dream.20060118: old tales
¶ by Rob FrieselWe (me, P.W., M.G., J.M., & B.S.) are all at his house (B.S.) for an evening of drinks and assorted weeknight relaxation. At one point we all go outside for a cigarette (though I don’t smoke), continuing from the tales from inside. Someone (I missed who, exactly) got us onto the topic of gaming. M.G. and B.S. largely excluded themselves from this conversation but P.W. goes into a rather lengthy explanation of a time “from his long-haired days” when an old girlfriend convinced him to LARP and though he’s ashamed to admit the LARP’ing part of it he did — no shit — truly and actually fly. J.M. isn’t buying it. P.W. insists that it actually happened, explained how he was chasing this man/frog hybrid wizard thing up some tower stairs when they hit the roof and both just kept going up. J.M. (still not buying it) makes fun of him to the point where he retreats into a patch of woods to sulk and finish smoking his cigarette.
I pursue him into the little patch of trees because I want to get the end of the story. Instead he segues into this story about how recently one of the local municipalities came up with these weird additional voter registration laws. It was this kit with measuring tape and a denim coverall and you were supposed to submit your dimensions (height/weight/etc.) and then trim down the coverall to fit. Supposedly they wanted everyone to show up at the polls looking like inmates or some such. Not only that though, they also wanted people that fit certain criteria to pre-register such that they were required to vote early. P.W. had some explanation as to how this was an elaborate shake-down and they were trying to discard “undesirable” votes in that precinct. He encapsulated it with an anecdote about this single mother that was being lumped into the “pre-vote”/”undesirable” category in the registration lines and how she basically knocked out a judge with a right-cross and started screaming at the top of her lungs about how her vote counted too and she wouldn’t be held hostage by some unnecessarily elaborate registration scam and how she was showing up on Tuesday to cast her ballot regardless.
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