So Brian Said

Every time I talked to native Lorainite for a human-interest story, I inevitably ended up hearing about how the person urged their children to get out of Lorain. "It's going down; there's no future here," they'd say.

And all the other writers are itching to get out of the Journal. Some of that is due to dissatisfaction with the workplace, but a lot of it is also due to the city itself.

I, on the other hand, love Lorain. It's exactly the kind of place I would want to raise my children. If I had any.

People from Lorain aren't stuck up, because no one can be once they understand poverty. If you're from Lorain, you lived it or you went to school with it. If you live in Lorain and work somewhere else, odds are that you can't find a route that doesn't take you right past the poor places.

You see, there's 36th and Globe, the heart of the ghetto down in South Lorain, where you'll get knifed for looking at the Hispanic gang the wrong way. Then there's the South Central Drive, where you'll get shot for not paying for your drugs. There's also Southview and Admiral King High School, where the teachers are perverts.

So that's all bad. Then there's the working-class neighborhoods where the steelworkers and Ford workers live. And then there's Queen Anne Drive and the rest of the neighborhood where probably 75 percent of City Hall employees live, and there's the beautiful lakefront housing where rich people live and never get burglarized.

But by and large, people don't seem to move out of Lorain. So Lorainites are born in the ghetto or the subdivisions or on the lake, and they all go to Admiral King or Southview -- neither of which is really any better than the other -- and and they decide to make something of themselves or not.

And so wherever you were born, you've been brought into the world on what is probably one of the most level playing fields in the world. If you're from the ghetto, you can ignore your resources and raise your own family there, or you can make like the rich kids and graduate. Maybe you'll be a Pulitzer Prize winner -- Lorain has at least two -- a four-star general or the first four-star admiral, or maybe you'll end up on Saturday Night Live.

And if you're living on Queen Anne, you can do what your father did and earn yourself a scholarship, or you can hang with drug dealers and end up murdered because you busted a borrowed a DVD player. And if you're lucky, the police will notice the bullet in your head and investigate. But don't count on it. Or maybe you could be a hooker, strangled and left dead on a balcony by a murderer who was kind enought to at least cover you up with a bedsheet.

The point is it's up to you.

The other thing I like about Lorain is the car parked outside the junkyard by 38th and Elyria Avenue. I believe it showed up shortly after I started working at the Journal last May. After about a week, it became clear no one was doing anything with it, and someone ripped the hubcaps off. A little later, the windshield was bashed in. Then it went up on blocks and the tires were gone.

As days turned into weeks turned into months turned into a year, the doors were taken off, the seats came out, the hood was ripped off, and just when it seemed there was no more you could do, someone put the cherry on top. As I drove in to work at the beginning of the month, someone took a big piece of poster board, wrote "Lorain Pride" in 12-inch letters and stuck it behind the engine for everyone to admire.

This time, the point is I love Lorain.
--McJangles 4:55 AM
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Check out this idiot.
--McJangles 3:21 AM
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Oooh, some sass in the comment box. Juicy.

Let me clarify my italicization.

While I stand by my charge of nefariousness, my italics were just meant to underscore that it appeared (at that point) that there was still a protracted process ahead of us.

That's not Blackwell's fault, obviously, and neither are many other election problems. But I still don't like him.

Nor do I like the 51 million-some idiots whom I'm forced to share a country with. You're all idiots.

It was strange to read posts by some people who said they couldn't stop crying when Kerry conceded, people who were thrown into awful funks upon learning the terrible news that America took its own life, etc. However, I was pretty prepared for it to happen. While I was genuinely expecting Kerry to take a narrow win, I wasn't really going to be surprised by either outcome.

But listening to Bush's press conference today, it finally started to actually set in. We actually have to endure four more years of this man.

But a strange thing happened then. Rather than getting angry or depressed, I started getting hopeful. OK, maybe he hasn't had a single good plan yet. Sure, everything he's touched has turned to shit. No, none of his bold agenda items have worked so far.

No, none of those things could work. But America couldn't re-elect this bonehead, could they? The Red Sox couldn't come from behind, could they? The Browns couldn't win the Super Bowl, could they? Oh, nevermind. You get the picture.

As wrong as I think the Iraq War is, as ineffective and counterproductive as No Child Left Behind has been, as outrageous as I think his tax cuts have been, the fact is that were stuck with all of it for another four years, and the only thing left to do is to hope that it works. And while I've disagreed with all those moves, I've also always said that "if it works, it would absolutely be worth it."

To use a Buchtelite analogy, I wonder if I'm being Jono or Linda: convinced the paper couldn't possibly be any better and therefore unwilling to try.

As much as I hate Bush, I am an American, and therefore, I love an underdog. All I can do for the next three years is hope to be eating crow in the end.
--McJangles 2:50 PM
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Grab a box of Cheez-Its. It's not over yet.

Remember how they screwed up last time? Remember how they promised they wouldn't do it again? Remember how everyone was going to rely on the AP to do the counting and the calling, just to make sure it wasn't all eft up? Yeah, that was good.

But then, remember when the goddamn Fox News Channel called Ohio for Bush when there were too many votes uncounted to safely do so? And remember when NBC jumped on board like a bunch of idiots? And remember how every single network had different counts for the electoral college?

As of 5:30 a.m., here are the tallies.
NBC: Bush, 269-221
CBS: Bush, 254-242
ABC: Bush, 254-225
Fox: Bush, 269-242
CNN: Bush, 254-252
NPR: Bush, 254-252
NYT: Bush, 249-242
WP: Bush, 254-242
C-SPAN: 254-252

Worst election ever.

I love the position Fox and NBC have gotten themselves into. The 20 votes given to Bush from Ohio put him within one vote of winning, so when Nevada, which has pretty decisively gone to Bush, decisively went to Bush, they couldn't call it, because they would then have to call the entire election over. So they pretended like Nevada wasn't done yet. Seriously. They just ignored the fact that Nevada was over.

At one point, it sounded like Tom Brokaw was going to clear things up. He said something about how "it appears we now have a count in Nevada, however it appears that the vote in Ohio may be closer than we thought." He then turned it over to Talking Head, who was going to explain the situation. Instead, Talking Head talked about New Mexico, and everything continued on as it had been.

But yes, as they said, Ohio will decide the entire thing now, and it appears that it's going to come down to provisional ballots, which the nefarious Dr. Blackwell has said will not begin to be counted for 11 days.

Mmmmm.... Cheeze-Its.
--McJangles 5:20 AM
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New York Times, bite me.

The Washington Post is the world's best newspaper. Two more great stories. One's even a sports story.

The Redskins lost yesterday, so Kerry wins tomorrow.

Another feature by Gene Weingarten. This guy is incredible. Given its length, I imagine this is another magazine cover story. Read it all anyway.
--McJangles 1:18 AM
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