank Belloc, combat psychologist, in the corner of the bar on Sansom Street, wiping his hand down against his beer after Margaret had gone off to stupored sleep, as though he was brushing off the bottle its own tears. “They’ll say, ‘we meant this’, if they lose. They’ll pose it in these terms, they’ll say, ‘hey, we knew we’d never get there, only that we’d let you run and let you win, but didn’t we give you a show!”

“Nom Dieu!” I stammered, watching the bar, the apathetic tender, the slowly streaming in regulars on a Saturday night at this downtown watering hole. “And they try and say there is a pendulum, a way of the left and the right swinging back.”

“Fuck them,” Belloc told me, and I knew who he spoke of; the hundreds, perhaps the thousands who said, who said in ’04, who say in ’08, that these things just come and they go, they turn and they pivot according to some arrhythmic pulse none of us are ever privy to. "Those who have whistled past the graveyard, who won’t get it, if Obama wins. It’s a battle. That’s why we are sitting here right now; this whole fucking thing could go landslide, it could go too-close-to-call and get stolen away. We have no way of freaking knowing.”

“It comes down to 10:15 to 10:45, with the panic point at eleven,” I slurred myself, dreaming of my cheapish bed rented a block away. “We watch the early exit polls start to merge with the returns, we look to Pennsylvania as the stronghold, hope for Ohio, pray for Florida, but if we miss, then, ok, take PA, take the tri-state, get early and good things from Colorado, and then it’s all good, no? Nothing but the sunny west coast coming through?”

Belloc rinsed his face in his own hand’s sweat.

“And if Virginia falls? The trifecta of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida? Then it gets, suddenly, a little tight. What will Missouri do? North Carolina? Then, every single fucking state makes a terrible difference!”

I was surprised to hear this kind of talk from my old and very composed friend; the man who calmed the thrill out of Chris Matthew’s leg, who talked Olbermann down from the ledge when he was removed as anchor.

I went to bed that night, draped in the empty down warmth of foreign covers, the flat screen of my room’s TV riveted to news, deeply conflicted, wondering, half hoping against the odds that this one time… the argument was finally going to work.