2017: In Gallup, They Take Polls

Gallup, New Mexico,  December 31, 2016.  Nora James sat at a small desk, lap top open, staring out of the third-story window of the El Rancho Hotel.  There wasn't much to see.  A slow, steady rain fell, and the streets were metallic in the fading light at the end of the day.  Everything looked like bent sheet metal in a room of blue Christmas lights.  Directly in front and somewhat below was the vacant Creamland Dairy, which she could only make out because the giant 1960s street lamps hanging over Old Route 66 cast the white cider block and glass facade in a ghostly glow, and because she knew this street so well from her past.  It had been part of her narrative on and off for years as she had grown up on the Navajo Reservation.  The mild wet weather was not normal though, not this time of year.  January is a cold month, and Gallup is a cold place in the winter.  Or was.  Something was wrong.

As there wasn't much she could do about that, Nora continued to stare out the window of the historic hotel that had become her home for a season.  To the right of the abandoned dairy store was an even drabber Kim's Import Plus, a corrugated metal building, also painted white, with four evenly spaced barred windows.  The lights were still on, and a blue scene of wide isles and sparsely covered metal shelving systems was visible inside.  Apparently Kim was having problems finding the Bikes, Strollers, Bags, Packs, Pictures, Stereos, Speakers, Gifts, Toys and Novelties advertised on two signs the same dimensions of the windows and mounted above in the red corrugated metal trim at the top of the building.  It was all too orderly and minimal, especially for an import shop.  Nora pictured Monk from the TV series in there manning the counter, refusing a bargain shipment from Taiwan while Kim was gone.  "This is junk.  We can't take that.  Do you have any colored plexi-glass boxes that fit neatly inside one another?   Those would look great centered alone on this long shelf over here."

Nora also stared at the grid of numbers on her spread sheet.  It was not so sparse, though it too was ordered rather neatly.  Yet, it was colorful.  She liked color on her Excel tables, and not just for clarity.  If one had to stare at data on and off all day, it might as well look pretty.  Still, the raw data no matter how nicely presented had led her to the wrong place, and it glared at her, laughing.  As she closed the file disgusted, she could hear a Jake brake on a semi in the distance over the slow steady stream of traffic on 66.

She stared out the window again.  Beyond the Quality Dairy was the railroad tracks, the wash, and then Interstate 40.  As it was almost exactly parallel to her, with a light twist of her head, she could see headlights in both directions; the headlight/tail light scenario would switch as she rotated her head one direction and then the next.  For a couple of minutes she just moved her head back and forth like an old typewriter carriage.  She even threw in an auditory "Ding" for the hell of it.  Her grandma had one of those in the back room at the trading post.  She and her cousins would mess around with it. They never typed anything.  They just put paper in and pushed the keys, aaaaaaaaassssssssssdddddddfffff, etc until the roller moved all the way over and they heard "Ding."

She closed the Excel file and opened a blank Word document.  She wasn't sure why.  She just couldn't go over all the different poll numbers anymore.  It was time to accept somehow pollsters all across the country had failed.  Her numbers for the Navajo Nation and other reservations matched election results fairly closely, but that wasn't enough.  She wanted to figure out what went wrong as a whole.  But she couldn't.  The poll numbers were what they were.  The election numbers were what they were.  The only problem is that they didn't match and looking at them wasn't going to change that.  So, she closed Excel and opened Word simply for something to do.

On her blank document she typed one line:

Tweet it as it is:

She had no plan of tweeting this.  It just came to her.  She thought she could perhaps watch TV instead.  But she didn't want to.

Not bad, she thought.  Anything is better than numbers, numbers that lie--just like this weather.  She typed some more:

The moon is brighter than the sun;  Toledo, Ohio's night life is more vibrant than Manhattan's.

This was fun.  She could go on, lie after lie, stated as fact.  She bit her lower lip, which was her habit when thinking hard.  She knew that because the list could go on, she needed something singular, something odd, an outlier.

Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro" contains more words in it than the Holy Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Veda Combined.

Ha!  She was delighted.  For a few minutes anyway.  Eventually there was facing being alone in Gallup, New Mexico on New Year's Eve, but she didn't need to do that yet.

For now, all she had to do was read her words:

Tweet it as it is:  The moon is brighter than the sun;  Toledo, Ohio's night life is more vibrant than Manhattan's.  Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro" contains more words in it than the Holy Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Veda Combined.

Maybe she would tweet it after all.  Maybe she wouldn't.  Perhaps no one would get it.  After the poll-defying election, there simply didn't seem to be an objective reality anymore.  Why should she hold onto one?