I began Election Day by voting, in Queens. I actually managed to drag myself out of bed and into one of those industrial-grey booths earlier than I usually manage to get up for work. This was the first time I have ever voted in a booth. Previously I have only gotten absentee ballots. Those usually came late, so it is quite possible this is the first time my vote was ever counted.

The turnout in Sunnyside was reasonable, though I was surprised to find that the majority of the voters in my very Latino neighborhood at that hour were white, some Asian. When it was my turn I registered my irritation over the lack of information about the ballot with the poll staffer for my district. I really was shocked to find I was supposed to vote on appropriations for public transportation. Somehow, I thought, New York must have some system where representatives and not voters end up voting for new propositions. I hadn't seen so much as a lawn sign for a proposition. In California, you get a practice ballot and two booklets itemizing not only each party's position on each initiative, but also a statement from the state treasurer or something which lays out exactly what this measure will cost and where the money will come from. I didn't even see any ads. Every veteran New Yorker I've said this to has responded with frustrated sarcasm: Heavens-- why inform the electorate about such things?

The unannounced appearance of this proposition was the first event in what is now stretching into a week of vertigo-inducing lessons on what democracy really looks like. Later that day a Green Party campaigner and friend of mine told that in Brooklyn, whole polling places full of those tanklike voting machines, with their regulation right-side-up flag decals on the side, turned out to be broken. Some wiped out hours worth of registered votes. Some only half worked, prompting poll-site volunteers to tell voters to vote half the slate on the machines, half on paper. The volunteers did not monitor to make sure people did not vote twice. An hour after I heard this story, Florida was recalled.

Anyway, I voted yes on the transit proposal; everyone (and I don't just mean New York residents) should have a train as reliable as the 7. I flipped the lever for Hillary Clinton and some other Democrat under the Working Families slate (New York has this weird rule saying parties can endorse each others' candidates... seems to me to discourage the parties from being imaginative, but hey.) I looked at the Presidential lever and my stomach sank. This is too scary, I thought. One wrong move and I could vote the school where I volunteer into permanent cesspoolhood. I finished off the rest of my levers, intending to come back and flip the Big Lever when I'd gotten my courage up. In the end, I'm not sure whether I voted for president or not. Don't blame me, I voted for disorganization.

I spent most of my day presiding over the distribution of free clothes we got in at work. This was satisfying; I am always happiest when I am connecting people to resources they need, especially if it won't cost them anything. It was also a Sisyphean effort, though. I would spend an hour sorting and folding the old jackets and blouses only to have a hoarde of women descend and return the room to a state of polyester entropy, unevenly perfumed with detergent and stale cigarettes. When the stock on the tables had shrunk there was more, so much so that you couldn't see the floor of the large stairwell where we were keeping the unopened bags, and the pile was as high as my head. I went wading in it. The soft black trashbags sucked at my legs. Women would walk away with two or three large bags of clothes for themselves and their families, and still there was more. Among these gleaners I saw the final stages of the cycle of charity which I wrote about in my Salon article... the truth seems to be that the clothes we discard encourage a few people to be just as greedy and bloated with disposables as their social "betters," and does not reach others at all.

That night I found myself with an hour to kill before a Surveillance Camera Players performance. I wandered around the Rockefeller Center area, making a vague mission of informing the resident homeless population about the clothes at WHEDCO. The first man I encountered was dumping a bag of cans out on the steps of a church. He apologized when I interrupted him. "I'm not with the church," I told him. "I couldn't care less if you dump the cans here. I just wanted you to know about some free clothes, if you need them." "I don' need no clothes," he said, emphatically. "I have everything new at home, all new. Just work so hard I have no time to use." He grimaced. I moved along.

Northeast of Rockefeller Center there is a surprising amount of "public space," big glassed-in gardens and atria on the ground floor of office buildings where ostensibly anyone can hang out, though the sterile slate walls and floors and the security are such that nobody can really feel welcome there. On election night, there were a few vagrants napping in the uncomfortable patio furniture. Around 52nd street, men of all ages and races played speed chess, clocks clacking. In a narrower space between 55th and 56th street, men in suits and yarmulkes clustered outside a club around a velvet rope and sipped red wine. Heading north I found another "public space" adjacent to the Newseum, Niketown, and further into its maw an impeccable marble shopping arena-- I had wandered into Trump Tower. Its elevators are gilded.

I returned to Rockefeller Center, where though it was eight in the evening it was bright as day. The disembodied voice of Tom Brokaw issued from every corner-- the gold statues, the ice rink with its mostly white skaters, the holiday flower arrangements, the red and blue spotlights, the huge banks of television equipment and the flags set up for a broadcast supplementing the election coverage with happy patter from Katie Couric, live from the all-American, mom-and-apple-pie hamlet of Manhattan. Stars jerkily rolled up and down and around the NBC logo, which was being projected on its home, the G.E. building. Some of the surveillance cameras around the Rockefeller Center moved like the stars as the Players passed them, our "Just going to work, officer" signs held over our heads.

Afterwards I went down to the Green Party headquarters on Houston for Nader's victory party. My friend-- the one who had heroically beaten his way through crowds to bring paper ballots to Brooklyn spots where voting machines had broken-- collapsed in a chair and wept as the last results came in and it became clear that Nader didn't even get the five percent he'd need to get the Greens matching funds for next time. I didn't feel as upset. Unlike him, I hadn't been putting my life on hold to campaign for Nader; I was also steeled for the worst. More importantly, I was in a room filled with energetic, beautiful young people, many of whom I recognized from elsewhere-- Puppetistas, associates from the IMC and the Church of Stop Shopping, my friend at FAIR, various organizers and rabble from assorted movements, a guy I'd met swing dancing. The frustration of being cheated out of our matching funds by reactionary Democrats was a setback, but we would still be here. The next day we would go back to the trenches of whatever fight each of us was fighting and settle in for the next onslaught. In the best anarchist tradition, Nader is not our leader; he is our spokesperson-elect, and we will continue to work together for justice with or without him, and that is what counts.

I left the party around 1:30 in the morning, with the candidates still neck and neck. Between the Houston stop on the F and the 5th Avenue stop on the 7, the train stopped completely, and everything went very quiet. I thought it was in observance of the tipping of some balance. When I got back to Sunnyside and turned on the TV, Peter Jennings was smiling and delivering his smarmy wrap-up speech, announcing that Bush had won.

And yet the next day everything had been taken back, and the vote was undecided. I felt Manhattan floating above the water like the Magritte painting of the kingdom perched atop a huge boulder. The light was brilliant and strange. For weeks I have finished every lecture on fighting to my students by saying "In twenty years, you won't remember who called you Juan Bobo or Nutty Professor; you'll remember who was elected President." The past few days, it's felt like we won't ever know who is president. We can't celebrate or accuse anyone in the wake of this election, can't set our sailing course by the eventual decision because we realize that the map was made way, way way before accurate navigational tools. It makes me a little giddy, like I just got out of school because of a bomb threat. Other people are going to have to start thinking about this, and talking about it, and I feel like I don't have to worry so much anymore about pointing out the government's flaws. Such an impossible moment in history, when the machine has simply started to malfunction without getting jammed by a wooden shoe!...